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THE RACE TO THE TOP or TO THE BOTTOM Gatsha Mazithulela
I have been querying why our national mood on GMOs seems not to be in step with the times even in an environment where we are clearly eating GMOs in one form or another or welcoming the same technology into our bodies to cure our diseases when we fall ill. Horrendous myths and outright untruths have been paddled to the point where we have heard quite formal statements from respectable businessmen on the subject of GMO chickens which don’t exist. One of the reasons why a country like ours may seem to be out of step with developments in this industry is an outdated policy position on GMOs.
It was with great relief therefore that I found a very clear output pertaining to national policy on GMOs in the Zimbabwe Agenda for Socio Economic Transformation: October 2013-December 2018 (Zim ASSET). Under the Food Security and Nutrition Cluster and in Key Result Area: Crop Production and Marketing, there is an output which expects policy review on GMOs.
I know that one cannot pre-empt the result of a policy review but we hope that the opportunity to bring the advantages of this phenomenal technology to our farmers will not be missed.
Of course we also maintain that regulatory environment must also ensure that there is nothing illegal or unethical in the process of adopting the technology or producing such foods, if we end up with a policy that allows GMOs.
Before we conclude that the current policy position that disallows the growing of GMOs in Zimbabwe is seen as very odd, I will explain why it was important to be guarded against GMOs in the past.
That policy position was on the mark when it came to protecting the consumer and the environment from what was seen, then, to be experimental product range. Indeed, many countries rightly adopted the so called precautionary principle in the formulation of their policies and Zimbabwe clearly was one of them.
The precautionary principle is not as straightforward as we may think and it is formally described thus: “The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action”.
What this means is that under this principle, it was the responsibility of those wanting to promote GMO technology to provide scientific proof that GMOs are not harmful.
It was not the responsibility of the Zimbabwean government or its people to demonstrate the safety of a technology that they did not have! So that is why our policy position became what we know today.
The precautionary principle is used by policy makers to justify discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of harm from taking a particular course or making a certain decision when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking.
The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result.
Perhaps it is time to review the precautionary principle now that a lot of the doubts that were present in the 1990s, when GMOs first came to the world market, were present.
What were those doubts and what really precipitated such a legally strong framework to be put in place to control the work of a few scientists, considered quite mad at the time. It is because for the first time in the history of human endeavour, we could now modify life, directly, in the laboratory.
I think the world welcomed this as a curiosity until the technology became so polished that it left the laboratory and could be implemented on an unprecedented scale in farms all over the world.
So where was the problem?
The root of the problem was in a scientist’s idea of a product versus what ordinary people expect. We expect straight forward explanations to issues that must be understood by all consumers and if a scientist takes us on a crash course PhD in five minutes, of course we won’t understand and then we should apply the precautionary principle until the fellow has something sensible to say.
Without going into those famous statements from hard core scientists and their equally poor communicators, the companies that they formed to market GMOs, I will attempt to explain why the fears we had then, should now be retired. One of the main reasons for fearing GMOs was that the plants were produced using a step where the required characteristic was chemically linked to antibiotic resistance in order to select the GMO with, say drought resistance in the laboratory.
So all the plants that did not have drought resistance, could not survive living in antibiotics and those that did, also had drought resistance. Although we wanted drought resistance, we did not want to eat something that was constantly producing an antibiotic as well. This is a very simple example of why we then said we don’t want GMOs but things have moved on very much from that situation.
Seeing the resistance to their idea of a product, scientists have listened to public concerns and they have used their substantial brains and resources to get round these problems.
The GMOs that have been licensed and which are being grown all over the world today don’t have those nasty attachments which the first product had. They have been eaten for almost 20 years with no problems and surely such data should be enough to suspend the precautionary principle.
There were other fears but their description may be beyond the scope of this article but suffice to ask again, is it not time to do away with the precautionary principle and deliver the agricultural technology to make our farms more productive?
A certain section in Zim Asset seems to suggest that we should at least go through a review of this policy. I welcome that.
Online Reporter