Oral Presentation to Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Environment and Tourism: Biodiversity Bill.

Honourable Chair and members, ladies, gentlemen, comrades;

Thank you for enabling us to present to this committee on this important issue.

My name is Glenn Ashton and I present this on behalf of SAFeAGE; The SA freeze on Genetic engineering, representing over 250, 000 people in SA and over 130 organisations.

We commend and support many of the concepts put forward in this bill but we have some fundamental concerns that have not yet been addressed. I shall outline them.

Through the intervention of this committee and Department of government we will, when it comes into force on 11 September 2003, be required to adopt the full implications of the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol. I thank this committee and department for supporting our accession to this important multilateral environmental agreement, that forms part of the UN Convention on Biodiversity. Both the UN Convention on Biodiversity and this secondary mechanism, the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol have direct bearing on both the intent behind this Biodiversity bill under discussion and the short and long-term implications of this bill as it is now drafted.

For instance the biosafety protocol states, among other things that we shall designate one national authority to be responsible for liaison with the UN secretariat; shall provide summaries of environmental reviews and risk assessments, as well as notify the secretariat of lack of access to the biosafety clearing house.

More importantly and relevant to this department, we must ensure that the development, handling, transport and use of modified organisms are undertaken in a manner that reduces the risk to biological diversity and take into account the risks to human health. Additionally there are requirements to take measures to regulate, manage and control risk assessments and to ensure that risk assessments are taken prior to the first release of GMOs. I lodge a fuller list of the requirements with the chair, to avoid running over my allotted time. My point is simply that we have to fulfil a broad set of criteria in the next two weeks that are closely related to issues of biodiversity.

We cannot and should not allow the Department of Agriculture to continue to manage this sensitive information. Agriculture’s department of Genetic Resources, supposedly the lead agency on GMOs, has recently pleaded strongly, before the Agriculture portfolio committee, to reject the Cartegena Biosafety protocol for highly spurious and misleading reasons. This after our government was actively engaged in the negotiations leading up to the agreement of the Protocol.

Agriculture has twice admitted before this committee that it is unable to properly monitor even the deeply flawed GMO Act and its regulations in the field. Additionally, the marked lack of access to vital information from that department has resulted in a court case between a member organisation - and the Dept of Genetic resources - in order to get hold of what should be public information on risk assessment and related data. All of these actions clearly undermine the intent behind our own proposed biodiversity legislation and run directly counter to the UN Biosafety protocol. The Department of Agriculture, it can be coherently argued, is in the business of promoting GMOs and while it pays lip service to regulation, this has never managed these risks transparently, sufficiently or stringently enough.

As DEAT is responsible for the implementation of the UN Convention on Biodiversity it follows that it must take responsibility for the Biosafety protocol. These two issues are inextricably linked to this Department and this Biodiversity Bill. Consequently we again stress our earlier calls for clauses on biosafety and the regulation of GMOs of all types to be included in this bill.

This Biodiversity bill is effectively a sub bill of NEMA, just as the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol can be said to be a sub-bill of the UN Convention on Biodiversity. All of these legislative disciplines must be parcelled within DEAT.

This biodiversity bill must apply to all living organisms, natural and humanly altered – we cannot forget that we are dealing with living genetically altered material, the first living, human made pollution on earth – and that this living material poses recognised risks to our biodiversity, as set out in the Biosafety Protocol. We must put coherent, practical and effective regulation of GMOs in place to protect our people, our economy and our environment.

We must also stress the importance of the need to apply the precautionary principle, Environmental Risk Analyses and risk assessments in relation to the regulation of GMOs. This has emphatically not happened in South Africa as set out under either NEMA or the Cartegena Biosafety protocol. The present marked lack of transparency and co-operation in regulating GMOs highlights how dysfunctional the system has been allowed to become. We cannot in good conscience allow the Department of Agriculture to continue to control GMOs and everything to do with them. The regulation and oversight of GMOs belongs in DEAT and not in Agriculture.

Equally, proper reference to GMOs, biosafety and risk assessments must be meaningfully incorporated into this Biodiversity Bill that we are discussing today. We cannot separate the biodiversity that we seek to protect from the real and proven risks of genetic pollution. If we fail to include this important issue into this bill, we will either have to draft new legislation to manage our obligations under the BSP, or give up all pretence at regulation of GMOs and leave things as they presently are; effectively in a completely unacceptable grey area of legal limbo, removed and hidden from public oversight. There is too much at stake to allow the present situation to continue as it is. Our local and international obligations set out clearly what we should do. It is up to you, as legislators to take the relevant action.

We thank you very much for the opportunity to present and we hope to continue this important dialogue with your honourable selves, until we have come to a solution. Thank you Chair.

26 August 2003.