Development & Aid, Headlines, North America

DEVELOPMENT: Plan Will Provide Africa with Cheap Biotech – Group

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2003 (IPS) - A leading U.S. charity revealed Wednesday a new initiative that it says will assist research and development workers in Africa to access and manage biotechnology to help reduce poverty and hunger.

The Rockefeller Foundation says that its new African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) will serve as a platform where African scientists and development experts can access new materials and information on technologies owned by international private companies and later even transfer them into the hand of millions of poor African farmers.

"The AATF will transfer material and knowledge, offering its partners access to advanced agricultural technologies that are privately owned by companies and other research institutions on a royalty-free basis," said Rockefeller President Gordon Conway.

Africa remains largely an agriculture dependent continent, where 70 percent of its population work as farmers. A whopping 90 percent of Africans suffer from hunger or related illnesses.

Of the world’s estimated 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night, 190 million are in sub-Saharan Africa alone. The World Food Program (WFP) says 38 million Africans now face death because of famine.

Women with near zero access to new agricultural technologies perform 80 percent of the agricultural work on the vast continent home to 840 million people.

According to the Rockefeller Foundation, through AATF, local and small-scale farmers will be able to tap into new crop varieties while African scientists and research institutions will have access to bio-safety testing, help distribute seed to farmers and aid in creating local markets for excess production.

AATF will also enter licensing agreements to access proprietary technologies royalty-free, then ”sub-license” them to institutions in Africa for further research and even issue commercial licenses for production and distribution.

Both conventional and genetically modified (GM) crops could be among the products that AATF could license in the future, with the initial emphasis on staples and commodity food crops, says Eugene Terry, implementing director of the initiative.

Yams, green bananas, plantains, and cassava are important staples in Africa, where they are grown in a household-based subsistence economy. Cash crops such as peanut, cotton, and soybean are grown for local, regional and international markets.

The AATF project might simply involve giving Africans access to "the vast databases and bio-informatics capacitates of the companies", said Conway.

"The AATF will not only take on the challenge of helping to make such deals, but also of making the deals work for poor African farmers once they are agreed to," he added.

Terry, an African plant scientist from Sierra Leon, predicted that almost every area of agriculture would benefit from the scheme.

"Some of the impact that will come out of this will be very noticeable on increasing yields, levels of productivity on the farm and improving nutritional quality of the products, as well as the status of people working there," he said.

Under the initiative, banana growers, for example, who now must re-plant part of a tree to prepare next year’s crop – in the process passing on the old crops’ diseases to the next generation – could use disease-free banana plantlets created by a biotechnology method called tissue culture.

Another example that could be applied continent-wide is ongoing in laboratories in Belgium, where scientists are working with the Uganda National Agricultural Research Organization to insert genes that will enhance banana tolerance to diseases like banana weevils, which destroy the trees’ stems and roots.

If applied successfully in Africa, the scheme could increase the production of bananas, a staple food in many areas, by some 75 percent, providing food for farmers and their families and possibly generating extra income from the sale of excess production, says the foundation.

Biotechnology’s promise of ending hunger and promoting economic growth in developing countries is the main reason behind the AATF, it adds. Biotechnology can, for example, fight malnutrition by raising the level of vitamin A, iron, and zinc in key food crops.

The foundation says that the so-called "green revolution" from the 1960s to the 1980s largely ignored Africa by focusing on food security issues surrounding grains, which are the main staple in Asia, at the expense of crops like chickpeas and cassava, which are essential to Africa.

Conway acknowledged that the AATF is fraught with risks.

For example, it is not known how long it will take for the initiative to translate into increased food security in Africa.

As well, the AATF appears to restrict African scientists and institutions to the role of pinpointing problems and then asking for "imported" solutions rather than developing those themselves.

The AATF, which says it cannot advocate a "blanket prohibition" on genetically altered crops, may need to overcome reluctance by many African nations to adopt GM seeds. Some countries fear that they might lose European markets if they adopt GM varieties and even lose traditional crop strains.

AATF will be launched in September, when it moves to its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. The money to kick-start the project will come from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Rockefeller Foundation and the United Kingdom government..