Ghanaians must resist being GMO “guinea pigs” – CPP

Ghana’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) says the country must resist attempts to use Ghanaians as guinea pigs for genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

According to Ernesto Yeboah, “…we are waiting someway somehow to become guinea pigs in the hands of some scientific experimentation by people elsewhere before we think, before we come together”.

The party’s anti-GMO lobbying campaign comes on the heels of Parliament’s consideration of a plant breeders’ bill, which when passed into law, aims to regulate and protect genetically modified and improved crop varieties.

The CPP’s deputy communications director told XYZ Breakfast Show Host Moro Awudu Tuesday that passing the bill will amount to pandering to colonialist tendencies.

He argues that tonnes of research findings in the US, the European Union, France, Australia, India and other scientifically advanced countries, have linked GMOs to sterility in men, tumours, cancers as well as numerous birth defects, and so have all put a moratorium on GMOs.

Yeboah claims GMOs have wreaked havoc in so many countries including India where 125,000 died from GMO related diseases in 2008.