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Feeding Africa
By Fred Pearce Cont...
Monsanto had the technology to attack viruses and were looking for an opportunity to work on an African root or tuber crop. It offered to train and support someone and donate the intellectual property rights to Africa. It approached me. I went to the company and brought seven sweet-potato varieties familiar to Kenyan farmers. I had to learn everything from the beginning. Transferring the gene into the sweet potatoes took me about three years. Then we selected virus isolates from the fields in Kenya and sent them to Monsanto to test them on the sweet-potato varieties in the greenhouse. It's taken me ten years to reach to the point where we are about to begin field trials in Kenya. It's very noble of Monsanto to donate the intellectual property to Africa. But other companies may not be so generous. If a company comes here and inserts a gene into a local variety, there is joint ownership. Kenyans should benefit. Of course, we need to be certain that the local genes are not just taken up and then sold back to us. That's why we need to enter into business partnerships. But we come to the table as stakeholders, not beggars. We tell companies: "You have the genes. We have the germ
plasm. We know the fields. We know the insects and pests that are here. Let's work together." If we develop a victim mentality we become losers. The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute has the intellectual property rights on behalf of the whole of Africa for the GM sweet potato. We are building a research infrastructure to develop it. This product now belongs to Kenya. It has no commercial value to Monsanto, except as PR. Next we will bring in transgenic cassava, using the products of public research. So again, no problem. So, what you're saying is that GM crops will not be as expensive as we're being led to believe. Absolutely. I have worked on tissue-culture bananas, which are improved through biotechnology rather than conventional breeding. We show the farmers how you can purchase a product and make a profit to buy some more. The tissue-culture banana costs 100 shillings [85 pence], double the old price. People told us that farmers could not afford to buy them. But this is a myth, part of the donor mentality. There is money in rural areas if farmers can see the benefit. We set about building confidence. We showed them some samples, and how to manage it, how the plants are uniform and vigorous and without disease. The demand for the new banana was unbelievable. Once they have seen the productivity of this material they have gone in and bought it with their own money. One woman I know sold 48 bunches of the fruit in one day and made about US$500. She had never sold more than five bunches before--never made money like that in her life. She could afford to expand her kitchen. Now she has a team of 50 women. She is a consultant. We have put money into providing microfinance for the farmers. These farmers can eat more and sell more. We need this kind of impact to demonstrate biotechnology. This is the way we are going to turn Africa around. If GM is so successful, why do you think many aid agencies and even governments are so adamant that better food distribution is the answer to food shortages? Some aid workers here--I won't name them--are being pushed into an anti-GM position from their European office. They're being brainwashed. We tell them we may not be the world's top scientists, and we know there are risks but we think we can manage them. When we bring the GM sweet potato here, we will be doing monitoring. We are not going to drop it and leave it. Many of them have come round. But they cannot tell their bosses in Europe. But opponents of GM include some big-name scientists like Hans
Herren, director of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, a big agricultural research
centre, based in Nairobi. To me Hans has a typical European view. Hans will tell you he is not against GM but that not enough testing has taken place. Well, there has been ten years of testing. We know enough to continue. How are we going to know more if we ban field trials? What I am afraid of is being dictated to from Europe. You have surplus food in Europe. There is no real need for transgenic crops in Europe--nobody is hungry. But there is a real need and real hunger here. Some scientists in the developing world think there is a hidden agenda behind Europe's stance on GM crops--an agenda to deprive poor countries of advanced technologies. What do you think? I think the anti-biotechnology lobbyists are the only people benefiting out of this. Greenpeace is a $100 million company. To keep that budget you have to be doing something and doing it well. European people are having opinions forced on them through manipulation and half-truths about how dangerous the technology is. Are you worried that the influence of the environmental lobby will extend to Africa? It will not happen. We don't have the mass push of products coming from America. Things are coming one at a time. As we bring the transgenic sweet potato to market, we have enough time for people to debate rationally. GM crops are unlikely to be introduced in Europe without strict long-term field testing of their environmental and health impacts. Is the regulatory regime in Africa developing along similar lines? We have not compromised anything in regulation. You wouldn't believe the number of meetings that have taken place because there is so much money to help Africa build a regulatory system. When we applied to the government for a permit for the transgenic sweet-potato field trials, ours was the first application. Apparently, a regulatory system did exist, but had never been used. It took two years to get the permit. But we now have it and field tests will begin here later this year. As a result of this process we have a regulatory system that is not brainwashed and which people respect. We haven't had mad cow disease here, after all.
Florence Wambugu is director of the African regional office of the International Service for the Acquisition of
Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)
27 May 2000
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