KING OF THE JUNGLE NO LONGER AT EASE

This lion rests in comfort in the secure confines of the animal orphanage at
Langata, Nairobi unaware that its other relatives are b eing massacred in a
deadly human - wildlife conflict. Maasai morans are hunting and killing lions
at the Nairobi National Park.

GM crops war rages as US, EU lock horns

By Barack Gogo and Ken Bosire in Washington

THE dispute between the United States and the European Union over the latter’s moratorium on trade in Genetically Modified products took a dramatic turn recently when the Bush administration, impatient with EU’s procrastination over the lifting of its ten year moratorium took the matter for arbitration at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In a move likely to spark a series of trade reprisals from Brussels, the EU headquarters, the Bush administration argues that there is no scientific basis for the ten-year EU moratorium on trade in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
Washington and her co-complainants; Egypt, Canada an d Argentina is accusing its wealthy trading partner of introducing politics into a purely scientific issue and relying on the result of a “flawed” public opinion poll to justify its reluctance to allow export of transgenic US grain into the lucrative European market.

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‘Yor Oguyo’: TR’s unfinished agenda

MARCH 25, 2003, was a special day in the calendar of the world-famous International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE). On this bright and sunny afternoon, the Centre’s staff and invited guests turned up in large numbers to launch ICIPE’s strategic Vision 2003-2010. It was also a day when ICIPE was to finally honour its founder director and one of Africa’s most illustrious sons in the science realm, Prof Thomas Risley Odhiambo, known popularly as TR to the ICIPE fraternity.
The late Prof Odhiambo, one of Africa’s most renowned scientists, founded the centre in 1970 and headed it for close to a quarter century until 1994. At the time he left, it had already entrenched itself as a centre of excellence in biosciences research and “demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that Africa can establish excellence in science, can nurture it, manage the growth of that excellence and its sustained development and cooperate effectively wit the rest of the world while building its human capital of motivated, talented scientists,” in his own words.
However despite these accomplishments, TR had an agenda for African science which he could not see through, the cruel hand of death having taken him away from our midst on May 26, two months after being honoured. So what was this TR’s unfinished agenda for Africa’s science?

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