{UAH} GMOs are a danger to us - Thought and Ideas - monitor.co.ug

http://www.monitor.co.ug/Magazines/ThoughtIdeas/GMOs-are-a-danger-to-us/-/689844/1935796/-/d423ibz/-/index.html

GMOs are a danger to us

Genetically Modified Organisms did not become a debatable issue in Uganda until government embraced them. However, pro-GMO activist dominate the debate.

Uganda has six biotechnology centres where our crops are transformed to GM crops: Kawanda (GM Bananas), Namulonge (Cassava, rice and sweet potatoes), Serere (BT Cotton), Kasese (GM maize) and Kibuku (Rice).

GMOs are being actively and officially promoted through a marriage of convenience between government institutions and institutional scientists. The new Agricultural Technology and Agribusiness Advisory Services (ATAAS), designed to support National Agriculture Research Organisation (NARO) and National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS), ASARECA and Makerere University are at the forefront of pushing the GMO agenda in Uganda.

The other African countries manipulating their indigenous crop gene are Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. However, there has been little debate on GMOs in Africa in general and in Uganda in particular.

The first serious GMO debate in Uganda was held early this year when government and with GMO engineers invited Prof Juma who is the Director of the Science, Technology and Globalisation Project at Harvard University, and, therefore, likely to be an important link between seed companies, such as Monsanto, and science laboratories working to offload GMOs in the United States and elsewhere in the world, to whitewash GMOs and cast them as the only avenue to food security in Africa.

Those invited were mainly the pro-GMO activists. Only three NGOs were invited but how they were selected remains a mystery. The debate was one-sided. Prof Juma carefully avoided mentioning the negative consequences of GMOs on the rights of our people, especially women, the real producers of food locally, in terms of land, healthy foods and sustainability of futures. He did not mention that some of the GMOs (terminator seeds) cannot be grown generation after generation, or season after season, and so destroy sustainability of food security for families and communities.

A debate organised by GMO activists at Makerere failed to cast Dr Girogen Olupot, the key anti-GMO lobbyist in Uganda, as a criminal or fit for the gallows. It was clear we lack biotechnologists that are anti-GMOs and do not even have the capacity to assess the environmental impacts of GMOs.

Will Dr Olupot salvage Uganda from a Biosafety Bill that does not protect Uganda's farmers and consumers from gene distortion?

Oweyegha-Afunaduula is an environmetal conservationist

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