BIOTECH IN THE NEWS

A Ghanaian Biosafety and Biotechnology expert, Prof. Walter Alhassan has said that introducing Agricultural Biotechnology in the country's agricultural sector will not only come to compliment the already traditional methods of farming, but deal effectively with issues of food security and the likely impact on farming from climate change.
He stressed that modern biotechnology is based on the developments in cellular and molecular biology that occurred in the second half of the 20th century, although traditional biotechnology has been in use for centuries and involves fermentation used in bread making, kenkey and alcohol production.
"Biotechnology is any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use", he explained.
He was speaking at a roundtable discussion with journalists organized by the United States Embassy, in attendance Mr. Gary R. Blumenthal, a United States Biotechnology expert and CEO of World Perspective International.
 

Somalia deposited its instrument of accession to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety last 26 July 2010 and will be the 160th Party to the Protocol on 24 October 2010, the same year of the 10th year anniversary of the adoption of the Protocol.
The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety is a legally binding international agreement controlling the movement of genetically modified organisms from one boundary to another, ensuring safety in transfer, handling and usage.
 

Kenya's cotton production is set to increase six-fold by 2012, after the country adopts biotech cotton (Bt cotton).
The country awaits the Biosafety Act whose regulations are to be gazetted later this month, before Bt cotton can be produced on large scale.
Among other things, the law will allow the commercialisation of GM cotton.
Kenya will become the third country to grow biotech cotton on the continent after South Africa and Burkina Faso, and the first to commercialise it in Central and East Africa.
According to Charles Waturu, centre director, at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute - Thika, this will step up cotton production from 50,000 bales per year to 300,000 bales and meet the country's cotton deficit.
 

Rice is one of the widely grown cereal crops and staple food for more than half the world's population. More than three billion people, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation, consume more than 100kg of rice per year, each. President Yoweri Museveni in March 2004 launched the Upland Rice (Nerica) Project, which increased rice farming in Uganda from 4,000 farmers to over 35,000 in 2007.
However, despite the increasing number of farmers who produce rice in the country, the crop has been affected by the rice yellow mottle virus. The epidemic that was first discovered in Kenya in 1966 gains entry into rice plants through injuries, which may be inflicted by insects or mechanically during the course of crop cultivation, for instance, damage to plants during hoe-weeding and destroys the plantation that affects the crop yields.
 

The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing the world’s 1020 million undernourished people by half between now and 2015 is still possible.
This was revealed by Dr William D Dar, Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) last week during a three-day International Conference on Eliminating Hunger and Poverty: Priorities in Global Agricultural Research and Development Agenda in an Era of Climate Change and Rising Food Prices in Chennai. The seminar was organized to mark the 85th birthday of Dr MS Swaminathan, the acknowledged father of India’s Green Revolution. 
Dr Dar said that the MDG target can still be attained if the “business as usual” approach is replaced by a new strategy to fight hunger, which is inclusive of poor women and children.