Govt stance on GMO remains intact
MINISTER for Agriculture Hussein Bashe has said that the government stance on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) remains intact, insisting however that his ministry is ready to allow the agriculture pundits in the country to engage in thorough research on GMO products.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement (TOAM), Bakari Mongo said here during an interview that carrying out research would play an important role in giving the country a professional stance of whether to adopt the technology or not.
“GMO technology has garnered attention of the world with some of the countries adopting the system and others rejecting it. Conducting intensive researches would also help our side to decide the same, we congratulate Minister Bashe for his good intention,” Mongo unveiled.
A GMO, or genetically modified organism, is a plant, animal, microorganism or other organism whose genetic makeup has been modified in a laboratory using genetic engineering or transgenic technology. This creates combinations of plant, animal, bacterial and virus genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods.
In Tanzania, preliminary GMO researches were conducted in 2011 in maize and cassava, after which the government decided to halt the maize research which was at the level of Confined Field Trials at the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI– Makutupora Centre in Dodoma).
For cassava the research was at the laboratory level in Dar es Salaam. Both researches were halted for some technical reasons.
“The minister said during his recent meeting with editors and journalists in Dodoma that he will pick two special centres at the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) for thorough GMO research. We remain optimistic that the researches will ultimately help to pacify the on-going uncertainty over use of the technology in Tanzania,” he added.
Tanzania, has so far entered several relevant international agreements on GMO, which are Cartagema Protocol on Biosafety 2000, Nagoya – Kuala Lumpur, Codex Alimentarius- International Food Standard (FAO) and (WHO), to mention but a few.
Genetically modified (GM) foods were first approved for human consumption in the United States in 1994, and by 2014–15 about 90 per cent of the corn, cotton, and soybeans planted in the United States were GM. By the end of 2014, GM crops covered nearly 1.8 million square kilometres (695,000 square miles) of land in more than two dozen countries worldwide. The majority of GM crops were grown in the Americas.
African countries face key challenges in the deployment of GM crops due to incongruities in the processes for effective and efficient commercial release while simultaneously ensuring food and environmental safety.
Against the backdrop of the preceding scenario, and for the effective and efficient commercial release of GM crops for cultivation by farmers, while simultaneously ensuring food and environmental safety, there is a need for close collaboration of and the interplay between the biosafety competent authorities and the variety release authorities.
The commercial release of genetically modified (GM) crops for cultivation requires the approval of biosafety regulatory packages.
