ZIMBABWE: GENETIC ENGINEERING WILL NOT BENEFIT ...
OTC 29.09.98 01:08
HARARE, (Sep. 25) IPS - Genetic engineering, which is being touted as the answer to
Africa's hunger, will not benefit Zimbabwe's poor farmers, agricultural experts warned
yesterday at a conference titled "The Future of Agriculture in Zimbabwe: Natural or
Genetic?" in the capital Harare.
"We don't know what impact this will have on our country. Who will determine the
prices of the genetically engineered foods. Look at the AIDs drugs, there are available
but who can afford them?", said Reginald Mugwara, a food security expert at the
Southern African Development Community's early warning unit.
"There is also an issue of disease, an element of uncertainty and human health",
he said.
According to Mugwara, genetic engineering will not improve the life of Zimbabwe's poor
farmers. "A lot of work needs to be done and come up with the exact... implications.
Agriculture is an important sector that needs to be safeguarded and not undermined,"
he said.
There is every reason for the experts to be wary of genetic farming. In 1990,
L-tryptophan, a food supplement made from genetically engineered bacteria by the Japanese
firm Showa Denko KK, is alleged to have caused 31 deaths and 1,500 injuries in the United
States.
Last month, there was a campaign in India against the landing of one million tons of
soyabeans from the United States, suspected to be genetically engineered.
The suspicions arose after the consignments had been found to be mixed with crops from the
biotechnology giant Monsanto, which has more than five million hectares under genetically
engineered soya.
"The only thing we know about bio-technology is we don't know enough. We know the
hype, we know the propaganda," said Pat Mooney of the Rural Advancement Foundation
International (Rafi), a non-governmental organization (ngo) in Winnipeg, Canada.
RAFI is concerned with the loss of genetic diversity -- especially in agriculture -- and
about the impact of intellectual property rights on agriculture and world food security.
"Almost all the bio-technology lies in the private sector. What a gamble it would be
if we relied on the private sector to feed the poor and they don't. We can't experiment
with the poor," Mooney said.
He said any new technology takes at least a generation before its implications are known.
"Some technology may exacerbate the rich-poor gap. We may see an exploitation of the
poor by the producers of these technologies," he said.
Olivia Muchena, who is Zimbabwe's deputy minister of lands and agriculture, agreed.
"There is rapid development of bio-technology in the world right now but this has not
been without devastating consequences," she said.
She also warned against falling in the same trap as did the world on pharmaceutical which
are now owned and controlled by a few private companies. "These issues of
bio-technology (and providing food to the poor) we still consider them of public
domain," she said.
Zimbabwe does not have laws requiring that genetic engineering products are suitably
labelled to warn an unsuspecting consumers as in many other countries.
"Even under conventional crops we are still trying to develop phyto-sanitary
standards in the region so that we can facilitate the movement of conventional crops let
alone the capacity to monitor the genetically engineered food," said Mugwara.
Not all agree, however. Andrew Matibiri, a bio-technologist with the Tobacco Research
Board in Zimbabwe, said bio-technology offers unparalleled benefits to farmers.
With the aid of slides, Matibiiri dished out the benefits: Higher yielding varieties
responsive to chemical inputs; year-round availability of better tasting fruits and
ability to produce year-round environmentally friendly crops.
"The fact that the research on bio-tech is often refined to international labs must
not mean that they lose interest in the research," said Matibiri.
But this only stirred a hornet's nest. "Bio-technology should not be a religion that
we have to climb on board and follow all the rules," said Mooney. "Before we
allow this to happen we should put institutional structures to monitor and control these
technologies first."
Copyright 1998