 |
||
|
||
 
|
Perspectives
GM Comes to sub-Saharan Africa (sort of)
by G. Pascal Zachary
For many years genetically-modified (GM) crops have been held out as a panacea for Africa’s chief economic problem: poor farm productivity. Fears of GM, however, have stopped the technology cold in sub-Saharan Africa in what is perhaps the most pervasive example of anti-technology backlash in the world. Despite intense interest in raising food output by Africans, GM is essentially a non-actor in the farm drama. No sub-Saharan country outside of South Africa (exceptional for many reasons) currently permits the growing of GM crops or the sale of GM seeds. European opposition to the technology has greatly influenced African politicians who say they do not wish to despoil traditional agricultural settings or become reliant on imported agro-technologies.
The impasse over GM in Africa has been considered a tragedy by some promoters of new technologies who insist that the technology can help produce the “Green Revolution” that so long eluded sub-Saharan Africa. Proponents cite the spread of GM crops in the US (85 % of soybeans, 75% of corn and half of cotton are GM varieties) and the popularity of the technology with American farmers (who adopt the technology because it simplifies the growing process and, often, reduces costs). Opponents counter that traditional crop breeding can satisfy the needs of African farmers more quickly and less expensively than bio-technology. They darkly suggest that, worse, GM is part of a Western conspiracy to indenture African farmers to foreign seed companies. The technology, in short, is a kind of agro-colonialism.
In Africa, GM critics maintain the upper hand; it was only a few years ago, after all, that governments in southern Africa refused food aid from the US because GM corn was part of it. Some countries, like Malawi, ultimately accepted the corn only to see elites in cities refuse to eat it. South Africa is the sub-Saharan nation that permits the planting of GM crops, and the country is anomalous, since its embrace of GM is a legacy of the technology-minded apartheid regime, a settler-government that built a nuclear weapon and maintained an extensive research-and-development establishment that lives on in the new, black-governed South Africa. Elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, GM is flatly banned, giving rise to a counter-view, embraced most recently by the African Union, labeled “freedom to innovate,” which refers to government-led, managed approaches to introducing biotechnology into the region.
Despite the widespread caution, a new dynamic is emerging in Africa: a quiet, if somewhat slow, acceptance of GM on a case by case basis – as part of a widening realization that, while better seeds are important, improved agricultural practices may be more decisive to gains in African farm productivity.
“We Africans need to adopt GM,” says Wisdom Changadeya, executive director of the leading biotech group in Malawi. A lecturer at the University of Malawi, Changadeya is pro-GM but concedes the technology is no panacea. “We also need other agricultural technologies,” such as improved irrigation and more and better fertilizers. “All these technologies put together will carry us forward.”
A more balanced approach to what the Ugandans have called “modernizing” agriculture has moved GM out of the “penalty box” and into active policy discussions and field trials. A half-dozen African countries have now authorized or are conducting trials of various GM seeds and one country, Burkina Faso, expects to approve the use of GM cotton, in late 2007 or 2008. Cotton is considered the likely first crop in most African countries, with drought-tolerant corn and perhaps a more nutritious and disease-resistant cassava, a tuber popular in west and southern Africa, to follow. For food crops, “we’re still talking 10 years away,” says Roger Beachy, president of the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis.
Even today, however, the outlines of a new paradigm are clear. What is emerging in Africa is a more sophisticated, nuanced understanding of biotechnology and the potential benefits of GM crops. Even foreign proponents of GM now regret originally proposing the technology as the solution to African hunger and poverty. They concede that GM is only beneficial in certain circumstances and the technology will invariably co-exist for the foreseeable future with hybrid variants. As Beachy observes, “Biotech is only one of the tools, not the only tool.”
What African governments, and their citizen farmers, need now is a plan of action. A new report from a special commission of experts on biotechnology, convened by the African Union, provided no specific recommendations, instead choosing to sketch out a broad framework, leaving difficult questions open and suggesting that tough political battles lie ahead. “Many African countries are wary of the potential market access barriers in regions sensitive to GM [food], such as the European Union,” according to the report, entitled “Freedom to Innovate.” The report continues: “the importation of genetic material used for research is not a contentious issue compared to gm products intended for final consumption as seeds, food or feed, whether processed or not.” The authors of the report, which include Harvard university professor Calestous Juma, worry that African policymakers are likely unprepared to even begin making informed choices about bio-technology and agriculture. “Most African countries have weak regulatory agencies that are lacking either comprehensive legislation or enforcement on food safety and standards,” the report insists. “Furthermore, inconsistent positions being taken by different African countries on importation of gm products make inter-state trade a challenge. African countries must strengthen the role of regulatory agencies to comprehensively address food standards and enforce those standards on issues of trade.”
As the African Union’s report suggests, while the “religious” issues on gm have probably been settled, there is plenty of room ahead for arcane debates over regulatory frameworks and technical assessments. Pragmatists have won out in the fight over GM in Africa, but practical plans remain desperately needed, because in the absence of these plans agricultural technology in the realm of improved crops will likely stagnate in the region. On the presumption that African farmers – the poorest in the world, on balance – have urgent needs, I will provide a brief roadmap for an initial engagement by Africans with commercial GM crops:
1. Regulatory partnerships between African countries are greatly needed. African governments should pool their resources and collectively analyze the appropriateness of various options. Currently, each African government insists on conducting its own field trials of every single proposed GM crop. The approach reflects a narrow notion of sovereignty that is ill-suited to deal with GM crops. Trials are expensive and time-consuming, a burden on resource-constrained African governments. Malawi, for instance, relies on foreign donations for half of its national budget, yet the country will not accept the results of South Africa’s tests on GM cotton. The neighboring countries of Uganda and Kenya each will perform their own trials on the same GM crops to be grown under the same farming conditions. Separate, duplicative tests might be acceptable for, say, New Jersey and New York, rich states with lots of trained technical bureaucrats, but for African countries to do the same seems delusional. A common approach will more quickly determine the appropriateness of a technology and probably do so with greater accuracy since the best people can be assigned the task for each sub-region of Africa.
2. Cotton is an excellent first choice for GM. “Better to start with a non-food, given the residual fears,” says Wisdom Changadeya of Malawi. African farmers, mainly in the west and the east, together are the second largest exporters on world markets of cotton, behind only American cotton growers who depend on GM seeds for higher yields and lower pesticide usage. About half the U.S. crop is GM. Outside of South Africa, a bit player in cotton, the GM crop in Africa is zero. African producers risk losing a significant market position in cotton – a crop that is central to the livelihoods of tens of millions of small farmers in such countries as Benin, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Mali and Uganda – if they do not switch over to GM cotton gradually, but surely. Indian cotton producers, having started a dramatic shift to GM in recent years, are grabbing a larger portion of global demand, raising the specter that they will squeeze out African producers. The only effective counter for Africans to threats from GM cotton growers in India, and ultimately Brazil, is to embrace GM themselves.
3. Improved seeds (whether hybrid or GM) can help African farmers, but at present the methods of seed distribution in many African countries are riddled with problems. In some crops, government agencies hold a monopoly on seed distribution; in Uganda, for instance, even though the growing, ginning and marketing of cotton resides completely in the hands of private actors, including multinational corporations, seed distribution remains the sole purview of the government. GM seeds, no matter the level of public and scientific acceptance, won’t help African farmers if dysfunctional means of distributing seeds persist. African countries, and their foreign donors, are paying attention to the need for improved seeds; see the new $150 million partnership on African seed development by the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. Corporations such as Monsanto, which sells hybrid seeds throughout Africa and GM seeds in South Africa, also understand the importance of stronger “inputs” for farmers, but much less attention is devoted to how farmers obtain seeds and who benefits from seed distribution. Nor is there adequate focus on the inefficiencies of present systems of distribution and how these inefficiencies can be reduced, if not eliminated. Distribution networks in the area of agriculture are unsexy, and seemingly unscientific, yet they represent “social technologies” that, if not as intellectually challenging as seed science, are essential to healthy economic performance. The drive to improve seeds for use in Africa should not obscure the importance of improving the way farmers obtain seeds, if GM is not to become the next on a depressing list of “technology transfer” debacles.
GM crops are no panacea for African agriculture but rather must be viewed as part of wider reforms in the way food is grown, processed and marketed, both within African countries and throughout the world. When viewed in the proper context, however, gm crops are one ingredient in the revival of African agriculture that will depend as much on linking producers with consumers as increasing the application of knowledge to the farms and fields of Africa.
For further reading:
The African Union commissioned a report on biotechnology and Africa, under the direction of Harvard University professor Calestous Juma. The report, made public in November 2006, offers highly general policy guidance, stressing the need for improved regulatory “capacity” and sub-regional bodies to help in evaluating new technologies and standards for their use. The findings are filled with policy platitudes, abstract and far removed from the practical problems of bringing new technologies to market. The phrase “there is great potential” dominate the narrative.
A sharply critical, yet informed analysis of GM and Africa was produced in 2003 by the Africa unit of the activist group, Third World Network. The author, Aaron deGrassi, identifies an important economic consideration, the relative “opportunity cost” of pursuing GM versus conventional crop breeding. The latter, deGrassi argues, offers better payoffs when the front-end, capital costs of the technology are accounted for. “Simply because technologies exist is not sufficient reason to utilize them—criteria are needed to select which technologies are best to develop and disseminate.” deGrassi concludes.
Biocassava Plus, a joint venture between scientists in the U.S. and Africa, represents an interesting case study on GM in development. Funded by the Gates Foundation, researchers, led by a plant scientist at Ohio State University, Richard Sayre, seek to engineer a more nutritious, disease-resistant and easier to cook cassava tuber. Cassava is the main staple for an estimated 250 million Africans, mainly in the west and the south:
G. Pascal Zachary is a journalist and researcher on African affairs. He has made 22 visits to sub-Saharan Africa since 2000, and his work, most recently, has been supported by the German Marshall Fund (Washington, D.C.), the Property Environment Research Center (Bozeman, Montana) and the Hoover Institution (Stanford, Calif.). The views advanced in this paper are his own. Links to his recent published articles on Africa can be found here.
|
|
