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Africa |
DEVELOPMENT
Not only poverty but hunger and malnutrition have also become major social
problems
threatening lives of Africa’s over 750 million people, and estimates
indicate that
the World’s least developed continent has between 25 and
30 million malnourished children
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 54 percent of child mortality in developing African countries is associated with malnutrition. «As many as one-third of children in sub-saharan Africa are stunted because of poor diet while every day, thousands of people die from hunger».
The problem has also forced millions of people on the continent to live below their full potential because they lack the energy and good health to function at their best.
Crop production
While agriculture remains the most important activity on the continent, crop production in Africa is the lowest in the World. Research findings say more than 25 percent of the grain requirement in Africa is imported, while up to 40 percent of the harvest may be lost due to post harvest damage.
All this calls for the sustainable production of food, safer farming methods, better pest control measures, and production of good quality foods in all poor resource areas of the continent.
Scientists say biotechnology is one of the new technologies that has a significant role to play in improving crop production and reducing waste. They say the use of high yielding disease and pests resistant crops, will have a direct bearing on improved food security, poverty alleviation and environmental conservation in Africa.
AfricaBio is a biotechnology association serving as a forum for informed debate on biotechnology issues in Africa. It says modern biotechnology offers many benefits for agriculture in Africa, and such benefits could be packaged in seeds.
«This means that it is a user-friendly technology which fits with the cultural practices of Africa, and is easier to transfer than methods that require elaborate technics or machines,» says a statement from AfricaBio.
Quoting the World Bank’s Vice President, Ismail Seragelding, AfricaBio says biotechnology is one of the many tools of research and development that could contribute to food security, by helping promote sustainable agriculture, centred on smallholder farmers in developing countries.
Improving production
Genetic engineering — the selective and deliberate alteration of genes in an organism — is one of the biotechnology methods which scientists say could improve production in resource-starved farming areas, provide good quality food and reduce farming costs, among other benefits.
In 1994, a delayed-ripening tomato was grown and eaten in an industrialised country, marking the first genetically modified (GM) food crop in history. Since then, the area planted with GM crops the world over, has increased by more than 25-fold — from 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to 43 million hectares in the year 2000.
Countries that grow transgenic crops include: Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Mexico, Romania, Spain, South Africa, Ukraine, and the USA, according to research findings from the Global Knowledge Centre on Biotechnology (GCOB) in the Philippines.
Growing concerns
But there has been a growing concern that food developed from genetically modified organisms, is unsafe for human consumption. Some people with food allergies, have also expressed concern that foods produced through the technology would create more problems, as new food varieties may introduce allergies that were not available in the food before it was altered.
Apart from food and feed safety, other concerns that have been voiced against genetic modification in agriculture are environmental, economic and social.
Some of the environmental arguments say GM plants may reduce the need for landraces and result in a loss of valuable agricultural biodiversity, and that movement of genes to weedy plants may impact on a farmers’s ability to control weeds.
Economically, the development and patent of GM food crops might put the control of agriculture more firmly into the hands of multi-nationals, thereby affecting the ability of small scale farmers to control their business and keep the plant as their own seed. Concerns about the rapid rate of globalisation and the inequality of accruing benefits, is compounded by the fact that developed countries control the development of biotechnology products.
On the social front, some of the arguments say that where ethical objections to gene manipulation are existing, the consumer may not be well informed about whether to use or to avoid GM products. This will require among other measures, clear labelling of products to ensure customers’ rights are maintained.
Southern African Regional Biotechnology (SARB) is a South African-based programme set up in they year 2000, to help build regional capability to assess the safety of GMs and to make informed decisions on whether or not to approve the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)s and their products.
A report from SARB says that while there is no «no risk» guarantee in any scientific discovery, no safety incidents have been reported on GM crops that have been grown and eaten by 1.3 million people the world over in the past five years.
Muffy Koch is a coordinator at SARB. She says people have been using ingredients and medicines derived from GM organisms for the past fifteen years, but the introduction of genetically modified crops was a more direct link to the food supply and hence the concerns about the technology.
«The technology has value and safety systems for checking human and environmental safety are in place in all countries approving the crops,» she says.
Although SARB caters for the entire Southern African region, with Mauritius, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as its core target countries, it seems more activity on genetic engineering is occurring in the region’s economic giant — South Africa.
South Africa
Reports indicate that South Africa has approximately 55 companies involved in biotechnology, and over 500 research projects are underway in the areas of food and beverage, medicine, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, environment, chemical and biosafety.
By the end of the year 2000, South Africa which regulates GMOs under its genetically modified organisms act that was passed in 1997 has approved GM insect-tolerant cotton, insect-tolerant maize and herbicides tolerant cotton. GM white maize was expected to hit the market by September 2001.
But media reports indicate that GM foods have been put on hold in Europe and are under attack in the USA and Canada, the major financiers of most southern African countries. The western countries fear potential health and environmental hazards that genetic engineering could produce.
However, a United Nations Human Development Report 2001, released in July says the current debate in Europe and the US over GM crops, mostly ignores concerns of the developing countries.
The report states: «GM crops could provide an answer to cutting malnutrition in poor nations...and produce a higher yield in countries with poor soil and where populations are desperate for food».
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