A former Director General of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Prof Walter Sandow Alhassan, has underscored the need for cotton farmers in the country to adopt the use of Genetically Modified (GM) cotton seeds to enable them to increase production.
He said cotton production by Ghanaian farmers would increase only when they emulated their counterparts from Burkina Faso whose cotton production increased from 400,000 to 630,000 tonnes in 2011/2012 due to the use of GM crops.
Prof. Alhassan was speaking at a workshop on the theme: “Job prospects in the field of biotechnology”, held for students from selected senior high schools in Accra on March 25, 2015.
He was of the view that GM foods that had gone through required safety testing procedures could be considered safer than the conventionally produced ones because of the tedious approval procedures they went through.
“For the past 19 years that GM foods have been put on the world market, no proven case of harm has been attributed to the products,” he added.
He said the time to start the use of GM crops was now because Ghana had gone beyond the stage of testing for Bacillus Thuringiensis (BT) cotton, as well as rice, cowpea and potato.
Prof. Alhassan noted that GM crops had the potential to be pest resistant, nitrogen efficient and drought resistant, thereby helping to increase yield and more nutritious crop quality.
Currently, there are no commercial GM crops grown in Ghana, but advocates of the GM technology believe that the adoption of GM cultivation will have significant benefits for farmers, consumers, as well as the environment.
In Africa, Burkina Faso and South Africa are the only countries that commercially grow GM cotton in order to increase yield and improve profit made by small-scale cotton farmers.