FOCUS ON AFRICA
http://www.gmwatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=37&page=1

1.SA BIOSAFETY REGULATORS IN BED WITH INDUSTRY
2.Letter in The Cape Times
3.Row over 'mutant' Aids drug - South Africa to become guinea pig for production and testing of controversial vaccine
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1.SA BIOSAFETY REGULATORS IN BED WITH INDUSTRY ON GM POTATOES?
Cape Town 27 July 2004.

The South African government has approved a United States funded project that will soon see genetically engineered potatoes sprouting in six secret locations in African soil. Similar potatoes were first grown in the United States but were withdrawn from the market due to consumer resistance.

The announcement of South Africa's authorisation for the project was made on Monday through a press release issued by the USAID and US Department of Agriculture-funded International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). ISAAA also receives funds from a who's-who of multinational chemical and seed companies: Bayer, CropScience, Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta, Cargill, Dow AgroSciences and KWS SAAT AG.

The potato project, to be run by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), was authorised despite comprehensive objections raised by the African Centre for Biosafety and Biowatch South Africa.

The South African government is obliged by law to advise objecting groups of the outcome of decisions taken on the release of genetically engineered products. But in this instance, said the African Centre for Biosafety's Mariam Mayet, the Department of Agriculture wanted to give ISAAA the opportunity to first do the public relations work for ARC and for Golden Genomics, a biotechnology consultancy run by the controversial Muffy Koch.

Previous field trials conducted by the ARC were found by the objecting groups to have been poorly designed, and they failed to answer key questions regarding the efficacy and safety of engineered potato lines.

The groups received an astonishing paucity of information to prepare their response to the application. Access to information about genetic engineering is presently the subject of High Court litigation brought by Biowatch South Africa against the South African Department of Agriculture.

Biowatch South Africa expressly asked that the decision on the potato project be delayed until the High Court passes judgement in its public interest action challenging government on the secret proliferation of genetically engineered organisms in South Africa.

Mayet said: “ We found that the scientific design of the proposed field trials for 2005 were seriously flawed. Ecological impacts on non-target species had only been addressed with limited scope, and key experiments to measure transgene stability and horizontal gene flow were not carried out. We therefore demanded that the trials be halted because they posed an unacceptable risk to the environment.”

Elfrieda Pschorn-Strauss of Biowatch South Africa said: “The potato project purports to target small-scale farmers, yet socio- economic impacts of engineered potatoes have simply not been considered. This is unacceptable. Potatoes are an important crop to the people of South Africa, fast becoming an important staple food.”

Although the potato project is partly publicly funded, payment and usage of up to ten patents are still to be negotiated. How can you talk about small-scale farmer benefits on the one hand and patent law on the other, Pschorn-Strauss demanded.

The government was intent on force-feeding unsuspecting South African consumers with genetically engineered potatoes, Mayet said.

ARC apparently plans to commercialise GM potatoes in 2007.

To view the objections to the GM potato field trials, see:
{ HYPERLINK "http://www.biosafetyafrica.net" }http://www.biosafetyafrica.net
{ HYPERLINK http://www.biowatch.org.za }http://www.biowatch.org.za
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2.LETTER PUBLISHED IN THE CAPE TIMES

Wynand vd Walt, spokesperson for the Genetically Modified (GM) food industry signally fails to make his case (GM food safe, letters June 10).

His claim that opposition to GM crops and foods in South Africa has no mandate from civil society is deeply ironic. SAFeAGE, the SA Freeze Alliance on Genetic Engineering, is one of the biggest NGO networks in South Africa, with well over 250,000 direct members and many millions more indirectly.

The campaign against South Africa's GM policies has been taken up by a broad swathe of civil society in SA, including the South African Catholic Bishops Conference, The South African Council of Churches, Trades Union, scientists, NGOs, CBOs, politicians and parliamentarians across the board. SAFeAGE and its member groups opposing GM bio-colonialism represent a well-established popular mandate. Van der Walt laughably states that opposition against GMOs is driven by international interests! It is as African as the mnqushu and pap that his clients are genetically engineering for us to eat, the first GM staple crop to be allowed globally - GM white maize.

On the other hand the proponents of GM technology operate solely for commercial reasons. Van der Walt himself has a lengthy track record as an uncompromising supporter of "biotech" corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, who force GM food onto an unwilling global public on behalf of US and European corporate interests.

As ex-head of both our national commercial seed organisation and of the biotech industry lobby group AfricaBio, van der Walt has a real cheek to
imply that his commercial mandate somehow trumps public rights.

As if this is not enough, he then speaks on our behalf! SAFeAGE clearly said in a statement issued after the Parliamentary meeting to which he refers, that we were dissatisfied with the outcomes of the meeting and were quoted as saying "that there were still fundamental disagreements around the safety and desirability of GE crops and food". We did not - as vd Walt asserts - support the outcomes of that meeting, except for the promise of more open dialogue. This has not eventuated, to date. Industry even reneged on the public promise it made to provide more data on its products.

There is no consensus on the safety of these crops, locally or globally. Again, contrary to vd Walts claim, we have indeed provided numerous
peer-reviewed studies setting out our concerns - to both industry and to regulators - with zero response. There is a concerted campaign to suppress many uncomfortable truths about GM crops and technology by industry. This wall of silence camouflaged as "corporate confidentiality" obscures the reality; the GM emperor is wearing no clothes.
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3.Row over 'mutant' Aids drug
Lloyd Gedye
Johannesburg, Mail & Guardian
23 July 2004

South Africa is to become the guinea pig for the production and testing of a controversial HIV/Aids vaccine that will be grown in genetically modified (GM) plants.

But local environmental activists have warned they will fight the project, for which the European Union has granted 12-million euro (about R80-million) over five years.

The first field trial of the GM vaccine is likely to be carried out in South Africa because there are fears that crops might be vandalised in the United Kingdom, Britain’s Independent newspaper reported this week.

The Independent said: “Concerns about direct action by environmentalists opposed to GM crops has led scientists behind the project to collaborate with a South African research institute which has offered to grow the first crop there.”

The institute in question is the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria. The CSIR confirmed it would conduct research on the plant vaccine to the value of €75 000 (about R560 000) this year.

The business area manager for plant biotechnology at the CSIR, Blessed Okole, described the initiative as a “humanitarian” project with the “primary aim of providing medicines for poor countries”.

However, local activists are not so enthralled. The coordinator of the African Centre for Biosafety, Mariam Mayet, said that if the European scientists believed trials in South Africa would go unopposed “they are in for a real shock”.

“Relocating such a project to South Africa because activists in Europe will destroy their crops smacks of environmental racism. We will fight them all the way.”

Muffy Koch, a biosafety expert advising the government on the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), said that for the first time this year GMO trials were being conducted in secret in South Africa , because local activists had made subtle threats about “night harvesting”.

The CSIR does not require government approval to take part in the project, but has applied for additional funding from the Department of Science and Technology.

The department provided financial support for a visit last year by Professor Paul Christou, a leading member of the Pharma-Planta consortium, to explore European collaboration with South Africa.

“The CSIR’s primary role and tasks relate to the genetic transformation of maize and tobacco with the experimental vaccines ”” and growing the transgenic plants in a contained environment to produce seeds that will be used for downstream processing,” said Okole.

European scientists expect to start human trials on the vaccine in the next five years. The technology, called “biopharming”, involves the genetic engineering of plants to produce pharmaceutical proteins and chemicals that they do not produce naturally.

The Pharma-Planta consortium will develop the concept from plant modification through to clinical trials with the aim of producing vaccines and remedies for major diseases including Aids, rabies, diabetes and tuberculosis.

Biosafety coordinator Philip Dale, of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, said several different production systems were under consideration, including the use of maize and tobacco. A final decision on the plant host would not be made until a year into the project.

“We will also carefully consider where to base the production sites. We already have a number of sites in mind, both in Europe and South Africa,” Dale said.

The GM crops are to have their genes spliced with genetic material from disease-causing viruses and bacteria to make prototype vaccines. By purifying the proteins, known as antigens, from the harvested crop scientists hope to mass produce vaccines at a fraction of the current cost.

The project’s scientific coordinator, Julian Ma, of St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, said it would take about two years to develop the technique before the first crop was grown in 2006.

The administrative coordinator, Professor Rainer Fischer, added: “There is a desperate need to find ways to produce modern medicines in sufficient quantities and at a cost that will make them available to everyone. We believe using plants to make pharmaceuticals could make a significant contribution.”

Ma said, “The cost of developing plant-derived products could be 10 to 100 times lower than conventional production.”

Andrew Tanyton, spokesperson for the Safe Food Coalition, a bitter opponent of GMOs in South Africa, dismissed claims that a desire to reduce costs lay behind the use of plants to produce vaccines.

“These medicines will be patented. When they come on the market there will be no competition, so prices will be as high. There will be no benefits for the consumer,” he said.

“You don’t need to create GM crops; you can develop medicines using GM technology by modifying bacteria in laboratories. There is no need to release these crops into the environment.”

Taynton added that GM crops have been rejected in Europe. “To keep the biotechnology industry afloat they are targeting countries with very lax biotechnology legislation.”

A major cause for concern over the new technology is the fact that a United States company, Epicyte, holds a key patent on the production of antibodies in plants. “Any benefits must genuinely reach those that need them, rather than simply lining the pockets of the biotech and pharmaceutical industry,” said Clare Oxborrow, a GM campaigner for Friends of the Earth.

“We believe food crops should not be used to grow these vaccines because of the risk of contamination. Food crops in the US have already been destroyed because of contamination by experimental ‘pharm’ crops,” Oxborrow said.

Okole said the executive council of the GMO Act would have to be convinced that there are no health or environmental risks, and that the trials will be managed to prevent any unforeseen loss of material.