GM battle in danger of trampling Africa
Tewolde Egziabher
Tewolde Egziabher argues that developing
nations must put in place biosafety systems based on the precautionary
principle, and develop the capacity - no matter how costly - to deal with the
risks of genetically modified crops.
The author of the text below is director
general of Ethiopia's Environmental Protection Authority, and was chief African
negotiator at the Cartagena Protocol.
[ADDIS ABABA] As the world's attention was focused firmly on the Cancún World
Trade Organisation summit in September, an important international agreement
quietly made its entry on the world stage, holding out immense implications for
developing countries.
The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which aims to regulate trade in
genetically modified organisms (GMOs), came into force on 11 September after
five-year-long negotiations over trade advantages and disadvantages -
intractable North-South issues that are set to continue to bedevil the
Protocol's implementation.
This is highlighted most forcefully by the US move to take the European Union
to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism over the European Union's insistence
that US exporters clearly label all GM food sold to Europe.
One of its main complaints is that Europe's stand makes Africa reject GM. The
elephants that are Europe and the United States thus fight, and the grass that
is Africa gets trampled. The WTO Ministerial Meeting in Cancún, Mexico, which
would have had direct or indirect implications on the case, collapsed on 14
September 2003, largely because the South, and especially Africa, refused to
accommodate the elephants.
Is this a foretaste of the future of the implementation of the Biosafety
Protocol as well? Why do I foresee future difficulties? The reasons are many,
flowing chiefly from the substantive differences between the developing
countries and the United States over GMO regulation.
The United States, which is unlikely to be a party to the Protocol, and the
60 parties to the Protocol start from opposing premises.
The United States starts from the premise of 'substantial equivalence', which
says GM crops are as safe as non-GM ones unless proved otherwise. The European
Union and the developing world support the 'precautionary principle' embodied in
the Protocol which states that a GM crop is to be considered possibly risky
unless proved to be safe.
From these perceived differences flow implications for implementation. The
Cartagena Protocol requires a country to allow the importation of a GMO only
after it has obtained all the necessary information about it and carried out a
risk assessment to evaluate the likelihood of harm to human health, to
agricultural systems, to its environment and to its socio-economic conditions.
The country of import is first informed by the exporter or by the country of
export of the intention to export the GMO. The country of import, after a risk
assessment, then informs the exporter or the country of export in writing
whether or not it will allow the import.
In the case of GM commodities intended for food, feed or for processing, the
intention to export is notified to all countries in one go through a
computerised database system called the clearing-house.
In this procedure, failure to communicate a decision to the country of export
or to the clearing-house cannot be taken as an agreement to import. The failure
might happen through lack of capacity and the precautionary principle would then
imply that no exportation takes place.
There are some exceptions to the procedure. A GMO that is merely transiting
through a country is not subjected to the procedure. However, if a country
considers any GMO as too dangerous to be allowed even transit, it has the right
to register this fact at the clearing-house and prohibit its transiting.
A GMO that is destined for contained use - under conditions from which it
cannot escape into the open environment and cannot come into contact with humans
or other forms of life - need not go through the procedure before importation. A
GMO for use as a pharmaceutical for humans is subjected to the procedure unless
there is another international law or a specified international organisation to
govern its import and export authorisation.
At the moment, there is no international law other than the Cartagena
Protocol to govern the environmental impacts of GMOs. The World Health
Organisation is responsible only for the safety to human health of
pharmaceuticals - GMOs or otherwise - and not for their environmental impact.
When it comes to implementing and regulating the Protocol, however,
developing nations are faced with all kinds of handicaps - for a variety of
reasons.
For instance, the Protocol depends on full information for its effective
implementation - it requires a labelling and traceability regime to be
negotiated once it comes into force. But the United States, the biggest producer
of GMOs in the world, refuses to label them, so countries will not necessarily
know when an unlabelled US GMO is imported into their territories. In the
meantime, safety will be compromised.
The poverty of developing countries, especially the least developed among
them, mostly in Africa, remains a crucial handicap: they are simply too poor to
allocate adequate resources for biosafety. Even more worrying is the fact that,
should a risk occur, these countries will find it hard to muster the financial
and technical capacity needed to combat it.
One would have thought that, given this situation, socio-economic
considerations would constitute a very important component in decisions over
whether to import a GMO. But the relevant provision of the Protocol is very
weak. However, neither this weakness nor any other international law prevents a
poor country from adhering to the precautionary principle and making a rigorous
socio-economic assessment before importing a GMO.
Risk assessment in the South also becomes complicated because of the complex
tropical and subtropical environments. A micro-organism under contained use
functions optimally at high temperatures. If it escapes into the open
environment in the North, it is unlikely to survive the winter cold. But in the
hot tropical and subtropical environments of the South, it may survive and
flourish indefinitely.
The South should, therefore, put in place biosafety systems that restrict
contained use only to laboratory conditions from which escape of GMOs is
impossible.
A major problem is related to the rich biodiversity of the South. It is a
well-recognised fact that biodiversity increases Equatorwards and decreases
Polewards. The environmental risk GMOs pose is one of passing their genes to
wild species. The larger the biodiversity, the more complex and uncertain
becomes the evaluation of risks posed by GMOs.
And yet, owing to low technical capacity, specific knowledge on the South's
biodiversity is very poor. Additionally, most centres of origin of crops are in
the South, which makes any mistaken release of a GM crop more devastating in the
South. The Protocol's information and risk assessment requirements recognise
this fact and include the centres of origin or genetic diversity.
It should thus be, but is not necessarily seen as, in the interests of the
North not to push GM crops into the South, and for the South to resort to
caution. After all, virtually all crops of importance in the North have their
centres of origin or genetic diversity in the South, which means that the North
depends on the South for its future breeding programmes and its future food
security.
A more intractable issue, of course, is trade and environment. Trade rules
favour the North. And the international agreement on Trade-related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights - or TRIPs - makes GMOs especially problematic for
the South.
TRIPs makes the patenting of micro-organisms and microbiological processes
compulsory. The North is allowing the patenting of GMOs and their sub-cellular
components based on this provision. The cellular parts essential for genetic
engineering are already patented. This means that any domestic development and
use of GMOs will become internationally bureaucratic (negotiating for the tens
of subcellular parts) and expensive (paying royalties on each patent). It also
means that GMOs, even when developed in the South, will be controlled by the
foreign patent owners of sub-cellular parts.
TRIPs puts the burden of proof of innocence on the person accused of the
infringement of a process patent. This could spell trouble when a GMO
cross-pollinates with the unmodified crop of a smallholder farmer and his crop
becomes contaminated by patented genes.
Absurdly, the farmer is assumed to be a process patent infringer. The
culprits - the wind and the insects - cannot be summoned to court as witnesses.
A South that wants food sovereignty and its farmers to remain innocent of crime
can refuse the planting of genetically modified crops in its territories.
Happily, however, at the insistence of the South, there is now a commitment
to negotiate a liability and redress regime under the Protocol in case of
damages caused by GMOs. Given these handicaps, is the South going to benefit
from genetic engineering? I wonder.
Generally, genetic engineering appeals to the South, which wants to develop
fast - the technology promises to put beneficial traits found in living
organisms to human use. Conversely, not using this capacity threatens being left
even more behind in development.
It has no choice but to stay safe. The South has to put in place biosafety
systems firmly based on the precautionary principle and develop the capacity -
no matter how expensive - to protect itself.
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Source: PANOS Features via Scidev.net
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