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34 BIO LIFE January – March 2005
In Africa, biotech is
a matter of survival
By FLORENCE WAMBUGU
NAIROBI—They can buy their food in supermarkets.
They can eat fast food,
home-cooked food, restaurant food. They can
choose the more expensive organic foods, or
even imported foods. They can eat fresh, frozen
or canned produce. Then, from their world
of plenty, they tell us what we can and cannot
feed our children.
The “they” I refer to are a variety of antibiotechnology
protesters who would deny
developing countries like my home, Kenya,
the resources to develop a technology that
can help alleviate hunger, malnutrition and
poverty. Genetic engineering of plants has
sparked a revolution in agriculture, one that
can play an important role in feeding the
world’s hungry. As an African, I know that
biotech is not a panacea. It cannot solve problems
of inept or corrupt governments,
underfunded research, unsound agricultural
policy or a lack of capital. But as a scientist, I
also know that biotech is a powerful new tool
that can help address some of the agricultural
problems that plague Africa.
The protesters have fanned the flames of
mistrust of genetically modified foods through
a campaign of misinformation. These people
and organizations have become adept at playing
on the media’s appetite for controversy to
draw attention to their cause. But the real victim
in this controversy is the truth, and African
farmers and consumers are not far behind.
I know of what I speak, because I grew
up barefoot and hungry in Nyeri, Kenya,
searching for solutions that would rid our crops
of the pests that ravaged them year after year.
We tried to smother the bugs by using ashes
from burned wood and crafted various concoctions
to spray the plants with.
Most of the time our attempts failed, and
so I learned early in life that to grow enough
food we must somehow find a way to control
the plant pests and viruses that routinely destroyed
our crops and shank our harvests.
Long before there were protesters, I was
working on biotech solutions to the vexing local
problems facing African farmers. Today,
after years of research, we are well on our
way to finding some of the answers. At home,
I am engaged in field trials of sweet potatoes,
an important staple in the African diet. These
sweet potatoes have been modified to resist
a plant virus that can decimate up to 80 percent
of a farmer’s crops.
We have completed only the first of four
trials, but thus far the results are encouraging.
Potential benefits from this research include
increasing sweet potato yields enough
to feed an additional 10 million hungry people,
and giving the farmers bigger harvests without
increasing their production costs, for a
potential gain of $500 million per year in crop
yields.
American protesters talk about how the
new methods will wipe out traditional varieties.
But let me tell you how it worked with
sweet potatoes in Kenya. Researchers
worked closely with farmers, allowing them
to select the local variety they thought had
the best taste, color and texture. That was
the sweet potato into which we inserted the
virus-resistant gene.
But, even as the science moves forward,
the protesters try to push us back.
I do believe they care, but they do not understand
the hunger that grips millions of Africans
and deprives malnourished children of the
opportunity to grow up healthy and to achieve
their full potential. For people in affluent countries,
hunger is an abstract concept.
There are those who say there is more than
enough food in the world, and that the solution
to ending hunger lies in redistributing surpluses
to the people who need them. However wellmeaning
their intentions, they are wrong.
Food aid is a temporary solution at best
and hardly a solution at all to the underlying
causes of hunger and poverty.
Biotechnology is a solution for Africa because,
unlike some other technologies, it is
packaged in the seed. Even small-scale farmers
can learn how to handle it and can share
in its benefits. Such farmers lack the resources
for the machinery and chemicals that revolutionized
agriculture in the West years ago.
And biotechnology can help Africans conserve
our beautiful natural resources and protect
our biodiversity. Instead of local varieties
being lost to disease, they are being protected
and conserved both in the field and in the laboratory.
This same opportunity can extend to
other African crops. And by using biotechnology
to make more productive the lands low in
nutrients, affected by drought or hampered
by other conditions, we can help slow the pressure
to put remaining wilderness under cultivation,
thereby protecting the plants and animals
they house.
I’m not alone in my belief that biotechnology
offers a solution to agricultural and food
problems. In Western Europe, birthplace of
the biotech protest movement, after an analysis
of the scientific evidence from 81 research
projects, the European Commission concluded
that, “The use of more precise technology
and the greater regulatory scrutiny
probably make biotech crops] even safer than
conventional plants and foods.”
And the United Nations Human Development
Report 2001 unequivocally states that
biotechnology offers “the hope of crops with
higher yields, pest- and drought-resistant
properties and superior nutritional characteristics—especially
for farmers in ecological
zones left behind by the green revolution.” As
a scientist working in biotechnology, and as
an African, I know this to be true.
So, I say to the protesters: be careful what
you attack because you might be harming that
which you profess to care about.
Florence Wambugu is a plant pathologist and,
when she wrote this piece for the LA Times
World Report special section in the Yomiurri
Shimbun, was the regional director for International
Service for the Acquisition of Agriculturalbiotech
Applications. She joined A Harvest
Biotech Foundation International in 2002