Calls for immediate restriction on U.S rice imports

Accra, Sept. 14, GNA - Friends of the Earth, Ghana (FoE), a non-governmental environmental organization, on Thursday called on the Government to immediately restrict rice imports from United States into the country.

This follows a recent announcement by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that rice supplies from the US intended for export had been contaminated with a genetically modified strain of rice, which had not yet been approved for human consumption. Ghana is among the top 10 importers of rice from the US. The FoE at media briefing in Accra said such lapses had immense and tremendous consequences for public health and environmental integrity. It thus called on the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and Ministry of Trade to initiate investigations to ascertain whether recent rice imports from the US had not been contaminated and to institute measures to contain the problem if the contaminated rice had not yet hit the Ghanaian market.

The European Union has banned rice imports from the US as a result of that contamination.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) has been touted by proponents as the panacea to problems of food insecurity especially for the developing world, despite various concerns raised about the health, environmental, socio-economic and even its ethical implications. But many countries, including several African nations are currently carrying out field trials with GMOs.

Ms Cheryl Agyepong, FoE's GMO Project Officer, cautioned that Ghana needed to tread carefully on the acceptance of GM foods until its full impacts with respect to health and the environment was ascertained. She stated that the August 18, 2006 announcement by the USDA did not state how widespread the contamination was or how and when it occurred, saying that this in itself was worrying if a country like the US had problems in the regulation of such occurrences. "Indeed, these obvious lapses in regulation and the inability of the US Government and the biotech corporations to control experimental genetically modified crops put consumers at high risk and increase the chances of GMOs to persist in the environment. "We the FoE-Ghana believe that a moratorium should be placed on all GMO crops until a time when the GMO exporting countries such as the US show commitment to tighten safety assessments of GM crops and products," she stated.

"In addition documentation of food safety assessment for GM crops intended for commercialization must be put in the public domain. "We think GMOs are too big a risk and we should put a break on it for the moment", she stated.

According to FoE, the USDA report indicated that Bayer Crop Science in Germany recently notified the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) that it had traced an amount of Bio-engineered variety of rice called LLRICE 601 in samples of commercial rice seed and may have entered the US food and feed supply.

The report indicated that German Biotech giant Bayer is the producer of the "LL601", a variety that had not been approved in any part of the world and has not passed the safety assessment necessary to protect human health and the environment. Bayer claimed that it was not intending to commercialize "LL601", stressing that it was in the market place as a result of accidental contamination

Bayer then speedily applied to the US Authorities to approve it, which would effectively limit liability on the Company for the accident. The LL601 rice has been genetically modified with a protein that makes it tolerant to glufosinate ammonium herbicide and was not intended for commercialization.

Mr Noble Wadza, Programme Co-ordinator of the FoE said the situation was a particularly serious one because the regulatory authorities in Ghana did not have the capacity to monitor such occurrences because of how they were scantily resourced. He said that in the wake of this development, one question that still remained was whether GMOs could deliver its widely hailed benefits.

He stated: "We don't need GMOs because Ghana has sufficient food. GMOs are enough to erode people's livelihoods. "It could become a very dangerous venture if research is not carried out before the country receives GMO food".

Mr Wadza said that even though some scientists in the country had hailed GMOs as the answer to food security, the Government should be concerned about how to make food available and accessible to all Ghanaians.

He said the problem facing the agric sector should be tackled through the adoption of responsible agricultural and trade polices that addressed subsidies, credit, the use of obsolete technologies, lack of proper storage facilities and access to land.

Mr Wadza stressed that it was important that Ghana treaded with extreme caution on the kind of development path it was choosing, adding: "We should learn to be independent and not let the developed world tie us down with things being rejected in their countries. "Besides, GMOs can't sustain the kind of subsistence farming of our rural farmers", he said.