|
Written by Truth About Trade & Technology
|
|
Tuesday, 06 October 2009 17:40 |
IAfrica
October 5, 2009
Author: Michael Hamlyn
Publication: iAfrica.com
Date: Monday, October 05, 2009
Via: AgBios
AfricaBio, an organisation that is in favour of genetically modified organisms, grown and traded under strict conditions, has a terrible warning for South African farmers.
"Look at what is happening in Europe."
Paul Green, a trade consultant from Washington in the US, told a media briefing in Cape Town on Friday that the European Union has banned all GMOs, but has found a tiny amount of GM corn in a soya bean shipment.
As a result imports of soya are likely to be banned, which means that very shortly there will not be enough oil seed to maintain animal feedstocks, which will mean that animals will have to be slaughtered.
There will eventually be a shortage of meat, and meat will have to be imported. The meat imports will have been fed on the very same GM corn and oilseed that the anti-GM activist regulators are trying to keep out.
Green quoted the EU Commissioner for Agriculture Mariann Fischer Boel as saying: "We are crazy. We are going to put our animal feeding industry out of business."
Joscelyn Webster, of AfricaBio, also had an anecdote about similar problems closer to home.
She said that because of "asynchronous" regulation - one country being slower than another to license the growth or trade in GM crops - South Africa has lost a valuable GM crop to Kenya, which was quicker off the mark.
Green is in this country to advise policy-makers and farmers that there is a way around the problem of asynchronous regulation. He said that a multilateral body established by the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation of the UN, the Codex Alimentarius, has recently adopted a method for managing the issue when a GM "event" has been through the food safety risk assessment process in at least one other country.
This will provide a "low level presence" guarantee for food, animal feed and processing. It should not provide seed-grain for planting, but it will bridge the gap between the different timing of GM approvals.
SOURCE: IAFRICA.COM
agbios.com
|
.png)
Follow us on Twitter