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The promotion and development of "Biosafety" laws in Africa continues. But it seems that different countries may have differing interpretations of how to implement genuine Biosafety, and what Biosafety really means. There is also still the widespread and naive assumption that GM technology can improve productivity, even though we have seen successive years of failure and spiralling costs for farmers.
Judging from comments made by Zimbabwe's Minister for Science and Technology Development, the new Biosafety Bill is being seen as a mechanism for facilitated GMO approvals. Talk is purely of the potential of biotechnology and GM to solve problems - and there seems to be little acknowledgement that GM will fail to solve the real causes of hunger, while posing risks to the health, environment, and livelihoods of farmers.
In Botswana, there seems to be a better awareness that the Biosafety Framework must have mechanisms which involve the public in decision-making about GM. However, policy makers must be cautious of the naive assumption that legislation can somehow make GMOs "safe".
AfricaBio, the industry-funded GM lobby group based in South Africa, recently engineered a public relations event by bringing MPs from across Africa to look at South African GM farms. The MPs then obligingly spoke out about the potential of GM to increase productivity, and the need for Biosafety legislation to enable countries to access the technology. Thus we see clearly that where Biosafety was once a mechanism to protect countries against GM, it is now seen as a step towards acceptance, promoted by GM lobby groups.
Farmers, however, continue to have a different view of GMOs. At the launch of the Eastern and Southern African Farmers Forum (ESAFF), farmers' organisations from 9 countries joined to make clear their belief that GMOs would harm their way of life. And after a citizen's jury held in Mali, farmers were convinced that Bt cotton would not help them to deal with the problems that Malian cotton farmers face, and that in fact GM technology would make the situation worse.
Policy makers have a responsibility to listen to these voices, since it is the farmers who have a deeper understanding of the realities of agriculture, and who will be the most affected by the technology.
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