 Nigerians have been advised to cultivate a healthy eating habit by consuming less ultra-processed foods and shift to organic food as a matter of public health. This call was made at a one-day event to celebrate the biodiversity of African foods-themed national convergence food fair in Benin City, the Edo state capital. Speaking after the event, stakeholders called on government at all levels to encourage Nigerian farmers to focus more on organic farming instead of genetically modified organisms' GMO products. The Nigerian food system has been very badly challenged over the recent years, mostly because of the introduction of more or less unregulated genetically engineered organisms into our country. We are concerned that the Nigerians are being forced to eat what they don't know. Farmers are given seeds that are genetically modified, they are not told that they're genetically modified. So people are planting what they don't know, they are eating what they don't know and we believe that the health of Nigerians is being compromised this way. We're also compromising the health of our environment and at the end of the day Nigerians are exposed to erosion of our culture, of our biodiversity and indeed our heritage. Now, there's a saying that you are what you eat. Everybody knows that. These GMO foods you're giving us, we know that these are man-made foods because it's about bringing two plants, combining a like gene from an animal into a plant. These things are taxonomically different. So we are encouraging and telling governments, if you insist on going ahead with GMO as you're doing, give Nigerians the opportunity, give them that respect to be able to come out openly also and tell them, okay, this is GMO beans, this because the average Nigerian out there cannot differentiate and they're just forcing it down our throat because a food that is this controversial in so many countries, why are we going into it? We need for caution, serious precaution as regards to pesticide use and precaution in Nigeria. From a lot of the studies we've done, we've realized that a lot of the pesticides that are applied in Nigeria are highly hazardous. Over 58% of the pesticides that are used by farmers in Nigeria are already banned in Europe for health and environmental reasons. And a lot of these chemicals have been presented to farmers under the guise of it can be used safely. As an advocate of organic farming, we encourage our farmers to embrace organic farming. Despite some fallacious statements that are made around the world that through organic farming we cannot feed the world, that is not totally true. There are agroecological systems that can be adopted to improve organic farming. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.