African countries urged to speed up the passage of bio-safety legislations

African countries have been urged to speed up work on their bio-safety legislations to allow capacity-building in modern bio-technology applications.
    
"Capacity building should include stewardship that would allow for safe quality product development,” Professor Walter Alhassan, Coordinator, Project on Strengthening Capacity for Safe Bio-technology Management in sub-Saharan Africa (SABIMA), said when he launched the 2010 Global Status Report on Commercialized Bio-technology and Genetically Modified (GM) Crops in Accra.
    
The launch, the sixth in the series, aims to promote awareness on bio-technology, assess progress made and address the challenges to promoting the use of the technology in global agriculture.
    
Bio-technology is the use of living organisms to produce a product or service for use, using the tools of tissue culture, molecular characterization for identification purposes in plant breeding, diagnostics, fermentation and genetic engineering.
   
 Prof. Alhassan explained that though Ghana had a legislative instrument in place to allow the processing of applications for research, up to the open quarantine or confined field trial level, the legislation for commercial release of GM crops was still receiving attention in Parliament.
    
He noted that possible dangers to delayed bio-safety legislation in Ghana included possible smuggling of BT cotton, also known and GM cotton, from Burkina Faso into Ghana by Ghanaian farmers as well as uncontrolled mixing of GM and non-GM cotton which compromised the quality of Ghanaian cotton.
   
Prof. Alhassan said South Africa, Egypt and Burkina Faso were the only countries in Africa that had bio-safety legislations in place As well as had access to the bio-technology tools.
    
He noted that with modern biotechnology, intractable pests and diseases of plants and animals could be controlled, nutrition enhanced and plants helped to cope with diverse soil conditions, droughts, high salt contents and poor soil fertility.
   
"After 15 years of commercial GM crops, perceived risks such as toxicity and the destruction of non-target organisms have been proven scientifically. Nevertheless, there is need for precaution as the use of the technology is promoted,” he added.
   
Giving highlights of the report, Prof. Alhassan said the five leading developing countries in bio-technology crops were China and India in Asia, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa.
     
He said from 1996 to 2009, biotech crops contributed to sustainability and climate change by increasing crop production and value by 65 billion dollars and provided better environment by saving 393million kilogrammes of pesticides.

In her remarks, Dr Yaa Difie, a lecturer at the Bio-Chemistry Department of the University of Ghana, Legon, said the use of Genetically Modified Organisms had created the most concern and led to the development of various international protocols, to which Ghana was signatory, and the development of the bio-safety legislations at country levels.
    
She reiterated the need to have Ghana’s Bio-safety Bill passed into law to enable the country commercialize what would proceed from the confined field trials.
    
Numbers of countries planting bio-tech crops increased from 25 to 29 in 2009 for the first time while each of the top 10 countries grew one million hectares of biotech crops.
   
 In 2010, a record of 15.4 million farmers in 29 countries grew biotech crops, with over 90 per cent being small resourced farmers in developing countries.
   
By optimizing crop productivity in the proposed global initiative, future prospects look encouraging for the next five years, with drought tolerant maize in 2012, golden rice in 2013 and BT rice before the Millennium Development Goals target of 2015, to potentially benefit one billion poor people by cutting poverty by half, the report indicated.