The Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) in collaboration with the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa(AFSA) has launched a campaign tagged: My Food is African campaign, aimed to influence the development of a cohesive food policy.
The campaign launch held on Monday, is also set to bring together the sectorial policies on food and agriculture and realign them to build a healthy food environment, promote healthy diets for all, re-balance power in food system, and to involve a wider range of stakeholders in designing and assessing policies.
The project is also focused on achieving the objectives of developing a favourable policy and framework and make citizens shift from the consumption of unhealthy foods to embracing healthy foods.
Speaking on the topic ‘Food, culture and colonialism’, Nnimmo Bassey, Executive Director of HOMEF traced the beginning of colonialism to when Africans were used as slaves by colonial masters to work on plantations.
He said, “Plantation agriculture is essentially a colonial idea in which the West carried slaves to use in place of machines. It is a colonial idea because plantation had to be developed for cash crops. They were not thinking of feeding them but exporting these crops in order to make money.”
Bassey noted that Africa is very diverse and not a continent known to be short of food.
He said, “Plantation agriculture came along with displacement of farmers and it is a major disrupter of our farming system also affecting the mentality of Africans.
“Today, GMOs are being imported into the country affecting our health and farming system. The government gives farmers these GMOs while telling them they are improved seeds.
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“This campaign seeks to urge us to go back and look for those foods we were using. There are so much varieties that we have that give us the foods that we need and the security we want.”
Also speaking, Dr Jacqueline IKeotuonye, Country Director for Biointegrity and natural foods awareness initiative, explained that the impact of processed foods results to increased risk of variation of health problems.
“Cancer is on the rise because Africans have moved from consuming natural foods to highly processed food,” she added.
She raised concerns on the negative impact of Monosodium glutamate, a flavour enhancer added to foods especially canned foods, crackers and even in baby foods.
She urged Africans to go back to their old cooking methods and embrace eating natural African foods instead of depending on processed foods.
Daniel Ofoegbu, Project Coordinator at hbs Nigeria and AAPN recommended a switch to agroecology, citing its success in Yangoje farm.
He said agroecology can solve most of Nigeria’s socioeconomic and environmental problems.
While explaining a research conducted on the assessment of food policies by Joyce Brown of HOMEF, she informed that Agriculture encounter challenges such as neglect in research system, poor market system, limited access to credit and among others.
The research also recommended Nigeria to strengthen her planning and coordination of policy on food and also establish governance platform to provide and protect standards for healthy and safe foods.
