New government rules on plant breeding in South Africa could throw the country out of sync with the rest of the world and close important import-export doors for us. And that – some agri leaders say – is the last thing Mzansi needs right now.
That is why the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and two leading industry organisations have launched a fight to reverse a recent government decision that all new breeding techniques (NBTs) will be classified as genetic modification.
In their joint statement, Agbiz, the South African National Seed Organisation (Sansor) and the non-profit industry organisation CropLife South Africa warn that the decision may lead to dire consequences for the agricultural sector.
“South Africa’s decision to regulate all products derived from NBTs as GMOs will have widespread implications not only in South Africa and on South African innovators, but also with regards to international trade of commodities that may contain products derived from NBTs,” the statement reads.
“Asymmetric regulation may cause food insecurity and create significant barriers between South Africa and its trading partners. The current regulatory approach for NBTs will also discourage the development and uptake of the technology by all actors in the South African innovation and research space, including South African-owned seed companies, public and academic sector research organisations and small to medium-sized innovation enterprises.”
The organisations lodged an appeal against the decision, on the basis that NBTs are identical to products that could have occurred naturally anyway, or by conventional breeding.
The differences between GMOs and NBTs
Dr Magdeleen Cilliers, policy and research officer at Sansor, says the difference between GMOs and NBTs are that GMOs are very specific organisms whereas NBTs cover a range of techniques used in the genetics field.
She tells Food For Mzansi, “Genetically modified organisms are organisms that were made by adding external DNA to the organism. Examples of a genetically modified organism is maize that has been genetically modified to be more resistant to maize stem borers.”
NBTs also include techniques that plant breeders use to make crops more resilient but many NBTs don’t entail adding external DNA and simply “adjust” existing traits of the plant. The plant breeding community argues that these techniques essentially speed up the process which nature itself could follow over many years, or which breeders have long achieved through cross breeding, for instance.
While Cilliers agrees that techniques that introduce external DNA should be classified as GM, a blanket GMO classification should not be applied to all NBTs. “The products that could actually occur in nature over many, many years and have the same changes as normal, conventional breeding should not be regulated in the GMO act.”
International legislation and trade
South Africa’s new regulations, which require NBTs to be evaluated under the framework of the Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) Act of 1997 and are regarded by key stakeholders as a mistake, was announced by the department of agriculture, land reform and rural development in October last year.
But whether NBTs should be regulated as GMOs is not a debate unique to South Africa, says Cilliers. In 2015, the United States’ department of agriculture confirmed that all crop varieties generated through NBTs are not GMOs as they do not contain foreign DNA from plant pests. The country found that their legislation around GMOs was outdated, and subsequently put processes into place to update it.
In a similar move, the Australian government announced in 2019 that gene-editing techniques that do not introduce new genetic material will not be regulated. In Argentina, crops produced through NBTs are subject to case-by-case review.
In the EU, the debate still rages on. The European Commission published its study on NBTs in April 2021, confirming that their existing policy is insufficient, and opening up the issue to public debate.
Cilliers says that, because many of South Africa’s trading partners decided not to regulate certain NBT products, trading with these countries becomes more difficult. “South Africa will now have products on our markets which are considered GMOs [here] but not [by] our trading partners.”
She adds that this new barrier to trade could stifle our ability to act in emergency situations. “It’s going to be very difficult to actually have a type of import-export process when we are in a disaster, for example if we are undergoing severe drought and we urgently need to import food to feed our country.
“All these countries can provide us with these products, but they fall within the GMO Act in South Africa. Which company is going to take up all these exorbitant costs to make sure that we can get these products in the South African market?”
Stifling innovation
The GMO Act requires compliance to various permit conditions, different ways to plant, mandatory trials and safety experiments, says Cilliers. Although this is important to ensure consumer safety, evaluating all NBTs in the same way will stifle innovation.
“There’s a very big cost associated with [GMOs]. It is almost impossible for a small South African innovator or small South African seed company to take on these extreme costs to get a product on the market through the GMO Act. It’s like taking… plants that can be produced naturally by conventional breeding [or] in nature… through this whole process with these exorbitant costs.”
Ultimately, says Cilliers, the human race has been breeding with seeds for thousands of years and NBTs are just a new tool to be used in conventional breeding. If farmers do not have access to these new tools, it could have a negative effect on how we farm and, eventually, on how and if we eat.
“Farmers will not have these new technologies and the best varieties for the hurdles that they face, for example extreme climates or higher disease pressure. Those are things that farmers have to overcome. [They need to] have the best-suited varieties available for them to overcome these challenges.”
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