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Professor Dorington Ogoyi, CEO National Biosafety Authority (NBA). /COURTESY.

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Why farmers, consumers should embrace genetically engineered foods

NAIROBI, Kenya Aug 29 – Though gene editing portends immense value for Kenya and the African continent, the gains could be lost without trust-building outreach to farmers and consumers.

Since farmers and consumers are key beneficiaries of agricultural technology, they must not be left out of the conversation, says a Kenyatta University professor. The key lies in the simplicity of the messaging.

“We need to start thinking very basic,” said Professor Richard Oduor, an associate professor of molecular biology at in the university’s Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology & Biotechnology. “We need to start thinking about the farmers.”

Scientists need to change how they interface with farmers and other members of society, Odour said. “How do farmers and the government, for instance, look at genome editing? Do they find it as trendy as we do? And if that isn’t the case, where are we going wrong?”

It is imperative that scientists and policy makers also loop the youth into the agriculture agenda, an objective that would be achieved by communicating the subject in a language that appeals to this demographic, he said. Similarly targeted messaging must be deployed in reaching out to the political class.

A number of biotechnological innovations have been pitched in Kenya, all looking good on paper, but in all practicality, that’s where it ends.

“I wonder if it is the strategy we use for communicating these new technologies that is the problem,” he said in trying to explain the lack of uptake. “Do we approach it in a language or a manner that is not necessarily exciting? Or is it that we have very good ideas but misplaced strategies?”

Genetic modification (GM), which preceded gene editing and has been widely seen as one answer to Africa’s crippling food insecurity, has hardly scraped the surface of its potential as evidenced by the relatively small number of crops that have been genetically modified in the country.

“GMO has been here since 1998,” Professor Oduor told a gathering of researchers and stakeholders in Naivasha, Kenya. “Almost 33 years later, we still don’t have much to show for it”.

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Present at the convention was Professor Dorington Ogoyi, CEO of the National Biosafety Authority, who highlighted the milestones that Kenya had achieved in its approvals of genetically modified organisms. Professor Ogoyi noted that so far, 4 applications had been approved for environmental release in the country.

The conference was convened under the auspices of the Alliance for Science, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB). Among issues that participants deliberated on were the benefits of agricultural genome editing, local and global biosafety policies, regulations for genome-edited products and values-based communication.

Professor Oduor cautioned that gene editing, which provides even greater flexibility to plant breeders, could suffer the same fate as GM if it isn’t communicated well enough to inform farmers of the benefits and prompt more consumers to embrace it as a solution to the nagging food insecurity problem.

The professor lamented that an inordinately high premium is attached to covering political stories in the country at the expense of other pressing matters, such as food security.

By learning the lessons from the false starts and stumbling blocks that have encumbered the GMO journey, researchers will be better equipped to project the news of more refined technologies such as gene editing to the general public, leading to greater acceptance.

“Now that we have seen and learnt from the experiences of GMO, we need, right from the onset when these technologies are fresh in the market, to start understanding the right approaches for reaching out to our intended stakeholders”.

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