CAPE TOWN - Africa should put aside national interests as the continent moves to harmonise genetic modification laws to boost food security, a senior official at the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) said on Tuesday.
The world’s poorest continent, where agriculture contributes up to a quarter of GDP in some countries and is an important source of foreign revenue, is increasingly turning to genetically modified crops to bolster food supplies.
But critics and consumers, mostly in Africa and Europe, have questioned the safety of so-called "Frankenstein foods" and have banned their import or cultivation due to fears it could harm humans and wildlife.
"Africa should look at GM crops, not with the purpose of adopting everything, but finding out whether there is anything good to help turn around their food security situation," Francis Nang'ayo, regulatory affairs manager at Nairobi-based AATF told Reuters on the sidelines of the African crop science conference in Cape Town.
"The question when you are talking about harmonisation is for people . . . to put the region ahead of short-term, narrow and parochial nationalistic interests," he said. Nang’ayo said South Africa, which first commercialised bio-crops in 1998, was one of a handful of African countries that had fully functional legal frameworks for GM crops. The others are Malawi, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mauritius and Kenya. South Africa, which planted 1.81 million hectares of GM crops in the 2008/09 season, is Africa's biggest and the world's eighth largest producer of GM crops.
Copyright 2009 Reuters
