Editor,

RE: "Rwanda takes early steps towards legalising GMOs” (The New Times, January 12).

This is simply called jumping on a bandwagon. Also research shows that there has not been any developing country where genetically modified (GM) crops have improved the livelihoods of people. Show me one and I will show you a technical lair.

It's not about health effects as they always want to put it. It's more than that – it's food security at risk, it's biodiversity lost to patented crops and animal species, it's making people slaves to the owners of the GM seeds... Criminalisation of local seed and food systems is making it so hard for family farms to survive.

GM crops technology needs well established and powerful economic systems that are strong enough to impose economic policies and reforms to other regions because it will be almost impossible for Rwanda to export a single GM product to other nations.

Eddie Mukiibi

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This is absolutely inappropriate. The process may discourage potential local industrial agribusinesses which will aggravate the food problem we already have.

So are we checking $30 billion worth food imports we receive from Europe and other places? Of course they are GM foods. There is no way to reduce the amount of the imported foodstuff and food insecurity we're facing without using modern farming techniques. Requiring someone to always go into some bureaucratic process of testing every time they want to grow crops is a horrible way to go.

Is it someone who is making the $30 billion who advised us to be aware of our African agribusiness enthusiasts for the sake of our health so that they keep the market?

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This is a very terrible decision that completely negates our environmental protection reputation and a slippery slope towards ceding our country’s food security.

The GM model of agriculture, controlled by very large multinational companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont, Cargill, etc., involves an endless succession of new chemicals to compensate for the consequences of chemical agriculture, which include depletion of the soil, herbicide-resistant weeds, and pesticide-resistant insects, requiring an ever increasing use of even greater use of herbicides and pesticides.

Before our law-makers put us on the dangerous treadmill of GMOs, they should all be required to read Steven Druker's 'Altered Genes, Twisted Truth' which exposes the deceptions and bypassing of procedures that allowed GE 'foods' to be put in American food markets fraudulently.

Druker demonstrates how the venture to genetically engineer the world's food has subverted science, corrupted governments, and systematically deceived the public. The book uncovers the biggest scientific fraud of our time. It provides a graphic account of how this fraud was crafted, exposing how the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was induced to become a key accomplice, breaking the law repeatedly to allow genetically engineered 'foods' onto the market without the safety testing required by US federal law. As a result, the book reports, Americans have been ingesting large quantities of new products that the FDA's own scientific staff had previously determined to be unduly hazardous to human health.

Mwene Kalinda