Years in the making, Kenya's GMO law prepares to go live

David Njagi in SciDev.net: Kenya's long-awaited biosafety law is likely to become operational this month — well over a year after its president approved the legislation. President Mwai Kibaki signed off parliament's approval of the biosafety legislation in February 2009, after a decade of controversy about the advisability of allowing the commercialisation of genetically modified organisms.

Last month, agriculture minister William Ruto confirmed that the biosafety guidelines had been finalised. Now, Harrison Macharia — chief science secretary of the newly created National Biosafety Authority (NBA) — confirmed to SciDev.Net that the gazetting of the bill, and thus its official commencement date, will happen this month.

Kenya will become the fourth African country to implement such legislation, after Burkina Faso, Egypt and South Africa.

Muo Kasina, principal research officer at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute said that research that has so far been held back because of a lack of legislation will now be able to undergo open field trials, and mass production of GMOs will attract more investment.

He added that the regulations will encourage transgenic research and help address the country's brain drain. "Having the biosafety regulations in place will ensure the products meet standards for commercialisation and provide the basis for product stewardship," said Kasina….

Cultivation on the slopes of Mount Kenya, shot by Mehmet Karatay, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License