GMO Africa

Researcher wants biosafety laws in Africa

Professor Walter Alhassan, a renowned agricultural biotechnologist from Ghana, recently raised a very salient issue regarding agricultural biotechnology in Africa. Alhassan moaned the unwillingness by African governments to enact laws to regulate safe acquisition of agricultural biotechnology. Alhassan regretted that the absence of biosafety laws in many African countries remains the greatest impediment to serious research on genetically modified crops in the continent.

I can’t but totally concur with Prof. Alhassan, and I would encourage other scientists, especially from Africa to stand by him. Unlike pro-biotech lobby groups and multinational biotechnology companies, they’ve the requisite credibility to force their respective governments to act. They’re the right people to explain, unabashedly, what biosafety laws entail. I say this because there’s this conventional belief in most African countries that the sole mission of biosafety laws should be to keep off genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from their territories. Sample this April 2007 statement from Zambia’s Chairperson of the Education, Science and Technology Committee, who said a biosafety law was needed to ensure “…Zambia remains a GMO free country.”

On this blog, just like Prof. Alhassan has said, I once emphasized that the first step to Africa benefiting from new technologies, including modern agricultural biotechnology, is to enact laws to regulate their acquisition. When computers emerged, African countries tried as much as they could to pass Information Technology (IT) laws to ensure their use for government and private businesses. The vigor with which African countries have enacted IT laws to ensure their safe use must, now, be applied to agricultural biotechnology. You can’t adjudge a technology - the way African governments are trying to do - as bad or good, before experiencing it. Europe, whose opposition to GMOs Africa seems to ape, is already conducting field trials of GM crops. Africa countries, except South Africa, are nowhere closer to here. They’re still dialoguing about whether biosafety laws have relevance to them. Isn’t this the time for Africa to heed Prof. Alhassan’s advice and pass biosafety laws, to allow farmers explore potential benefits agricultural biotechnology.