After the worst massacre of Catholic faithful in Nigeria’s history on June 5, rights advocates have rebuked the U.S. Department of State’s flawed conclusions in its annual religious freedom report for 2021.
Article by Douglas Burton from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
“Instead of tongues of fire—bombs and firearms descended on worshippers in southwestern Ondo state [June 5] in a Pentecost Day massacre,” said government critic Emmanuel Ogebe, Special Council for Justice for Jos advocacy group based in the United States.
“The blood of the innocents be upon the Buhari regime and their American enablers,” Ogebe told The Epoch Times, referencing the brutal bombing and shooting of a Catholic congregation in Nigeria’s Ondo state on June 5.
Ogebe and other analysts have told The Epoch Times that for years the U.S. Department of State has explained most of the violence in the Middle Belt states as a consequence of disputes over land and water resources.
The latest report cites its nonprofit reporting contractors to support the same narrative.
The NGO reporting groups of the International Crisis Group, Mercy Corps, and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) are cited repeatedly in the report to show that the greatest part of the loss of life some observers have called a “genocide against Christians” is actually not motivated by religious extremism.
“Rather than religious belief or animus, we find that intercommunal violence is largely driven by insecurity and a lack of trust between ethno-religious groups competing for political power and control over natural resources,” according to the ACLED report.
Elsewhere the report states, “Numerous fatal intercommunal clashes continued throughout the year in the north-central region between predominantly Christian farmers from various ethnic groups and predominantly Muslim herders.
“According to the ICG [International Crisis Group], the causes of the northwest turmoil were complex and interrelated, saying that ‘Environmental degradation and rapid population growth have aggravated resource competition between herders and farmers. Disputes over land and water prompted both herders and farmers to form armed self-defense groups, fueling a cycle of retaliatory violence that has taken on a communal dimension.’”
The legal experts and State Department veterans interviewed by The Epoch Times denounced this narrative.
“The 2021 Religious Freedom Report conveys more information about the attitudes of the State Department officials who wrote and approved it than it does about the situation on the ground in Nigeria,” said former assistant secretary of state Robert Destro.
“Even senior Nigerian government officials fear that they will be kidnapped for ransom and murdered, and it is common knowledge that Nigeria’s federal police are either unwilling or unable to stop the violence.
“Can you imagine the uproar if the official state department narrative on Ukraine described that conflict as climate-change induced ‘communal violence’ and ‘resource competition’ between Russian soldiers and Ukrainian farmers?” Destro said to The Epoch Times.
“By downplaying the ethnic, religious, and economic dimensions of the carnage, the State Department diplomats are appeasing the Nigerian government, misleading Congress, and deluding themselves.”
“Nothing says the State Department report is arrant nonsense more than the glaring facts of the rivers of martyrs blood flowing in Nigeria in which the “see no genocide, hear no genocide, say no genocide” Anthony Blinken team are actively covering up in defiance of United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and others,” Ogebe said.
The communal violence explanation surfaced in a June 6 Washington Post article on the church attack.
“While the attack was the first of its kind in Ondo state, it fits a larger pattern of communal violence across Nigeria,” according to Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow for African studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
That observation drew the ire of Nina Shea, a human rights attorney and scholar at the Hudson Institute, who told The Epoch Times, “The Council on Foreign Relations expert insinuates that the attack on the church was somehow provoked. It was not.
“This was an innocent congregation in a peaceful area.
“This narrative of a communal violence is a well-worn tactic also used by the State Department to manipulate international opinion, avoid portraying Christians as victims of persecution and deflect attention from the real crisis of extremism infecting society and spreading throughout Nigeria.”
Critics also faulted State Department’s approach to remediating the violence, which emphasized peace-building grants to “narrow the gap between competing narratives,” according to the report.
“Nigeria doesn’t have a narrative problem, It has a security problem,” Destro told The Epoch Times.
“The [U.S.] Embassy is fundamentally misconceiving the nature of the problem, which is a breakdown in law enforcement,” Destro said.
“That’s like saying, ‘we need to bridge the gap between the victim of a rape and the narrative of the police department that didn’t show up,’” Destro added. “As long as the embassy sees its role as managing narratives, there will never be a reduction of violence.”
The Secretary of State’s removal of the listing of Nigeria as “a country of particular concern” last November has rankled myriad human rights organizations with engagement in Nigeria.
In the words of the report, “The Secretary of State determined that Nigeria did not meet the criteria to be designated as a Country of Particular Concern for engaging in, or tolerating, particularly severe violations of religious freedom—or as a Special Watch List country for engaging in, or tolerating, severe violations of religious freedom under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.”
The listing is reserved for nations that have serious problems with human rights abuses and the Nigerians were embarrassed by it, according to Destro.
A less onerous label for a nation is to be listed on “a special watch list,” which Nigerian didn’t get either, in spite of the fact that Nigeria in 2021 saw a 15 percent increase in violent deaths over the previous year.
“This was not a determination but a dictatorial decision that is neither supported by fact or law,” according to lawyer Ogebe.
“It is glaring to note that while Sudan was delisted in a prior year citing improvements in country conditions, the Blinken State Department is so incompetent and capricious, it doesn’t give reasons or cite Nigeria’s improvements in its reversal process.”
Ogebe went on to say: “Indeed with Sudan, the Pompeo-led State Department removed it from CPC to special watch list. Blinken on the other hand basically just disappeared Nigeria altogether in a mysterious magic trick.”
Image by EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
