Scientists Challenge MPs
PROF WALTER Alhassan, Coordinator of the Programme for Biosafety Systems has called for an urgent and cost-effective legislative environment to promote the safe acquisition of agricultural biotechnology to enhance food production on the African continent.
He said it was therefore important that African Parliaments gave the biosafety issues all the attention they deserved for the continent to derive the necessary benefits from it.
He said there were biosafety regulatory frameworks bounded by international conventions like the Cartagena Protocol in many countries to ensure the safe use of biotechnology products in agriculture but where those regulatory systems existed, they appeared too harsh to work with.
Prof. Alhassan, who was briefing journalists on the current state of the technology in Accra recently, cautioned that if care was not taken, the gene revolution would pass by Africa, and for that matter Ghana, just like the green revolution.
The annual publication on biotechnology is complied by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), a non-governmental organization.
In 2007, the number of countries planning biotech crops increased to 23 as compared to 12 in developing countries and 11 in industrial countries.
He said biotech crops achieved a very important milestone in 2007 with the number of resource-poor farmers who benefited in developing countries exceeding 10 million for the first time.
“Of the global total of 12 million beneficiary biotech farmers in 2007, over 11 million were small and resource-poor farmers from developing countries like South Africa, Argentina, India and the Philippines.”
He said much progress had been made in the first 12 years of commercialization of biotech crops “but the progress made is just the tip of the ice-berg, compared with the potential progress in the second decade of commercialization from 2006 to 2015”.
He noted that after 11 years of global cultivation and use, no scientifically proven harm from Genetically Modified crops was established except the perceived risks by environmentalists and some non-governmental organisations.
He called for the encouragement of public-private sector partnership for the application of modern biotechnology in agriculture to promote its use in agribusiness.
Mr. Charles Kobina Annan, Executive Secretary of the National Association of Farmers and Fishermen, who chaired the function, expressed concern about the absence of a legislation to work with biotechnology which farmers were ready to use.
He stated that the anti-GM (Genetically Modified) stance of Europe was nothing but only in the commercial interest of that continent.
He said whereas Europe discouraged others from going into biotechnology, it continued to undertake several field trials.
As at 2004, European countries such as France, Italy, Spain, UK and Germany had carried out a total of 1849 field trials of GM crops.
The National Biosafety Committee (NBC) has promulgated a Biosafety Legislative Instrument (LI) to circumvent the delay in the passage of the Biosafety Bill to allow good practice of science.
The LI, currently before Parliament, is expected to be passed by the end of March after the 21 sitting days of Parliament.
Mr. Samuel Timpo of the Biotechnology Nuclear and Agricultural Research Institute of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission said the Parliamentarians were ready to give the Bill the necessary attention if it was brought before the House “but the delay has been elsewhere”.
The LI used the existing Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Act 521 of 1996 as a template since it has provisions for the conduct of research in general. It therefore seeks to simply extend this to the conduct of research on Genetically Modified Organisms.
Mr. Timpo explained that the LI recognised and empowered the NBC as the National Focal Point on Biosafety.
It also authorized the conduct of confined field trials, provided the regulations for the conduct of confined field trials but did not allow the commercialization or release of products to farmers and consumers.
He said Ghana’s desire to modernize agriculture must take the necessary protocol procedures to develop the agricultural sector in the country.
“We need to develop capacity for GM food safety evaluation from food safety data submitted by the country for export, if guidelines are followed, GM foods are safe and approval must be on a case-by-case basis and there must be the need for capacity building,” he added.
By Sylvanus Nana Kumi
Source: Daily Guide
