Accra, July 12, GNA - Government has provided equipment to two research institutes of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) worth 7.6 billion cedis to enable them to undertake research into biotechnology.

Animal Research Institute in Accra would serve the research institutes in the southern sector while Crop Research Institute based in Kumasi would serve the institutes in the northern sector, the Director-General of CSIR, Professor Emmanuel Owusu-Bennoah told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Accra on Wednesday.

He said the facilities in the southern sector would be used to build capacity in the livestock industry to enable Ghana to achieve sustained growth in meat and diary products and the production of vaccines.

The northern sector facilities would assist in the development of research and capacity building geared towards the improvement in crop yields and disease resistant crops.

He said the provision of the facilities would be fully operational after Ghana's Bio-safety Framework currently before Cabinet had been passed.

The framework would ensure an adequate level of production in the field of safe transfer, handling and use of living modified organisms resulting from modern biotechnology that may have adverse effects on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and also risks to human health.

Prof. Owusu-Bennoah noted that Africa, and for that matter Ghana, was lagging behind in biotechnology and appealed to government to put in place the needed strategies to keep abreast with the technology for the benefit of country.

He added that Information and Communication Technology (ICT), biotechnology, nanotechnology and what was sometimes known as the frontier technologies were posing peculiar challenges, which Africa and Ghana should be taking more seriously than what was being done now. Citing the health sector as an example, the CSIR Director-General said biotechnology in the health sector alone could provide wealth for Ghana to leapfrog to middle income status, but that would not happen without critical investment by stakeholders with the government providing the critical leadership.

"Today, the global market on the first generation therapeutics based on DNA technology is reported to be worth over 32 billion dollars by 2003 and the market trends indicate that the figure would reach 60 billion dollars by 2010 thus overtaking conventional therapeutics as the leading source of clinical pharmaceuticals.

"Taking into account other non-therapeutic bio-technology R&D products, this market figure could jump to a colossal sum of 1.5 trillion dollars by the year 2010 according to market researchers," Prof. Owusu-Bennoah said.

He called on government and all stakeholders to vote more money into research on biotechnology so Ghana could develop its own vaccines and in the area of agriculture, farmers could also own their own seeds to avoid the dependence on the multinationals for seeds, which would be more expensive.