GMOs: Fake hybrids and the fight to own Nigeria’s food

In Nigeria, the argument over genetically modified crops has moved beyond laboratory safety. It now reaches into farmers’ fields, market stalls and WhatsApp groups, where the central question is increasingly who controls the country’s food.

Supporters present biotechnology as a response to hunger. They point to cowpea that could produce 20 bags instead of four, as well as maize designed to withstand drought and pests. Critics see a different future, one in which farmers depend on seeds they cannot save and foreign corporations gain greater control over agriculture.

Nigeria has already crossed from GMO scepticism to adoption. It became the first African country to commercialise a genetically modified food crop with pod-borer-resistant cowpea. TELA maize is also in Nigerian fields, while Bt cotton is grown on farms. At the same time, hybrid tomato seedlings reportedly sell for N200,000 a bag, and seedless pawpaw is replacing trees in some compounds.

The article argues that much of the anxiety surrounding these changes involves a basic confusion. Many complaints from farmers concern counterfeit hybrid seed, not genetically modified seed. Insecurity in Benue and Plateau has also turned parts of Nigeria’s food-producing region into a graveyard, while the government distributes millions of bags of “improved” seed without clearly explaining the distinctions among hybrid, certified and genetically modified varieties.

The health debate remains contested. In 2015, about 300 scientists, physicians and legal scholars writing in Environmental Sciences Europe cited a shortage of independent, long-term feeding studies. The Centre for Food Safety has argued that claims of complete safety go beyond the evidence without human epidemiological studies. Other institutions reach a different conclusion. A 2016 review by the U.S. National Academies found no substantiated differences in health outcomes, including cancer and allergies, between populations that eat GM foods and those that do not. The WHO considers approved GMOs on the international market safe to eat. For Nigeria, the dispute combines science with questions of sovereignty, survival and dependence.