By Gabriel Ewepu, Abuja

AS environmental challenges continue to escalate, a renowned environmentalist and Director Health of Mother Earth Foundation, HOMEF, Nnimmo Bassey, Friday, pointed that poor biodiversity maintenance in Nigeria poses threat to nutrition, agriculture, health and others.

Bassey speaking during an interview with Vanguard said the issue of biodiversity is very critical to the lives of Nigerians and all stakeholders are to ensure the biodiversity system is maintained and sustained.

He said: “We lose a lot by not maintaining and sustaining our biodiversity. The loses cover the areas of nutrition and agricultural productivity, health, climate change resilience, culture, economy, education, and general productivity.

“Our people do not only depend on biodiversity for food, but also for medicine, energy, and cultural production. Our culture thrives on healthy biodiversity – and this includes language, cultural festivals, stories, songs and overall wellness.

There are many food crops that have been lost by drastic population shifts from rural to urban and the related shift in occupation and economic relations.

“People who were self-sufficient in nutritious foods from a diversity of species now depend on the market for food items and equally cultivate tastes for harmful junk foods.

“Whereas safe nutritious foods promote good health, risky and over processed fast foods tend to have negative impacts. The varieties continue to narrow down to a few, like rice and maize, equally triggering import dependency.

“We should not fail to mention that loss of biodiversity promotes poverty in more complex ways than the simple converse assertions that poverty causes biodiversity loss.”

He also stated that, “One of the most baffling acts of government has been the forcing of genetically modified varieties on the unsuspecting Nigerian population. Genetic modification does not only pollute overall biodiversity, it thrives in monocultures which reduces nutritional biodiversity.”

He further pointed that, “This surreptitious pollution of our biodiversity is underlined by the fact that largely informal socio-cultural context does not permit labeling of such genetically modified foods.

“This effectively removes the choice option which is patently illegal. A large percentage of genetically modified crops are so modified to tolerate herbicides many of which have severe implications on human/animal health as well as destruction of non-target organisms with key biodiversity functions.

He added that, “Biodiversity is a key in the resilience of ecosystems to environmental stressors including climate change. Its continuous destruction negates the efforts to adapt to or mitigate these challenges.”