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Engineering food for Africans

(Monday, Sept. 9, 2002 -- CropChoice news) --

The New York Times, September 8, 2002, By MARC LACEY: ABETE, Kenya, Sept. 6 - A barbed-wire fence encloses a field full of vegetables, and security guards protect the perimeter of what is clearly not an ordinary garden. At harvest time, this well-guarded produce, instead of going to market, goes into a bonfire.

The sweet potatoes grown here on the outskirts of Nairobi, and in three other secure gardens across Kenya, are different from those sold at market - genetically different. They have been altered in a laboratory to help them fight a virus that regularly wipes out Africa's sweet potato harvests.

For now, though, they remain experimental, and they are sealed off from consumers and destroyed just when they grow to the point that they could be boiled, mixed with unripe bananas and eaten as a Kenyan breakfast food with tea.

Genetically modified food is a contentious topic in Africa right now. Two countries where many people live on the verge of starvation, Zambia and Zimbabwe, have raised safety concerns about corn donated by the United States that was grown using scientific methods. Zambia has banned donated food that has been genetically modified. Zimbabwe was also reluctant to feed its people corn from the United States, which does not certify that it is free of modifications, but lately has dropped its objections.

But behind the protests, Africa has been developing genetically modified foods of its own, with the help of countries like the United States that see them as an important development tool. Scientists at the front lines of Africa's biotechnology revolution, in Kenya, South Africa and Egypt, say they believe that their lab work will eventually help develop heartier crops for a continent that has always been a difficult place to farm.

"Biotechnology is a tool, one of many," said Christopher K. Ngichabe, a Kenyan scientist who is coordinator of the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa. "We're not saying it's a panacea, but it can address some of our problems."

There are plenty of problems when it comes to African agriculture. Pests and viruses wipe out harvests that are already some of the least bountiful in the world. Add to that difficult soil conditions and recurrent droughts, and one has a situation in which most Africans eke out a hand-to-mouth existence despite toiling long hours in the fields.

Critics of the experimentation contend that much of Africa has neither the regulatory agencies nor the regulations required to ensure that biotechnological research does not harm the environment.

Kenya is in the process of drafting a law dealing with genetically modified foods. South Africa has had regulations in place for five years, although they have not always been followed.

Still, research continues in various parts of the continent to create more durable crops, plants that can stave off pests and disease and tolerate soil that is dry and lacking in nutrients.

Besides sweet potatoes, scientists are trying to perfect cassava, a root that is a primary source of calories in Africa, that can withstand the cassava mosaic virus, and a high-tech version of corn, Africa's main staple, that would be less sensitive to the maize streak virus. They are also working on a cotton that is more resistant to insects.

Already, bananas produced using plant-tissue culture are widely available in Kenya, and they grow faster and are heartier than other bananas.

In 1999, a dozen strains of genetically modified sweet potatoes in tiny vials arrived in Nairobi from the United States, where they had been produced over several years by a team that included a Kenyan scientist, Florence Wambugu.

Several rounds of research completed in Kenya have narrowed the most desirable sweet potato strains to four. Local scientists hope to select one or two especially hearty strains in the years ahead, and eventually to introduce them to Kenyan farmers.

"The impression that Africa opposes genetically modified foods is false," said Dr. Wambugu, one of the continent's leading advocates of the practice and the author of an article in the scientific journal Nature titled "Why Africa Needs Agricultural Biotech." Dr. Wambugu personally carried Kenyan sweet potatoes to a laboratory in St. Louis in 1991 during a postdoctoral fellowship financed by the United States Agency for International Development. She worked with American scientists, and other Kenyans, to produce a more durable crop for Kenyan fields.

"Imagine if we could increase yields, and feed more people, through technology," she said in an interview from Johannesburg, where she was trying to counter widespread criticism of genetically modified food at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. "Many farmers here cannot read or write. But they know seeds. We could give them technology that is packaged in the seed."

South Africa is further along than the rest of the continent when it comes to such research. Its farmers this year harvested the country's first crop of genetically modified corn, without a significant uproar from the populace. The white corn was grown on about 200,000 acres of farmland around the country, a relatively small area, and will represent only about 1 percent of the local market, officials say.

A yellow variety, also genetically modified, has been around since 1998, grown mostly as cattle feed. Some of it has found its way into African kitchens, though, mostly as cereal, scientists say.

It is similar corn, developed in American laboratories with extra genes for hardiness, that has sparked controversy in drought-stricken southern Africa.

Zimbabwe has accepted the genetically modified corn but not before insisting that it be milled first so that it does not contaminate homegrown corn varieties. Zambia remains a holdout, refusing to accept any of the corn - which is called maize in Africa - for anyone other than non-Zambian refugees living in the country.

At the Johannesburg summit meeting that ended this week, technologically enhanced produce was considered by many critics to be a dangerous innovation, one that might just end up harming Africans more than it helps. Their fear is that altered genes might disrupt the world's biological diversity, giving rise, for instance, to troublesome weeds resistant to all herbicides.

With both research and protest occurring simultaneously, Africa appears as divided as the rest of the world when it comes to genetically modified foods. Besides assisting African nations with the research, the American government is financing education campaigns to try to counter the arguments of many Europeans, who are far more skeptical of tampering with genes.

As for the scientists trying to use the technology to increase Africa's harvests, they imagine a day when markets the continent over will be fully stocked with genetically altered produce, just as tasty and nutritious as the more pedestrian varieties Mother Nature provides, but more durable.

"It's not about Frankenstein," said Dr. Ngichabe, who contends that most Africans have not yet staked out a firm position one way or the other in the genetically modified food debate.

That is why African scientists, backed by wary politicians, are proceeding deliberately before they try to transfer the potentially beneficial technologies from the laboratory to the field.

"See, the plants don't have horns," said Francis L. O. Nang'ayo, principal research officer at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, among the rows of genetically modified sweet potatoes growing here.

Dr. Nang'ayo, who studied in the United States and Britain, dissociates himself from the African governments that have turned away genetically modified corn. If he were in their shoes, he said, he would have accepted the food.

"It's a matter of life and death," he said. "I'd rather save a life than let millions die for theoretical reasons."

But that is not to say Dr. Nang'ayo wants to rush the research process along. For now, he considers it prudent to burn the experimental sweet potatoes. And he carefully plucks the flowers off the genetically modified plants to ensure that they do not pollinate with any run-of-the-mill sweet potato varieties growing outside the ring of barbed wire.

"We're taking our time with this," he said.