Showing posts with label Peter Wamboga-Mugirya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Wamboga-Mugirya. Show all posts

Friday, September 28, 2018

NGOs Are Causing Africa’s Agriculture To Stagnate

By Peter Wamboga-Mugirya 
A joke that is going around refers to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as “nothing going on.”
My experience over a 15-year period of studying, interacting with and experiencing NGO activities in my country, Uganda, has proven the joke to be spot-on, apart from those genuinely fighting or advocating for the protection of human and child rights. The NGOs that have emerged to fight against the transformation of agriculture are really up to the nasty mission of stagnating agricultural development in Africa, and developing countries in general.

Why? Because a focus on these NGOs and their anti-GMO activities has proven that they are hell-bent on selfishly opposing application of advanced scientific techniques or better methods of breeding crops/plants — particularly modern biotechnology or genetic engineering (GE) aimed at introducing drought-tolerant, disease- and pest-resistant and biofortified crops to our countries. They base their opposition to GM/GE-crop technology/foods on unfounded allegations that they’re unnatural, ungodly and inorganic. Yet it is our experienced and highly-trained breeders who call for and apply this technology as a tool where conventional breeding has failed over decades of trials to solve the problems.