Africa modifies its stance on GM crops

A region that is repeatedly afflicted by critical food shortages is beginning to ease its strident resistance to genetically modified food crops.

A genetically modified field of soybean plants in a research field near Pirassununga, Brazil. Paulo Fridman / Bloomberg News

Genetically modified food has always been a tough sell, but nowhere more so than Africa, where it is banned in all but a handful of countries. Now, this appears to be changing.

With a famine declared once again in East Africa, Kenya has become only the fourth country on the continent to allow the full-scale importation and production of GM crops.

Kenya embraced genetically modified food this month in the face of fierce resistance from local consumer groups and politicians. Elsewhere in Africa, the debate is just beginning.

Until recently, South Africa was the lone exception. It was one of the first countries in the world to adopt GM crops and today has about 21 million hectares of land growing biotech produce. In the past few years, Egypt and Burkina Faso have also recently begun farming GM crops. But in the rest of Africa, GM farming remains off-limits. Even the importation of engineered food is restricted or banned outright.

When Zambia needed food aid in 2002, for instance, it made it clear that it would not accept biotech crops, however hungry its people were.

"I will not allow Zambians to be turned into guinea pigs no matter the levels of hunger in the country," thundered the-then president, Levy Mwanawasa.

Other countries that faced the same famine, such as Mozambique and Malawi, reluctantly allowed GM maize to be imported, but only if it was already milled, to prevent farmers from keeping back seeds for planting.

GM foods were first introduced to a suspicious public in the West during the 1990s but have slowly won acceptance from consumers, especially in the US, as safe to eat. Europe still has a moratorium on growing GM food, although it has begun to allow limited production for non-human consumption.

Developing countries, though, from Brazil to India to China, have accepted biofoods as a way to feed growing populations. China especially has decided conventional agriculture cannot keep all its people fed and could soon lead the world in GM farming.

GM foods typically are everyday productions that have had their gene codes modified to make them resistant to disease. They can also reduce the need for chemical poisons and fertilisers, and boost farmers' productivity.

The subject still provokes fierce debate around the world; opponents warn that it could pose health and environmental risks, and places food security at the mercy of a handful of biotech corporations. This month, the environmental group Greenpeace raided a GM research station in Australia and destroyed a trial plot of genetically modified wheat.

In spite of this, genetic-based agriculture continues to expand and today, more than a billion hectares are under GM cultivation, according to the Group of 20. Except, it would seem, in Africa.

"The great tragedy of the biotech revolution has been that Africa has missed out, just as it missed out on the original Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that allowed India and China vastly to increase agricultural productivity and abolish famine while their populations soared," said Mark Lynas, a former anti-GM activist-turned proselytiser for biofoods.

There are several reasons for this. First, the fear that once countries become dependent on GM seeds, they will become indentured to the patent-holders of these crops, corporations such as the US gene giants Monsanto and Dupont.

A lack of scientific capacity is another hurdle for African countries, which tend to depend on outside expertise. All too often, this is in the form of interest groups, and frequently, vociferously anti-biotech European NGOs. For the past decade, the naysayers held sway. But this is changing.

Supported by organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the billionaire investor Warren Buffet, African agricultural research is beginning to develop its own scientific know-how and with it is tentatively moving towards biotech crops.

Kenya, in particular, is also developing its own research institutions. It recently opened a US$12 million (Dh44m) greenhouse to test GM crops, making it only the second country on the continent to have such a facility. The other is in South Africa.

The greenhouse is as much for public relations as it is for research. Kenya still has some way to go to convince a sceptical public that GM food is safe to eat. By conducting its own research, rather than simply importing biotech food, Kenya's scientific community hopes to show that it understands the safety concerns of consumers.

In the meantime, the Kenyan government is under no illusions that it will be a hard slog to convince people GM technology is safe. Everyone from beaurocrats to ministers have been roped into the task.

Even officials who have no direct link to the issue have been speaking up.

"I have eaten genetically modified food in South Africa and I have not died," the deputy education minister, Ayiecho Olweny, said in Nairobi. "I have not had any negative effect from eating it."