By Erik Chiputula:
The National Commission for Science and Technology (NCST) said use of Bio-Techinology in the Agriculture sector has a huge impact on achieving food security in the country.
Chief Research Services Officer for NCST, Lyson Kampira said this onWednesday in Lilongwe after a day long orientation of journalists to the on Science reporting with bias to Bio-Techinology.
Kampira said they came up with an idea to train journalists after realizing that there isn’t much reporting on science particularly on Bio-Techinology.
“We organized this training for the Media personel in order to look how best we can do science reporting with the background of Biotechnology because it came to our notice that there isn’t much reporting on science especially Biotechnology so we thought by giving them basic facts and also mechanism to do with reporting they could improve in that area” said Kampira
Kampira added that they expect the general public to know the benefits of Biotechnology through the media as well if used properly how it can help to improve on social economic advancement of malawians.
On his part Biotechnologist Professor James Bokosi hailed the idea of engaging the media saying it will curb the existing misleading information about Biotechnology.
“we have observed that people can give misleading information and they can also exergerate so the training was to correct that gap as well as try to give the public the right information”
He further said Biotechnology in Malawi has been crucial as one of the product that they have released Bit cotton has produced best results forcing alot of cotton farmers to start using it.
Biotechnology has been in use in Malawi for a long time. A large component of this biotechnology is however traditional in nature and has to do with processes such as fermentation, animal breeding, plant breeding and tissue culture.
