SUNS  4290 Tuesday 29 September 1998


ZIMBABWE: GENETIC ENGINEERING WILL NOT BENEFIT POOR FARMERS

Harare, Sep 25 (IPS/Lewis Machipisa) -- Genetic engineering, which is being touted as the answer to Africa's hunger, will not benefit Zimbabwe's poor farmers, agricultural experts have warned in the
capital Harare.

"We don't know what impact this will have on our country. Who will determine the prices of the genetically engineered foods. Look at the AIDs drugs, there are available but who can afford them?", said Reginald Mugwara, a food security expert at the Southern African Development Community's Early Warning Unit.

"There is also an issue of disease, an element of uncertainty and human health", he said.

According to Mugwara, genetic engineering will not improve the life of Zimbabwe's poor farmers. "A lot of work needs to be done and come up with the exact...implications. Agriculture is an important sector that needs to be safeguarded and not undermined," he said.

There is every reason for the experts to be wary of genetic farming. In 1990, L-tryptophan, a food supplement made from genetically engineered bacteria by the Japanese firm 'Showa Denko KK', is alleged to have caused 31 deaths and 1,500 injuries in the United States.

Last month, there was a campaign in India against the landing of one million tonnes of soyabeans from the United States, suspected to be genetically engineered.

The suspicions arose after the consignments had been found to be mixed with crops from the biotechnology giant 'Monsanto', which has more than five million hectares under genetically engineered soya.

"The only thing we know about bio-technology is we don't know enough. We know the hype, we know the propaganda," said Pat Mooney of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (Rafi), a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Winnipeg, Canada.
  
RAFI is concerned with the loss of genetic diversity - especially in agriculture - and about the impact of intellectual property rights on agriculture and world food security.

"Almost all the bio-technology lies in the private sector. What a gamble it would be if we relied on the private sector to feed the poor and they don't. We can't experiment with the poor," Mooney told a conference in Harare on Sep 24, on 'The Future of Agriculture in Zimbabwe: Natural or Genetic?

He said any new technology takes at least a generation before its implications are known. "Some technology may exacerbate the rich-poor gap. We may see an exploitation of the poor by the producers of these technologies," he said.

Olivia Muchena, who is Zimbabwe's deputy minister of lands and agriculture, agreed. "There is rapid development of bio-technology in the world right now but this has not been without devastating consequences," she said.

She also warned against falling in the same trap as did the world on pharmaceuticals which are now owned and controlled by a few private companies. "These issues of bio-technology (and providing food to the poor) we still consider them of public domain," she said.

Zimbabwe does not have laws requiring that genetic engineering products are suitably labelled to warn an unsuspecting consumers as in many other countries.

"Even under conventional crops we are still trying to develop phyto-sanitary standards in the region so that we can facilitate the movement of conventional crops let alone the capacity to monitor the
genetically engineered food," said Mugwara.

Not all agree, however. Andrew Matibiri, a bio-technologist with the Tobacco Research Board in Zimbabwe, said bio-technology offers unparalled benefits to farmers. With the aid of slides, Matibiiri
dished out the benefits: Higher yielding varieties responsive to chemical inputs; year round availability of better tasting fruits and ability to produce year-round environmentally friendly crops.

"The fact that the research on bio-tech is often refined to international labs must not mean that they lose interest in the research," said Matibiri.

But he only stirred a hornet's nest.

"Bio-technology should not be a religion that we have to climb on board and follow all the rules," said Mooney. "Before we allow this to happen we should put institutional structures to monitor and control these technologies first."