The Open Forum on
Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) wants the Ghanaian media to frame
the modern biotechnology debate in a manner that will improve public perception
toward the technology.
Over
60 percent of people in Africa depend on agriculture for their livelihood, yet
only four percent of cropped land has access to irrigation, whilst close to 33
percent of cropped land is subject to drought, making food production extremely
difficult.
Other
factors affecting agriculture in Africa include poor policies, low investments
in agriculture, virulent attach on crops by pests, diseases and low application
of fertilizers due to extreme poverty.
According to Daniel
Otunge, Africa Coordinator of OFAB, a program of the African Agricultural
Technology Foundation (AATF), the media has huge responsibility in setting the
right development agenda for policy makers, especially in promotion of
better agricultural policies and adoption of new technologies to help mitigate
the challenges.
“For better or for worse,
the world is mass media mediated,” he said, adding that the media is vital in
the biotech debate to provide information for the public to make decisions regarding
benefits and potential risks.
The
enactment of the National Biosafety Act in 2011 gives full legal backing to the
use of LMOs in Ghana but with biosafety approval.
The
National Biosafety Committee last year approved three applications for confined
field trials of Living Modified Organisms (LMOs) in the country, including cowpea,
rice and cotton biotech crops.
Mr.
Otunge has called on the media to provide the platform for credible biotech
dialogue in Ghana to facilitate improved and timely decision making on the
technology.
“To
ensure that Africa is in a position to harness the benefits of biotech, the
media ought to make the debate to be about which policies need to be formulated;
which strategies need to be adopted; which capacities are lacking and needs to
be built and what biotech investments should be made and where”, he stated.
By
working closely with scientists and policy makers, the media should define an
African agenda for biotechnology or else the continent will forever be
dependent on food aid from countries that have adopted innovative agricultural
technologies to improve food production, the OFAB coordinator noted.
OFAB
Focal Person in Ghana, Dr. Margaret Otta Atikpo, believes the use modern biotechnology
would help bring about agricultural productivity in Ghana.
“In biotechnology, we are removing the good traits in the genes of organisms and putting it into another [organism] to get a better product, so the farmer can produce a lot of crops in a short while you have the cattle breeder getting a lot of cattle produced from one source”, she explained.
AATF
is a not-for-profit organization that facilitates public-private partnerships
to access and deliver appropriate agricultural technologies for use by
resource-poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Foundation was set up
specifically to deal with the intellectual property rights with regards to
biotech crops and has successfully brokered several technologies including Striga
control in maize; Insect-resistant cowpea; improvement of banana for resistance
against banana bacterial wilt; Biological Control of Aflatoxin; Drought-tolerance
in maize and Improved Rice.
OFAB
has the mission to enhance knowledge-sharing and awareness on agricultural
biotechnology to help create a better biotech regulatory frameworks to
facilitate adoption of the technology.
The
Forum currently has six chapters in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda
and Tanzania.
Story
by Kofi Adu Domfeh
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