Africa's biotech establishment is deploying its biggest guns to attack NGOs opposed to GMO crops to help push through Ghana's corporation-friendly Plant Breeders Bill – a key element in the corporate enclosure of Africa's farming, seeds and agricultural heritage.

Speaking at a public meeting organised for farmers in Ghana's Brong Ahafo Region entitled "GMOs the truth and misconceptions", Professor Walter Sandow Alhassan advised farmers to avoid being misled by anti-GMO groups, telling them:

"We should get away from this misinformation and try to see how we can revolutionize our agriculture and move with modern trends."

He is also quoted as calling for groups opposing GMOs and corporate seed-grabbing like Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) to be "abhorred", because, according to him, "those groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology."

We at FSG are shocked by Alhassan's reported pronouncements urging farmers to reject our warnings and stand by our position that accepting GMOs will result in seed colonisation and seed slavery. In truth, what Ghanaian farmers need to abhor and reject is scientists laden with conflicts of interest.

Because ultimately, genetic engineering is about private corporate control of the food system. Monsanto and Syngenta are particularly greedy to get their hands on Ghana's agriculture and control the seed market here – and Professor Alhassan is a key servant of the global GMO establishment helping to make this resource grab possible.

The meeting itself also deserves examination. It was organised by the Ghana Chapter of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) in collaboration with the GMO-pushing, Gates Foundation-supported African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) which itself created OFAB in 2006.

OFAB's purpose is to "positively change public perceptions toward modern biotechnology. This will lead to increased adoption of GM products in Africa and the rest of the world." So it iis hardly an impartial voice of science!

Another co-sponsor of the meeting was CSIR, the South African-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which works in biotech, GMOs and synthetic biology – and which notoriously 'biopirated' the Hoodia plant – appropriating and patenting the traditional knowledge of the San people of southern Africa.