100 CHAPTER 4


Uganda has taken significant steps to ensure the safety of GM biotechnol- ogy applications. GM banana varieties will need to undergo biosafety assess- ments1 and receive the regulatory approval of the country’s National Biosafety Committee before being approved for research, confined field trials, and release into the environment for commercialization.2 However, the biosafety regulatory process has several economic conse-


quences, as biosafety regulations are not costless endeavors. Kalaitzandonakes, Alston, and Bradford (2007) calculate the compliance costs for regulatory approval of herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant (Bt) maize to be on the order of about 7–50 million US dollars (US$). They note that the approval costs for similar types of GM crops will be alike. In addition, biosafety- testing requirements can consume significant amounts of time—from a few months to several years. A delay in the approval of a new variety forestalls access to the potential benefits generated by farmer adoption of the technol- ogy, and one can expect such costs to be substantially higher than the regula- tory compliance costs (Wesseler, Scatasta, and Nillesen 2007). Jaffe (2006) has noted that existing drafts of Uganda’s biotechnology and


biosafety policy stress the importance of the socioeconomic implications of the technology for biosafety regulation, but that author also observes a lack of precision in identifying the socioeconomic aspects and how they should be considered. In fact, Article 26.1 of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity gives countries the choice of whether to include socioeconomic considerations in the biosafety assessment process con- sistent with other international treaties, although limited to the context of bio- diversity (Jaffe 2006). Article 26.1’s “may take into account” clause has been applied strictly in some countries, such as India, where the socioeconomic con- sideration is mandatory for biosafety applications. Many countries, including Uganda, have not determined whether and how


to include socioeconomic considerations, at what stage of the regulatory pro- cess to include them, and what the scope and decisionmaking process within biosafety regulations should be. In fact, some biosafety experts (and some countries) have resisted including a socioeconomic assessment as a mandatory part in the biosafety decisionmaking process, as in their view, such issues may


1 The original scope of biosafety as described in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety was environ- mental safety. However, over time the original scope has been expanded to include food and feed safety in terms of toxicity or allergenicity. In this chapter, it is therefore understood that the label biosafety includes both environmental and food/feed safety.


2 Five technologies have been approved for confined field trial testing in Uganda: a virus- resistant cassava, a weevil-resistant sweet potato, an insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant cotton, a fungus-resistant banana, a bacteria-resistant banana, and a nutrition-enhanced banana.


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