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FOOD SECURITY AND GMO DEBATE IN KENYA
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
NAIROBI-KENYA
MARCH 18, 2009
LENTEN TAKE 6
Kenya Red Cross has warned the drought is getting worse and many people are expected to starve. Currently over ten million Kenyans do not have food absolutely. In their Lenten 2009 campaign booklet Kenya Episcopal Conference (KEC) Justice and Peace Commission while acknowledging the fact that food is a big problem in Kenya has in its story about the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) food.
The story talks of Mr Fanaka who thinks that with food crisis GMO could be the only alternative to change the future of farmers. Furthermore Kenya became the fourth African country to allow the production and use of GMO crops after President Mwai Kibaki signed off on Parliament’s approval of new biosafety legislation on February 13, 2009. The Biosafety Bill 2008 sees the East African nation join Burkina Faso, Egypt and South Africa as African nations which permit genetically modified farming.
The KEC in their fourth week of Lent campaign which is observed next Sunday March 22, 2009 has as its theme: Food Security and empowering Farmers. The story talks of how farmers could be empowered to avoid food shortages in future.
With president’s assent to the Bill, one way to empower farmers, a National Biosafety Authority will now be created, under the National Council for Science and Technology, to implement the legislation and to follow priorities as stated in the National Biotechnology Development Policy passed in 2006, Margaret Karembu, director of the Kenya-based African centre of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications
Even though GM foods are inherently unsafe, and current safety assessments are not competent to protect us from or even identify most dangers, the new law will not only allow open field trials in several locations, but also removing previous restrictions and speeding up agricultural improvements.
Like KEC the Vatican has moved from a neutral position in a Europe-US confrontation over GM food to come down in favour of genetic modification. Pope John Paul II was greatly interested in new technologies for food development as part of a policy of sustainable agriculture because of 24,000 people who died every day from starvation.
In Kenya food shortage is not only now. It goes back to December 2006 when the government appealed for $150m in aid to help save 2.5m threatened by the famine in the north-east alone.
This was about the time more than 30 million people were going hungry across Africa from the west, to the horn and the south according to the UN’s World Food Programme.
While poor rains had contributed to the problem the root causes were many and complex.
Apart from Kenya several African countries were affected especially Somalia and Ethiopia. Some 11 million people needed food aid in the region after poor rains.
About half of these were on the brink of starvation and need urgent help. This is because most Africans live in rural areas, where many are subsistence farmers, dependent on a good harvest to get enough food to eat. There are hardly any irrigation systems, so people rely on the rains.
Since then rains have become less reliable, which could be the result of global warming apart from rising populations which have also led people to farm on increasingly marginal land, even more at risk from even a slight decline in rainfall.
Just as we are going on press some three million people are going hungry in Zimbabwe, which used to be the region’s bread basket. Although most donors say the government’s seizure of productive, white-owned farms has worsened the effects of poor rains, this is African problem in general, especially in Somalia where 2m need urgent food aid.
In Ethiopia, some one million people in the south-eastern Somali region could also face severe food shortages, while another seven million need food aid urgently.
It is against this background that by March 2003 the numbers of people facing starvation where worst maize shortage affected over 14 million people in Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe and countries facing famine in southern Africa were advised to accept GMO food or risk death for millions of its people.
A severe food crisis threatens 13 million people in the six countries in the region – with Malawi and Zimbabwe the worst hit.
People for Peace in Africa (PPA)
P O Box 14877
Nairobi
00800, Westlands
Kenya
E-Mail news@ppa.or.ke
Tel 254-20-4441372
Website : www.ppa.or.ke
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Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:54:40 -0700 [03:54:40 PM CDT]
From: People For Peace
Subject: Regional News