By the year 2025 Sub-Saharan Africa will experience a grain shortfall of nearly 90 million tons. That estimate is based on the assumption that farmers can maintain current cereal yields. In fact yields have been decreasing over the past 40 years. Reasons for this include the fact that the subcontinent probably has the poorest soil in the world. It is prone to erosion, highly acidic, and chronically short of water. To reduce the anticipated shortfall, farmers in Africa will have to produce higher yields. One way to achieve this goal is by using modern biotechnology, namely the planting of genetically modified crops.
In his book The Doubly Green Revolution, Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, argues that the only way to improve crop production in the 21st century is to combine conservation of the environment with productivity. He calls for scientists and farmers to forge genuine partnerships to design better crops. He also urges them to develop and rediscover alternatives to inorganic fertilizers and pesticides, to improve soil and water management, and to enhance the earning opportunities for the poor, especially women. To quote him:
Genetic engineering has a special value for agricultural production in developing countries. It has the potential [of] creating new plant varieties that not only deliver higher yields but contain the internal solutions to biotic and abiotic challenges, reducing the need for chemical inputs such as fungicides and pesticides, and increasing tolerance to drought, salinity, chemical toxicity and other adverse circumstances. Most important, genetic engineering is likely to be as valuable a tool for the lower-potential lands as for the high-potential. It can be aimed not only at increasing productivity but at achieving higher levels of stability and sustainability.
Most transgenic crops currently available are produced by the private sector for farmers in the developed world. However, partners linking the private and public sectors are making a concerted effort to address the needs of the developing world. Of interest to Africa is the encouraging research into the production of virus-resistant sweet potatoes, cassava, and maize; improved productivity of bananas; and crops that tolerate salt and desiccation. Research carried out in South Africa has shown that soil acidity and drought stress account for 80 percent of yield losses, while diseases and pests account for the remaining 20 percent.
Why highlight these crops? Many people in eastern and southern Africa eat sweet potatoes as a subsistence crop. Scientists from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and the United States have succeeded in improving the protein content of sweet potatoes by a factor of four using tissue culture. This improvement could have a significant effect on the lives of many people in Africa. And with the help of genetic engineering, scientists are making good progress in developing a virus-resistant sweet potato.
Cassava, known to western societies as a source of tapioca, is a staple food in much of Africa. The leaves and starchy roots of this plant make up the world’s third-largest source of calories after rice and maize. In some years cassava mosaic virus has almost wiped out the entire crop in certain African countries. Another problem with the crop is that it contains high levels of cyanide and requires three to five days of labor-intensive preparation that involves soaking the cassava in water and scrubbing it to remove the cyanide. Both of these problems could be solved by genetic engineering.
Many Africans eat maize three times a day. The crop is, however, sensitive to the maize streak virus, which plagues both commercial and subsistence farmers. Research using genetic engineering carried out in South Africa shows great promise for the development of a maize variety resistant to maize streak virus. This research has been funded by collaboration between the public and private sectors.
In the western world, bananas and their close relatives, plantains, are a snack and a dessert, but in western and central Africa they provide more than one-quarter of all food calories. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization ranks bananas as fourth among the world’s most important food crops. Scientists in Kenya, using modern tissue-culture techniques, have succeeded in dramatically improving the yield of bananas.
One genetically modified crop having an impact on African countries, including South Africa, is insect-resistant cotton. In 1997 four small-scale farmers agreed to participate in field trials in the KwaZulu Natal province. The results were so impressive that the next year 75 farmers planted the genetically modified seed, and by the year 2001 644 farmers were involved. Although this crop will not solve Sub-Saharan Africa’s grain shortage, cash crops are extremely valuable in economically uplifting rural areas.
Another way in which transgenic crops could be invaluable to Africa is in the production of vaccines. The process of combining pharmaceuticals and farming (called “pharming”) can produce vaccines cheaply and free of possible contaminating animal viruses that could become harmful to humans. The most expensive aspects of a vaccination program are cold storage and needles. If vaccines can be produced in transgenic tomatoes or bananas, the need for cold storage and needles will be circumvented. Scientists are making impressive strides in this area. In addition, research is being carried out in South Africa to use tobacco, an extremely hardy and drought-tolerant crop, to produce vaccines against the African variety of HIV and other African-specific viruses.
In light of these obvious needs and the advantages of using genetically modified crops to meet those needs, how should Africa respond to the current outcry in Europe against such crops? Unlike Europeans, rural African farmers must be able to feed themselves, their families, and possibly their communities without depending on shop-bought food. Meeting this goal is important for sustaining the environment as well as for feeding people. As Kenyan anthropologist Richard Leakey said, a person must have at least one square meal a day to be a conservationist or an environmentalist.
Although African scientists applaud the use of biotechnology to improve crop and food production in Africa, some journalists disagree. They contend that the United States finds a ready market in Africa for genetically modified food and imply a conspiracy between the U.S. government and the United Nations World Food Programme to dump unsafe, genetically modified crops in Africa as emergency aid for the world’s starving and displaced. However, the only food that has been delivered as food aid has been declared safe by U.S. regulatory agencies. Moreover, the World Food Programme only accepts food donations that comply with the safety standards in the donor country.
As for growing genetically modified crops in Africa, no U.S. company will consider field trials in a country, let alone commercial releases of such crops, until the country has a biosafety management system in place. Unfortunately, such a system is generally lacking in Africa, and the process of implementing them takes time. South Africa, leading the way, published the regulations for its Genetically Modified Organisms Act in 1997 but is only now implementing them.
The figure below shows the number of applications received between 1990 and 2000 for permits to test, grow, and import genetically modified crops in South Africa. The drop in the number of trial and general releases in the first half of 1999 is largely attributable to the takeover of the previous nongovernmental regulatory authority by the National Department of Agriculture.
In conclusion, countries in Africa need genetically modified crops as one way to increase yields and decrease Africa’s chronic food shortages. If Europe does not want or need these crops, that is for it to decide. We Africans, however, have no intention of allowing any nation dictate to us what is, or is not, in our best interest.
For further information, see G. Conway, The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, N.Y., USA: Cornell University Press, 1998); T. Dyson, “World Food Trends and Prospects for 2025,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96, no. 11 (1999): 5929–5936; and F. Wambugu, “Why Africa Needs Agricultural Biotech,” Nature 400, no. 6739 (1999): 15–16.
Jennifer Thomson (JAT@molbiol.uct.ac.za) is a professor of microbiology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.