• It is important for maize farmers to follow standards before buying the maize seed to avoid GMO seed.
• It is not right to go to any other shop to buy maize seed.
• Suppliers that have come on board should be reported to the regulators.

An Agriculture Expert has advised farmers to consider buying their maize seed from reputable and certified suppliers to avoid getting Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) seeds.
Speaking in an interview with Money FM News, Dr. Maxwell Phiri said it is important for maize farmers to follow the standards before buying their maize seed, adding that the best is to go to recognized suppliers where it can be easy for them to return the seed when need arises.
Dr. Phiri said all the seed suppliers that have come on board should be reported to the regulators so that a test can be conducted on the seed they are selling to unsuspecting farmers.
“It is important for maize farmers to follow the standards before buying the maize seed. And arising from what happened regarding the GMO seed, it is very practical that our farmers should first consider buying from reputable certified maize seed suppliers.”
“It is not right even if it is not GMO, just to go to any other shop to buy maize seed even if it’s in Lusaka, the best is to go to recognized suppliers and get their seed and if need arises they can go back and get a refund. So these suppliers that have come on board should be reported to the regulators, we have regulators that are regulating issues to do with Biosafe.so they should be reported so that they do a test on the seed that they are using,” Dr. Phiri said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Phiri says farmers who use GMO seed may have difficulties to offload their products on the market, and may end up getting limited profits.

“GMO seed has a lot of impacts, one of them from reliable sources but not yet confirmed is that it may damage the pattern of the soil because the soil is used to the normal seed, if you change that it becomes another problem. And the other one is that it plays a very bad role on the market.”
“The market is very competitive, we are not using GMOs so if you are going to get GMO you may have difficulties to offload your products on the market. So this will spoil the market and you may end up even getting a deficit in terms of your profitability,” he noted.
Recently, National Biosafety Authority (NBA) seized over 2,000 tonnes of genetically modified (GMO) maize seed from some farm fields and warehouses in Lusaka, Central, Southern and Northern provinces and subjected them to GMO test using Polymerase Chain Reaction.