Calabar: Dr Nnimmo Bassey, an environmentalist, has decried what he called the unconscious promotion of “green deserts” by the government at all levels in Nigeria, with the continuous introduction of plantations.
Bassey, Director of Health at the Mother Earth Foundation, made a remark at the Third Multi-Stakeholders Conference on Deforestation in Cross River, organised by We The People, a Civil Society Organisation in Calabar, on Monday.
He said plantations were examples of monocultures, which were essentially green deserts, as forests with their rich diversity in flora and fauna were destroyed to create them.
Bassey, the former chairman of Friends of the Earth International, explained that the same plantations, which had one crop covering an expanse of land, were sustained with various chemicals, including pesticides, herbicides, and others.
According to him, during this process, other organisms, such as butterflies, are killed, and it also creates health hazards.
“Government officials, both at the federal and state levels, will tell you that we need to grow cash crops in plantations because we need the foreign exchange to grow our economy.
“As a nation, we are more interested in foreign exchange than the well-being of our people in the country.
“Otherwise, what is the essence of cash cropping if the environment is destroyed and the people are not healthier?” he said.
Speaking further, Bassey stated that cash cropping was a colonial concept that led to the introduction of plantations, not for local consumption, but primarily for exports.
“Pan’t first be concerned about supporting small-scale farmers to produce food that is healthy for our people.
“They should not just have the idea of plantation agriculture, which leads to slavery, as it was years ago when Africans were stolen to work in plantations abroad,” he stated.
Bassey stated that to ensure food security, Nigeria needed to combat insecurity, encourage farmers to return to their farms, provide rural infrastructure, invest in extension officers, and support agricultural research institutions nationwide.
Similarly, Mr Ken Henshaw, Executive Director of We The People, stated that the world needed to be aware that Cross River’s largest pristine rainforest was undergoing the fastest rate of deforestation.
According to Henshaw, this rainforest had been protected by local communities for decades until the government of Cross River turned the forest into a commodity for generating profits to fund its budget.
He said that the fact that the state has what is left of the forest is due to communities being very proactive in ensuring its protection against both foreign and local interests.
He explained that in 2008, the government introduced a ban on all forest activities and stopped communities from accessing the forests, following incentivisation from the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN REDD).
“The UN REDD initiative told the government that it would get carbon credit if communities were kicked out of the forest, but for nearly 15 years after, the carbon credit did not come.
“And because communities were disincentivised from protecting their forests, loggers and all that came into the forest and effectively destroyed the forest,” he explained.