Ever since July 1, 2011, when the bio-safety bill was passed by the National Assembly, a lot of advocacy has been going on to persuade President Goodluck Jonathan to give his assent to the bill. Biotechnologists, agricultural specialists, NGOs and governments of other nations as well as economists have joined forces to persuade Jonathan to sign the bill into law.
However, several critics of biotechnology have described the pressure on the President as unwarranted, while others ponder over what the technology is all about and why it is attracting much attention.
Some die-hard cynics even queried the rationale behind initiating the bill in the first instance.
Mrs. Rose Gidado, the Head of Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology (OFAB), said that Nigeria was a signatory to the Cartagena Protocol on Bio-safety. OFAB is a department in the National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA).
Gidado, therefore, said that Nigeria was bound to enact a law regulating biosciences because she was a signatory to the Cartagena Convention on Bio-safety. She explained that the Cartagena Protocol on Bio-safety was an international agreement, whose objective was to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology, among others.
She said that the protocol was premised on the ability of biotechnology to have a distinctive effect on biological diversity (biodiversity), taking also into account risks to human health. “It was adopted on Jan. 29, 2000, but was enforced on Sept. 11, 2003, with a total of 166 parties (countries) to the protocol and Nigeria signing on May 24, 2000,’’ she said.
Shedding more light on the bio-safety law, Prof. Bamidele Solomon, the Director-General of NABDA, explained that the convention was aimed at preserving biological diversity. He said that the Cartagena Protocol sought to protect biodiversity (different species) from the potential risks posed by Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology applications. “It will, for example, let countries ban imports of a genetically modified organism if they feel there is not enough scientific evidence that the product is safe,” he said.
Unfortunately, researches have shown that many species have depleted to fractions of their original populations. Available statistics reveal that 10,000 species of animals have gone extinct ever year due to human activities.
Be that as it may, the main concern of Nigerian experts seems to be more focused on the inherent dangers of not assenting to the law. They fear that with the delay in giving assent to the bill, which partly aims at policing Nigeria’s borders, genetically modified foods may already have been imported into the country and consumed by Nigerians without any regulations.
Gidado stressed that there were already some foods in the country that were now referred to as “GM suspects’’.
She blamed the development on the delay in giving assent to the bio-safety law, as no one or agency was scrutinising imported foods so as to trace the genetically modified ones among them. “Our borders are porous: Nigerians have a penchant for foreign products; we do not like our own products, we also depend a lot on imported foods. It is very likely that we have GMOs in the country and that is why we need this law because once the law is in place, the influx of GMOs into the country would be controlled. Any food coming into the country will be checked by the regulatory agency that will emerge after the assent of the bio-safety bill,’’ Gidado added.
Besides, Mr. Adebayo Adeolu, a crop scientist and lecturer at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), stressed that Nigeria’s porous borders had been a major challenge to efforts to check the importation of GMOs at present. He said that if the bill’s signing into law was delayed for too long, GMOs could flood the country to such an extent that subsequent efforts to regulate the imports might be too demanding.
“I think GMOs are around but my worry is that when the bill is signed into law and the new agencies are created and empowered; they would have two specific assignments. They have to check the GMOs that are coming into the country and they must also strive to conduct a comprehensive check on all the existing varieties of our crops to enable them fish out the GMOs among them and do regulatory work on them,” he said.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Muyiwa Abimbola, the Head of Crop Improvement and Research Unit, Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN), Ibadan, blamed the Customs Service and other law enforcement agencies at the borders for allowing GM suspects into the country. She stressed that the presence of GM suspects in Nigeria resulted from the country’s porous borders and the lack of regulations to check importation of GM foods.
Meanwhile, concerned citizens have called on the President to sign the bio-safety bill into law, saying that the approval would enable the country to reap the myriad benefits of GMOs. The Minister of Agriculture, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, expressed the hope that the President would soon give his assent to the law. Adesina stressed that one of the government’s interventions was to introduce biotechnology in all research institutes in the country, as part of the strategies aimed at getting the President to sign the bill. “What we are faced with is the negative propaganda about GMOs but we know that we can gain a lot through biotechnology. Biotechnology is about the science of DNA; both nature and laboratory do a lot of DNA and the issue of GMOs is a matter of application,’’ he said.
Also, Professor Turner Isoun, a former Minister of Science and Technology, dispelled the fears on the possibility of GMOs being harmful to human consumption, calling on the citizens to be more comfortable with biotechnology and biosciences. “In fact, we should have a comparative and a competitive advantage in the areas of bio resources, biotechnology and agricultural biotechnology. Africa still has over 60 per cent of the available farming areas: Nigeria still has some rain forests but we need to grow, we need to conserve and we need to exploit these resources with enlightened perspective,” he said.
All the same, Prof. Kelvin Urama, the Executive Secretary, African Technology Policy Studies (ATPS) in Nairobi, Kenya, stressed the need for Africans should always be in the vanguard of efforts to develop new technologies. He said that biotechnology and process modifications were carried out to have better high yielding crops. “Many countries that have adopted biotechnology are moving forward and it will be disappointing that Africa, which hosts more than 60 per cent of the world’s economy, is still facing hunger,’’ Urama said.
Although, it has yet to be established if the GM suspects in Nigeria are actually GMOs but the general consensus of opinion is that the Jonathan-administration should take a prompt decision on signing the bio-safety bill. The President’s action would ensure the safety of the foods consumed by the citizens even if the country is not interested in taking due advantage of the benefits of biotechnology applications.