Professor Olalekan Abiodun Akinbo, Supervisor of AUDA-NEPAD, Centre of Excellence in Science, Technology, and Innovation has called for the creation of a collaborative environment for genome editing among African scientists to meet the continent’s food and nutritional security. He said with the nutritional and food security challenge facing the continent, there was an urgent need to close the yield gap in staple crops and enhance food production to feed the growing population. ‘To meet the increasing demand for food, Africa needs efficient approaches to produce food. For crop improvement, this can be done by using the available including modern biotechnology as well as the full potential of new breeding tools such as genome editing in addition to conventional technologies.’ ‘Technology is moving the world and we as Africans cannot afford to lag. We need to move with the world in a positive order,’ Prof. Akinbo told the Ghana News Agency in an interview. He explained that given the potential and skills existing on the continent, the application of genome editing techniques was rapidly growing in agriculture and the global landscape of regulatory developments for genome-edited crops was fast changing. To him, sustainable intensification of agriculture in Africa was essential for accomplishing food and nutritional security and addressing the rising concerns of climate change. Prof. Akinbo explaining how this could be achieved said Africa was endowed with rich resources and had competent researchers and scientists with the technical expertise to rub shoulders with their international counterparts. He noted that African scientists from member states were doing so much around research, science, technology, and innovation, and ‘all we need to do is to create a platform and synergise our efforts to achieve a common goal to achieve the Africa we want.’ The collaboration he noted would help strengthen weak institutions among member states and create an enabling environment or environmental advantage for the technology to strive. ‘As scientists, we can work for the ‘Africa we want,’ by ensuring that we will not only be a consuming continent but a producing continent that can compete favourably on the global market and this can be achieved if we collaborate and build on the initiative, build on the capability of what other countries have developed and complement each member state. Let’s create a niche and work on a common crop, a common crop like cassava which is a staple crop across Africa, geno-edit it and that will answer one continental goal- Agenda 2063, Zero Hunger.’ Prof. Akinbo who is also a plant breeder explained that the application of genome editing techniques was rapidly growing in agriculture and the global landscape of regulatory developments for genome-edited crops was fast changing with many countries developing regulatory guidelines to handle genome-edited products, whilst many others were being discussed. Traditional genome editing involves the delivery of the editing reagents into the plant cells through genetic transformation. In this approach, the editing reagents get integrated randomly into the plant genome and can therefore generate undesirable genetic changes. He noted that Africa was making progress in creating the enabling environment for the commercialization of genome-edited crop varieties and mentioned Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya as countries that have biosafety guidelines for the regulation of genome editing. He described GEd as a technology similar to the conventional breeding that is usually conducted by agriculturists to take out an undesired trait in a crop and replace it with a desired one from the same crop family and that can help develop pests-resistance seed varieties to boost food security Genome editing Prof. Akinbo said had a prominent role to play in improving agriculture in Africa with many researchers exploring the potential of the technology in developing crop varieties for a better and more sustainable African Agriculture, adding, this technology requires adequate funding and enabling policies to release genome editing products.’ He noted that presently, there was no GEd product on the market and that it was only five countries from the member states that have something at the research level. ‘The only country that has something on the field now is Kenya because they have approved Genome Edited maize to be on trial on the field without confining. Burkina Faso is working on rice but it’s still at the laboratory, while Ghana, is also working on sweet potatoes, yet to get to the field. Ethiopia is working on teff, a major crop of that country, which is currently at the laboratory and yet to go to the field. ‘In Nigeria, they have cassava, and they are improving it for starch production, but it’s still in the lab. South Africa is also working on cassava, but it’s still in the laboratory. Interestingly, Uganda is also working on cassava, but it is still in the laboratory, saying, these are African scientists using available resources in their laboratories to do their research on these crops, and the main goal is to commercialise these products, which are critical to food security and wealth creation on the continent. He called on leaders in member states to provide the needed funding and resources to support the optimum realisation of the technology to boost nutrition and food security.
Source: Ghana News Agency
