The Leadership of the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG) has said the introduction of GMOs will not only deprive the country of its food sovereignty, but also has the tenacity to wipe its seeds.
The PFAG together with the Ghana Agricultural Workers Union, the Centre for Organisational Development and Food Sovereignty Ghana, said the call was to salvage the local seed industry.
The GMO was a grand strategy by multinational seed companies and their Ghanaian agents to control the seed production and rip off the patent right of a single seed purchased by farmers.
Madam Victoria Adongo, the Executive Director, PFAG speaking at a press conference in Accra commended the Minister of Food and Agriculture’s position that Ghana does not need to introduce GMOs into the country as a means to ensure food security.
She encouraged the Minister to hold on to this position as Ghanaian farmers, consumers and CSOs were in support of his position.
The PFAG Executive Director said aside the well-known challenges in the sector, local seed producers and famers were plagued with numerous constraints.
She said there were the critical and real challenges facing the sector and farmers and obviously GMO was not the solution and could not be part of the solutions at this stage of the country’s agricultural development.
Madam Adongo added it would also kill the country’s infant seed industry and take the progress chalked in the agriculture sector steps backward.
She, therefore, called on government to learn from the lessons from the failures of the BT-Cotton in Burkina Faso in 2018, where they had to rely on Togo for conventional Cotton seed to save their Cotton industry from total collapse.
Mr Edward Kareweh, the General Secretary of Ghana Agricultural Workers Union, said the scientific community in Ghana has not endorsed GMOs, rather its only few, who as a result of their own interest were championing that.
He said the assertion that “GMO is a crucial tool to revolutionalise Ghana’s agriculture sector’ is the clearest manifestation of some of our scientists’ lack of appreciation of the happenings in the Ghanaian agricultural sector”.