Governing Biotechnology in Africa: Toward Consensus on Key Issues in Biosafety
A “living paper” prepared for the second session of the African Policy Dialogues on Biotechnology – Southern Africa
by IFPRI; Nepad; Fanrpran
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Executive Summary
The last decade has been a defining moment for policy makers in Africa, especially for those charged with policy for the agricultural sector. Despite the highest level of agricultural technological advancement in the world over the decade gone by 75 percent of the population in Africa still wallows in abject poverty, threatened by hunger and food insecurity. Most of the food insecure are smallholder farmers who wake up every morning to till the soil.
The advent of genetic engineering in agriculture has clearly changed the content and nature of the debate on how to respond to food insecurity. So, too, has the debate on how to achieve longer-term agricultural growth and food security through self-sustaining processes of growth. To many stakeholders in Africa, along with genetically modified food will come genetically modified agricultural technologies. Two extreme positions appear to polarize this debate: extreme pro-genetic engineering and extreme anti-genetic engineering positions.
The extreme pro-biotechnology groups catalogue potential benefits of the technology and often dismiss any concerns about potential risks. They tend to portray biotechnology as the panacea to combat food insecurity in Africa. On the other extreme are the anti-biotechnology activists who see no evident benefits and associate the technology with nothing but danger and risks. They would like the development, commercialization and application of the technology stopped. The two extreme views have tended to confuse many African policymakers and sections of the public because of the lack of reliable information and guidance available to these groups. There is increasing uncertainty and confusion in many of the African governments’ responses to a wide range of social, ethical, environmental, trade and economic issues associated with the development and application of modern biotechnology.
The absence of African consensus and strategic approaches to address these emerging biotechnology issues has allowed different interest groups to exploit uncertainty in policymaking, regardless of what may be the objective situation for Africa. Both pro and antibiotech advocacy groups can affect African decision making adversely, as they portray agricultural opportunities in extremes, making it appear like it is an “either–or” situation.
It is this in recognition of this polarization in biotechnology decision-making processes in Africa, and even among scientists, that NEPAD and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have established a regional platform, “The African Policy Dialogues on Biotechnology” through which African countries can engage in dialogue and develop a consensus on the controversies, risks, challenges and myths surrounding the growth and development of biotechnology in Africa. This paper attempts to highlight the key issues in biosafety that require African consensus, and in so doing, provide a framework that will guide the dialogue for building a consensus on how to govern biotechnology in Africa. The aim of this paper is not to provide a detailed description or overview of all biosafety issues. Nor is the aim to go through all the biosafety issues covered by the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Rather, the aim is to point out those dimensions of biosafety that are divisive and thus call for an African consensus, drawing implications for capacity building efforts by African countries. This paper thus is not exclusive or exhaustive, but rather a living paper that is designed to be elastic and accommodative of new and additional ideas and issues that will be raised by the different stakeholder groups in the ensuing dialogue. The paper is expected to change and grow as the dialogue process grows to new and higher levels of debate.
As a framework document, the paper will try to respond to key questions in Biosafety likely to be critical in informing the debate. The paper will serve as a living document that will inform decision makers as to the options and considerations they must take into account as they develop national biosafety frameworks. It will draw on information and data from many sources, to illustrate Africa’s current stage of development in research and regulation.
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