Genetically modified organisms may be animals, plants and microbes. They are commonly called genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because they are products of human imagination – or manipulation. Humans who work in laboratories and the field, and who call themselves modern scientists, manipulate the genes of plants, animals and microbes to produce artificial organisms with altered gene identity and combinations: the GMOs. They are anti-God or anti-Nature.

Gene splicing or genetic engineering

An organism whose genetic structure has been directly modified so that it will express a desirable trait is thus a genetically modified organism, commonly referred to as a GMO. The process of adding genes to organisms is also often called or genetic engineering.

The National Geographic Society defines a genetically modified organism (GMO) as an animal, plant or microbe whose DNA has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. For thousands of years, humans have used breeding methods to modify organisms. Non-GMO crops and their products are crops that have not been genetically engineered.

GMOs and Transgenic Organisms

GMO and Transgenic Organism (TO) have been used interchangeable but there is a slight difference between the two. Although both have altered genomes, a transgenic organism is a GMO containing a DNA sequence or a gene from a different species. While a GMO is an animal, plant or microbe whose DNA has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. Thus, all transgenic organisms are GMOs, but not all GMOs are transgenic. In this article I am focussing on GMOs.

Role of Monsanto in GMO revolution

Monsanto scientists were among the first to genetically modify a plant cell. They published their results in 1983. Five years later the company conducted the first field tests of genetically modified crops.

The Monsanto Company was an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation founded in 1901 and headquartered in Creve Coeur, Missouri. It was at the centre of the GMO debate in the 1990s and the early millennium. It was critiqued by environmentalists, human rights crusaders, and food rights crusaders all over the globe. Even some more aware countries that sought to protect their traditional food base resisted the machinations of Monsanto.

The demise of Monsanto

Monsanto was eventually bought by a German company called Bayer in 2018 and incorporated into Bayer’s ‘crop science’ division. This meant that Bayer inherited all the lawsuits against Monsanto in many countries. One problem with Monsanto’s GMO seed industry was that it went hand in hand with manufacturing of chemicals to protect the crops that resulted from the GMO seeds, and which polluted waters, the air, soil and caused health problems to animals and humans. In 2020 Bayer ended up paying over $10 billion to settle legal claims related to a dangerous chemical called Roundup, a creation of Monsanto. 

Before Bayer bought Monsanto, the American firm was extremely powerful, dominating the seed industry. It was also run by directors closely linked to unethical industries in the USA and elsewhere. In Africa, Monsanto worked closely with unethical, immoral and unaccountable scientists and governments to spread its new religion of GMOism. In fact, Monsanto sponsored so many od them to pursue their advanced studies in crop science and genetic engineering. These were its disciples in Africa.

My Role in the demise of Monsanto

In the 1990s and early millennium, I was one of the scientists and environmentalists that advocated against Monsanto and its GMOs and chemicals. Professionally, I detest GMOs and industrial pesticides and herbicides because when I was trained as a conservation biologist at the University of Nairobi at the beginning of the 1980s, I was trained to conserve and manage natural resources and the natural environment. There was no artificiality in the training in terms of conserving and managing the environment. GMOs are not natural resources and cannot exist in natural environments. They require large expanses of land cleared of natural vegetation to exist as plantations maintained by spraying of industrial chemicals to protect them from pests. So I had to manifest as an advocate against destruction of nature and the natural environment to replace them with plantations of genetically engineered crops and animals.

What are natural resources?

Natural resources may be classified in different ways; either as materials or components found within the environment. They are utilisable by plants and animals, including Man, Homo sapiens, for their nutrition and survival in the environment. Britanica defines a natural resource as “any biological, mineral, or aesthetic asset afforded by nature without human intervention that can be used for some form of benefit [to plants and animals, including Man]”. This is a good definition because it is not economistic or humanistic. Most definers of natural resources put Man at the centre of their definitions. They stated that a natural resources was a resource was what could be utilised by Man for his economic benefit.

Natural environment

The natural environment is the thin layer of life and life supports, called the biosphere, that contains the earth’s air, soil, water and living organisms. It extends as far up as the tip of the tallest tree on Earths, and as deep as the bottom of the deepest trench in the Ocean. According to LiveScience, the tallest trees on Earth are the coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) that loom over the mist-shrouded coastline of Redwood National Park in Northern California. And the king of these giants is a tree known as Hyperion, according to Guinness World Records. When it was last measured in 2019, it stood an eye-popping 380 feet, 9.7 inches (116.07 meters) tall from top to base, taller than a 35-story building. The deepest known depression of this kind is the Mariana Trench, which lies east of the Mariana Islands in the western North Pacific Ocean; it reaches 11,034 metres (36,200 feet) at its deepest point. However, for the purposes of this article, I will define environment as everything, including everything and all peoples on Earth.

People, corporations and institutions that promote GMOs spend time, energy, intellectual capital and money trying to convince all and sundry, that GMO foods are healthful and safe to eat just as their non-GMO counterparts are. They particularly emphasise that some GMO plants and animals have actually been modified to improve their nutritional value. The creation of GMOs has changed the food chains and food webs to which Man, Homo sapiens, is integral, and made them more and more unnatural.

Key actors in the global GMO debate

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the most prominent donors in the GMO debate. For more than a decade, it has been providing funding for “innovative” agricultural research, including hundreds of millions of dollars for GMO projects. United States Agency for International Development (USAID), United Kingdom Department for International Development, Japan International Cooperation Agency, and others, have all tentatively begun funding a range of initiatives supporting the adoption of GMOs in the developing world.

GMO-promoting firms and institutions have shifted their GMO crusade to the poor countries of the world. They believe GMOs are the key to food security in these countries. They think a food secure future in the poor countries lies in adopting GMOs.

Large corporations producing genetically modified seeds will continue to dominate the debate, with activists questioning their motives and whether they have the ability to achieve social good while making a profit. But the technology to produce GMOs is becoming increasingly cheaper and democratised, opening the door to new plant varieties that are in the hands of the public not just companies. Devex says African nations have been central to the debate around genetically modified organisms, along with Latin America where GMOs are extensively grown, and developing countries facing a range of man-made impacts on the environment such as Pacific Island nations.

Resistance to GMOs

In the more developed world, where people are more aware of the deleterious effects of GMOs on human health, resistance to GMOs has proliferated over the decades. For example, the European Union (EU) policy on GMO foods respects the consumer’s right-to-know by ensuring clear labelling and traceability of GMOs. This requires reliable methods for their detection, identification and quantification (for authorised GMO in food, feed and the environment. In fact, in the EU the following countries have banned GMOs: France, Germany, Austria, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Bulgaria, Poland, Denmark, Malta, Slovenia, Italy and Croatia. In Africa, the only countries that have banned GMOs are Algeria and Madagascar. In Asia, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Bhutan and Saudi Arabia have banned GMOs. In the Americas Belize, Equator, Peru and Venezuela have all banned GMOs.

Why I don’t like GMOs

I have many reasons why I don’t like GMOs in the food chains and food webs in which humanity is included. Let me just list the reasons behind my rejection of the GMOs:

• GMOs, like homosexuality, are being imposed on Africa by the West, which has rejected them.
• GMOs are unnatural and are the main reason why both nature and the environment in Africa have rapidly deteriorated, seen in widespread climate change. They require natural vegetation clearance and spraying with dangerous and expensive chemicals for them to survive.
• To grow GMOs, we have to agree to lose our time-tested seeds and crops and the equally time-tested agro-ecological systems, which in Uganda are also under threat from the nomadic pastoral human energy system.
• Many GMOs arise from terminal seeds, which can only be grown in one season, not the next. Besides, they are very expensive, since they have to be bought every season from seed shops.
• The imposition of GMOs is erasing our time-tested small-scale farming of crops that have for centuries reproduced themselves as an integral component of our biocultural landscapes.
• GMOs are containing my profession of conservation biology by being a major reason why numerous species of plants, animals and microorganism are becoming or have become extinct.
• GMOs have destroyed and are confining to destroy natural and cultural identity of our people, their local belonging and local democracy, as increasingly people from elsewhere are grabbing land from the local communities to grow them for money, not improvement of the nutrition of the people.
• Consumption of GMO foods may be one reason why many people in local communities these days suffer allergic reactions, unlike before when allergies were rare.
• I am one of the people who fear that the rising number of cancers of all types may be due to the rising enforced consumption of GMOs in Africa in general and Uganda in particular. The West as I indicated above have rejected GMOs and the cancer rates there seem to have gone down as they have multiplied in Africa. Of course research is needed to establish the truth
• Many insect species and bird species I used to interact with when I was growing up in my village Nawaka have become extinct. Currently the honey bee is being squeezed out of the Nawaka biocultural landscape as people turn more to growing GMOs and spraying them with dangerous chemicals to protect them against pests. Environmental destruction through widescale vegetation clearing is exacerbating the problem.
• Herbicides, such as Round up being used to protect GMOs against weeds, are of course reducing the biodiversity on the local biocultural landscape and exacting deleterious effects on the soil ecosystem
• The politics of GMOs in proliferating towards ensuring that Arican countries accept that GMOs will solve the food crisis on the continent. Even the World Trade Organisation is now integral to the GMO politics that excludes the West from compulsion to consume GMOs. This is discriminatory.
• GMOs may turn out not only to be a political weapon using food to control Africa and compel it to accept politically dangerous choices in environment and development. They may also emerge as a new genocidal weapon against Africans. If it combines with homosexuality, which is anti-heterosexuality, marriage and family, the consequences on Africans can boil to one thing: increasingly decreasing representation of Africans in future generations of humanity.
• If GMOs and Homosexuality prove to be new joint genocidal weapons aimed at Africans, then, Africa will follow the same path that the Maoris of New Zealand, Aboriginals of Australia and Red Indians of the Americas travelled to extinction. When a population cannot reproduce itself, it has only one way to go: extinction. It might be that GMOs and homosexuality are being enforced on Africa because it is the richest Continent in terms of Natural resources. This requires scientific investigation.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda