Sunday, 29 May 2011

STAKEHOLDERS in agricultural biotechnology met two weeks ago at the National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI) Umudike, Abia State, calling for an urgent passage of the biosafety bill expected to regulate the practice of biotechnology in the country.

The one-day meeting was an Open Forum On Agricultural Biotechnology (OFAB), featuring the formal commissioning of the N14 million new Biotechnology Research Centre at the NRCRI, said to be funded by the Education Trust Fund (ETF).

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Professor Sheikh Ahmed Abdullah, described the event as epoch making, jointly organised by the National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA), African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) and Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN).

He said the forum was to facilitate the flow of information on agricultural technology and biosafety issues between the general public and technology developers. ‘Our gathering together here in NRCRI,’ he said, ‘is in recognition of her distinction in agricultural biotechnology as it has emerged as one of the pacesetters in the adaptation of agricultural biotechnology with the commissioning of a new Biotechnology Research Centre in her bid to make it a centre of excellence’.

The minister, stated that despite current efforts to increase food production, hunger and food insecurity still persists, adding that this has underscored the importance of biotechnology research. ’Over the last 20 years, improved crops varieties have accounted for an estimated half of agricultural productivity enhancement programmes.’

He continued: ’we therefore need new solutions to increasing agricultural productivity to combat hunger and poverty among our people.’ He described agricultural biotechnology as ‘a proven tool which, when complemented with traditional breeding and novel resource management, can increase productivity.’ He listed the benefits of biotechnology as including the reduction in excessive use of pesticides and agro inputs and thus less impact on the environment, reduced impact of plant diseases pests, breeding of stress-tolerant crops that withstand vagaries of changing climate, including the enablement of diagnosis of livestock diseases and vaccines production, production of numerous crops with enhanced nutritional quality to improve the health and nutritional status of farmers and consumers.

According to the minister, his ministry has given full support to the passage of the National Biosafety Bill and will also be an active player in, and collaborator with, all relevant institutes in the field of biotechnology. ‘The target of this administration is to improve capacity for the domestication of biotechnology in Nigeria by constructing additional laboratories and building the capacity of personnel to conduct research into the area of genetic engineering.

Director General of the National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA), Professor Bamidele Solomon, said in his address that, since April 2009, when the open forum started its public activities, a sizeable number of participants who regularly attend have acquired a better appreciation of the biotechnology concept and have exhibited a renewed hope that the intractable challenges particularly in the era of food production could be overcome after all, with the emergent technologies.

According to him, ‘open forum on agricultural biotechnology (OFAB) has popularised biotechnology to such an extent that the planning committee has been told to move the forum’ to places at the grassroots, outside Abuja,

On the biosafety law, he said that international convention requires that any country desirous of practising biotechnology must put in place a national regulations. This implies that ‘without a biosafety law, the results of confined field trials undertaken in the research institutes across the country will remain on the shelves of research and will never reach commercialisation.’

NRCRI’s executive director, Dr Kenneth Nwosu, said that, over the years, his institute has endeavoured to fulfill its national mandate to conduct research into the genetic improvement, production, processing, storage, utilisation and marketing of root and tuber crops of economic importance which it does from six experimental substations located in various agro-ecologies of Nigeria.

According to Nwosu, NRCRI is now the first institute in Nigeria to receive approvals for the conduct of any confined field trial of a genetically-modified (GM) crop plant on the basis of the national biosafety guidelines. He expressed optimism that the national biosafety law will soon be in place to enable NRCRI fully participate in agricultural biotechnology research in order to reap its benefits.

Science and Technology minister, Professor Mohammed Kao’je Abubakar, represented by Professor Bamidele Solomon, said that his ministry recognises the critical role of agriculture in the economy of the country. He said that economic growth goes hand in hand with agricultural progress while stagnation could be an explanation for poor economic performance. The session drew participants from ministries, ADP, farmers’ groups and the academia.

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