He went on to highlight what needed to be done to meet the needs of over 1.1 billon people living in abject poverty. The agribusiness industry, he said, was determined to help advance sustainable development through the use and development of new technologies. “The plant science industry’s products will continue to support farmers in the key areas of yield protection, crop enhancement and quality improvement”, he promised, adding that knowledge and technology transfer using public-private partnerships could make a real difference in the promotion of sustainable agriculture in the south.
South Africa’s Arts, Culture, Science and Technology minister, Dr Ben Ngubane, endorsed Imhof’s sentiments. Speaking at an AfricaBio seminar on the role of biotech and biodiversity in sustainable development, the minister said the crucial role of biotech in sustainable development, particularly in Africa, could not be questioned. This contradicted the views of many ardent opponents of biotech, led by Vandana Shiva, who also took her emotional campaign to the WSSD. But undeterred by noisy aberrations by the green lobbyists, the minister said his country viewed biotech as being critical in its quest to attain national developmental priorities, including food security and environment.
As if to remind the meeting of the importance SA attached to biotech, Dr Ngubane observed that the twenty first century belongs to “ biotechnology and its immense potential to contribute to human and animal health, agriculture, manufacturing and sustainable development.
The seminar was meant to significantly enrich understanding of the interface of biotech and biodiversity with sustainable development. Public, private, and industry representatives, among others, attended it.
During the seminar, African and Asian farmers demanded freedom to grow any crop of their choice, improve agricultural productivity and access the best available technology.
The summit was reminded of its commitment to implement chapter 16 of the Agenda 21, which calls for increasing agricultural productivity in developing countries through successful and environmentally safe application of biotech in agriculture, the environment and human healthcare. The Rio Earth Summit of 1992 committed UN member states to chapter 16 of Agenda 21 that established that biotech promises to make significant contribution to better health care and enhance food security through sustainable agriculture. Amidst spirited campaigns against biotech by the greens, farmers cautioned that closing the doors on the technology was a recipe for disaster. They argued that the most logical thing the summit could do was to remove all obstacles in the path of access and conduct of comprehensive trials of all new seed technologies. The meeting turned upthe heat on African governments, urging them to reject ill-conceived and unfounded criticisms of biotech in agriculture, including demands by special interest groups for moratoria on genetically improved crops. During the Ubuntu village meeting, Dr Ngubane castigated an employee of his ministry for joining the bandwagon of anti-biotech groups without critically examining the positions they were advancing.
Major challenges to development and application of biotech in Africa were identified and discussed. They included lack of policy and regulatory frameworks, low public-private sector partnerships for sustainable use of the technology, low national budgetary allocations to build and maintain competent capacity for biotech research and development, and establishment of effective communications strategies and structures to enhance understanding of biotech and its application in problem solving.
The noisy rejection of genetically improved corn by some southern African countries threatened to reverse the small gains the continent had made in biotechnology transfere.
The ill-advisedrejection of transgenic grains by hunger-stricken countries of Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi raised a lot of durst during the summit. Leading the pact were African scientist meeting under the auspices of A Harvest Biotech Foundation International who said it was immoral, unethical and inhuman for the states to reject GM foods under the pretext that they were unsafe.
“We consider it unethical and inhuman to play politics with the lives of people,” the scientists said. They lamented that the governments in question did not seek expert opinion on the matter before making their decisions. However, Dr Mwananyanda Lewanika, whom advises the government of President Levi Mwanawasa of Zambia on food matters, disagreed saying that they consulted widely through a national debate before reaching a final decision to reject the transgenic food aids. (See interview on page 8). Perhaps what he did not envisage was his people resorting to slaughtering dogs to fill their empty bellies. Pro-biotech scientists and the Johannesburg summit argued that all available evidence show that the GM grains from the USA under dispute had been tested and certified safe and fit for human feed. But green Lewanika of Lusaka countered that the US regulatory system was not infallible. The pro-biotech scientists found unlikely allies on this tragic saga. The European Commission beat a retreat from its hitherto unflinching opposition to GMOs. The Commission issued results of GM corn varieties’ safety assessment tests that gave them a clean bill of health. They went on to approve the corns for food use in the European union. This was a big relief for the Americans and the biotech industry worldwide. The rejection of the corns was blamed partly on the confusion arising from the EU’s moratorium on GMOs. The countries’ affected fear that allowing transgenic grains into their country would lead to loss of markets in the Western Europe. But now that the EC has released the grains from bondage, it remains to be seen how the affected African states will react.
But even before the belated change of position by the EU regarding the produce, leading scientists like Dr Val Giddings, the vice-president for food and agriculture of the Biotech Industry Organization, had dismissed the Union’s opposition as based on non-science. Dr Giddings attributed European consumer’s fear of GM foods to many things but science. He argued that the hostility was as a result of tortured European history, mentioning Eugenics, Nazism, HIV tainted blood, mad cow disease fiasco, xenophobia, among other mishandled continental problems. More socking was his revelation that most Europeans in their ignorance believed that only GM tomatoes contained genes. Giddings blamed this on deliberate misinformation by the hostile European media and the greens. Joining the debate, Prof Klaus Ammann of the Botanical Gardens of the University of Bern, Switzerland, gave the results of a comparison of organically and conventionally produced foods in more than 150 studies that yielded only slight differences concerning their content of nutritionally and health-relevant constituents. Turning to maize, he said that compared to conventional maize, GM varieties contain up to 90 per cent lower concentrations of fumonisin and up to 75 per cent lower levels of aflatoxin concentrations. He concluded that the smaller amounts of fungal toxins in Bt maize varieties means a verifiable health benefit to consumers, both human and livestock.
Asian farmers lead by Dr Buran Mitra of Liberty Institute, Federation of Farmers Association (India) and Kisan Coordination Committee and the Philippines Provincial Farmers’ Action Council condemned anti-biotech lobbyists and called on the WSSD to protect farmers’ right to use agricultural biotech.
Dr. Gro Harlem Bruntland, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), also came to the defense of GMOs, saying emphatically that they were not likely to present human health risks. In her address to the health ministers from southern Africa in Harare during the summit, Harlem urged them to accept GM food aid to minimize the impact of the humanitarian crisis. “Available scientific knowledge and information from variety of sources show the consumption of genetically improved foods is not likely to present human health risk,” she said. WHO is the ultimate United Nations body that deals with global health matters. The three famine-stricken southern African states are members of the organization.
With the swelling evidence supporting safety of transgenic foods and glaring lack of concrete data or facts to prove otherwise, it is difficult to understand or justify the greens opposition to GMOs. In fact scientists have shown beyond reasonable doubt that agricultural biotech is more environmentally friendly than the conventional technologies. And that poverty, which biotech is aimed against, is actually the worst polluter.
The greens betrayed their lack of tolerance at the WSSD when they refused to share a platform with proponents of biotech to discuss the pros and cons of the technology. And when the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) finally cornered Dr Vandana Shiva—an ardent anti-biotech-to debate the subject with Prof. James Ochanda, the chairman of the Nairobi-based African Biotechnology Stakeholders Forum (ABSF), Vandana exposed anti-biotech groups as people whose opposition to biotech is based on anything but reason. In fact she resorted to name calling instead of addressing the issues at hand.
No wonder some observers accuse the greens of opposing biotech for the love of money put at their disposal by disgruntled and outwitted European agribusiness hell-bent on slowing down their American counterparts from running away with commodity markets worldwide. According to Dr Wambugu, anti-biotech groups have budgets of over USD 120 million per year to fight GMO trade. “Having failed to win the war in the US and Canada, if the growing acreage of farmlands under GM crops is instructive, they have now turned the barrels of their canons on the developing world,” she said. By 2001 USA had 35.7 million hectares under GM crops. And according to Mackenzie Agrochemical Services, the North American GM crops trade is worth about 3 billion dollars while it’s almost non-existent in Western Europe. Although the anti-biotech’s stated aim is to protect Africa from multinationals because it lacks capacity to regulate biotech, at a Science Forum workshop at Ubuntu village, scientists observed that capacity cannot be built by abstention but by participation. Most African, European, Asian, Latin American and North American scientists attending the summit urged African states to embrace the new technology to boost food production so that expenses on food can be reduced drastically. Currently African urban populations spend 60 percent of their income on food compared to Europeans’ 25 percent and Americans’ 12.5 percent.
Prof. Thomas Odhiambo, the founder of the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), who is now the president of African Academy of Science, said that the continent has no choice but use biotech to improve its agricultural productivity.
Absolute poverty in African has reached 60 percent and is growing. To reverse the dangerous slide will require new ways of doing things. Lies from European NGOs regarding the safety of GMOs will not help. Following them, said the scientists, would only condemn African to perpetual poverty, underdevelopment and a denial of human dignity, to paraphrase SA President Thabo Mbeki
Lennart Bage the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) also supported the use biotech to promote food production in developing nations. This is imperative considering that 900 million of the 1.2 billion people, who suffer extreme poverty, live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for survival. For farmers better seed technology is fundamental to survival.
Bage declared to the meeting: “Make no mistake: it’s those rural people who must be reached in order to achieve the millennium development goals.” Investment in agriculture must be improved because it plays a pivotal role in this collective effort. This is because agriculture is the biggest contributor to gross domestic product and the main source of employment in the Third World.
Paradoxically, as the delegates talked intensely on poverty reduction, the proportion of Official development Assistance (ODA) going to agriculture and the rural sector had fallen sharply.
The president of Dutch Farmers’ Union, Gerard Doombos, speaking on behalf of the international Federation of Agriculture Producers lamented the drop in priority for agriculture from national budgets, donors and international institutions, saying WSSD must find ways of reversing the trend.