Protesters Don’t Grasp Africa’s Need

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 anti-biotechnology 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 shrank 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% 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 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. For me, it is the affliction of a person I know. When I grew up, it was my brother and sister, my neighbor--in bad times, my entire village. It is still the face of the child at my feet.

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 well-meaning 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. We have learned through many difficult years that if we can develop the means to maximize our agricultural productivity, we can both combat malnutrition and ignite an engine of economic growth. Biotechnology is one of the keys.

Biotechnology is also 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. This time we must not miss out.

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 lands low in nutrients, affected by drought or hampered by other conditions more productive, 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. As researchers, we are taught to ask many questions. I say to the protesters, ask many questions. But let the science and the data provide the answers. The farmers and hungry people of Africa need this technology.