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Feeding Africa
By Fred Pearce
If you live in Europe or the US, genetically modified food might sound like a luxury. But for people in poor countries, it's the difference between a square meal and starvation, according to Florence
Wambugu, one of Africa's leading plant geneticists. Would you expect anything else from someone who's been on the payroll of Monsanto? Perhaps not. Yet Wambugu is no puppet of agribusiness. She's the daughter of a subsistence farmer from Kenya who went into agricultural research to help farmers like her mother. Campaigners against GM food portray you as an apostle of Monsanto in Africa. Are you? Some people say I am fighting for the company. But I say I am a stakeholder in this technology. It is twenty years of my life. I believe in the benefits it has for our people. So I fight for the credibility of the technology. How can GM technology benefit the poor when it is an alien, expensive technology controlled by rich countries and large multinationals? GM may be better for Africa than older technologies, like those of the Green Revolution. In fact the Green Revolution, which failed in Africa, was alien because it came from the West. Africa's farmers had to be educated in the use of
fertilisers, for example. But transgenic crops can get round that because the technology--to control insects, for instance--is packaged in the seed. GM also means higher yields. Right now maize yield in Africa is 1·7 tonnes per hectare; the global average is 4. But if you insert the Bt gene as a genetic insecticide, 20 per cent of that shortfall comes back. I'm not saying that transgenics alone will solve all the problems. But it will lead to millions of tonnes more grain. So unlike some people in Europe, you don't think GM technology is a bit of an expensive luxury? In Africa GM food could almost literally weed out poverty. In Europe, some people oppose crops with herbicide genes. In Africa most weeding is done by women--50 per cent of women's labour in Africa is tied up with weeding. Reducing that would have a major impact. In developed countries food is getting cheaper because they use more and more technology, but in tropical Africa it is getting more expensive because it is all manually produced. People with a small salary spend almost all of it on food. If we can increase food productivity in rural areas it will bring the price of food down, and generate more money for investment to turn the wider economy round. Surely what African farmers really need is fertilisers and better irrigation? Won't putting money into GM technology divert attention from these more basic needs? I think that is like saying Africans don't need aircraft, we should go by road. Or that we should be denied computers until everybody has bought a typewriter and mastered it. We are part of a global community. Of course, we need to look at why existing agricultural technologies have had so little impact in Africa. Africa needs to pick and choose technologies, to learn which ones are compatible. Don't you think it's right for Europe to be cautious? This is an untried technology and we don't know the risks. Europeans tell us it is too dangerous. They tell us: "Africa, this is not for you. Keep off." You in Europe are entitled to your own opinion. But I think it is dangerous when you tell everyone else what to do. But you're not a farmer. What would a scientist from the capital city know about the needs of the rural poor? My mother was a subsistence farmer and she was the inspiration for my career in agricultural research. We had a small farm with all kinds of crops. It provided our whole income as well as our food. Sometimes there was not enough, so I know about hunger. My mother would always look for ways to increase production. She would look for better seeds. We didn't have chemicals but she would use things like ashes to control insects. She made enough money to send me and my brothers and sisters to school. But it was not easy. I have always wanted to use science to go back and make an impact on the communities that I came from. I've studied in many countries. I did my PhD in England. I did my postdoctoral degree in America and worked in the private sector there. But my heart never left the village. I decided to come back. People are dying of hunger in Kenya now, in
Turkana. I don't want to go to international meetings and only see these problems on the television: I want to be part of it. A hungry person is not a myth, it's a person I know. Why did you choose to focus your research on controlling the sweet-potato virus? The sweet potato is a major staple crop. It is always there in the backyard if there is nothing else to eat. My mother grew it. I know it. Sweet-potato yields are very low in the tropics--a third that in China--largely because of the virus. I worked at the University of Bath in Britain and did my field work in Kenya with farmers like my mother, who grew the crop. I wanted to solve a national problem. We were making little progress using traditional plant breeding. And there was a well-defined need to generate resistance to the virus that biotechnology could address. How did Monsanto enter the picture?
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