1.Uganda: Agric minister wants food policy to guard against GM food
2.India: GM crops too cumbersome for hiking rice yield
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1.Agric minister wants food policy
By Ronald Kalyango
New Vision (Uganda), 22 October 2006
http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/220/527982

IMPLEMENTATION of a food and nutrition policy should take place quickly to to guard against dumped and GM foods.

Agriculture minister Hilary Onek said, "The country's freedom of policy choices in terms of governance, food safety and prevention of dumping, expired or Genetically Modified (GM) foods are compromised because there is no policy to guard against their importation."

Onek said this in a speech read by the State Minister for Fisheries, Fred Mukisa, while opening a Practical Monitoring Methods validation workshop at
the Speke Resort Munyonyo.

The workshop drew participants from Norway, Food and Agricultural Organisation representatives from Rome, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Malawi.

Daisy Eresu of the agriculture ministry said the workshop aimed at presenting key findings in the right to food monitoring tool that had been developed.
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2.Hiking rice yield, biotechnology to the rescue
Scientists say transgenics or genetically modified crops cumbersome, biotech tools can boost harvest of non-GM crops
ASHOK B SHARMA
Indian Express, Posted online: October 27, 2006 
 
New Delhi, October 26: Scientists, faced with the major challenge of boosting productivity of staple crops for ensuring world's food and nutritional security, are now looking at effectively deploying biotechnological tools to develop crops which would not be transgenics or genetically modified (GM) ones.
 
Transgenics or GM crops, they say, have generated much controversy across the globe. It has to pass through rigorous regulatory process before commercial release and hence it's time consuming. Rather the better option would be to deploy biotechnological tools like marker-aided selection, molecular characterisation, exploitation of apomatic genes, allele mining, harnessing heterosis, pyramiding of rice genes to develop a range of high yielding non-GM crops.
 
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has already sounded the alarm bell that the global demand for rice would increase by another 200 million tonne by 2025 and scientists have taken up this challenge seriously.
 
However, scientists at the recently concluded 2nd International Rice Congress in New Delhi were of the view that no major technological breakthrough is in sight that would increase rice yield. A major technological breakthrough means increasing the photosynthesis in rice (C3 crop) to the level of that in maize, sorghum and sugarcane (C4 crop).
 
In a major rice producing country like India, the annual rate of growth in output of this staple crop has tapered off to a level lower than the annual increase in population growth of 1.8 per cent. "Though the yield potential of rice is 10 tonne per hectare, farmers on the average still harvest five tonne per hectare. To close this gap, we must develop varieties with more durable resistance to disease, insects and tolerance to abiotic stress," says a noted plant breeder and World Food Prize recipient, Gurudev Kush.
 
But the availability of rice genome structural sequence has given agricultural scientists the confidence to proceed. The International Rice Genome Sequencing Project has identified about 56,298 genes. "After this project, scientists are busy identifying its functions. Once the function of a gene is identified, it will be possible to develop better by introducing genes through traditional breeding in combination with marker-aided selections or through direct engineering of genes into rice varieties," says Kush.
 
"Scientists are exploring the possibilities of deploying modern biotech tools for developing high yielding crops with high nutrition content,’" director-general of the International Rice Research Institute Robert S Zeigler says. "We have effective biotechnological tools at our disposal such as improved rice crops which would not be transgenic crops. Development of transgenic crop is only one of the many options."
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