GM crops not the answer for Africa : report

A seminal study of the effects of genetically modified crops on poverty alleviation in Africa concluded that biotechnology does not address the roots of poverty and hunger in Africa, and that it is a wrong intervention for poverty alleviation.

The study was done by Aaron deGrassi, of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK and the report released in 2003, but is as relevant today as it was at was at the time of release. The report of the study was titled "Genetically Modified Crops and Sustainable Poverty Alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Assessment of Current Evidence." It assessed experience with genetically modified sweet potato and maize in Kenya as well as Bt cotton in South Africa.

These crops play significant food security and economic roles in many African countries. As such they have often been touted as being particularly suitable to genetic manipulation in order to decrease hunger and poverty in Africa.

The study showed that GM crops do not address issues that are at the heart of low African agricultural productivity, such as low soil fertility and pest-infestation among other problems faced by the farmers of the three crops. Biotechnology also cannot deal with the associated issues of corruption, declining commodity prices, inequality in land distribution and ownership, income disparities, and armed conflicts which are some of the major cause of poverty/hunger in Africa.

GM crops failed to address the reasons of low productivity because the specific needs of the poor farmer were not taken into consideration, nor were the farmers consulted on what interventions they most needed to assist to help them become more productive. The technology was found to be not cost effective, not environmentally friendly and to generally be unsustainable. The study found that the commercial interests of the biotech companies which support GM projects took precedence over the agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions of the farmers.

Claimed yield increases of the three GM crops turned out to actually be net losses when all the extra inputs that have to be pumped in for them were taken into account, the study found.

Examples of the inappropriateness of the technology were the fact that the GM sweet potato introduced in Kenya did not address the major problem farmers have with the crop, which was weevil-infestation. The Bt maize did not provide resistance to the type of stem borer that was specific to maize in Kenya. Similarly, the Bt cotton introduced in South Africa was meant to resist the American bollworm, a different variety to the pink bollworm that affects cotton
production in South Africa.

On the basis of these findings the report concluded that while genetic modification may constitute a novel tool, it is a relatively ineffective and expensive one in Africa and agreed with a South African commentator that there are better ways to feed Africa than GM crops.

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The report has over the years been widely cited by opponents of GM crops. The general thrust of the argument continues to be that there are more cost-effective, simpler and more Africa-appropriate ways of increasing productivity for these three and many other crops but that because there is no financial incentive to these other methods, they suffer from neglect to the detriment of the farmer.

The non-technical reasons for the problems of African agriculture cited in the report hold as much water today as they did four years ago. The technical ones risk falling by the wayside. For instance, it is a matter of time, experimentation and money for the GM companies to develop crops with the "right" local pest resistances should they determine the profit potential justifies it.

While the report will probably not have made any members of the pro and anti-GM crop groups defect to the opposing side, it is a particularly useful reference point in the debate on Africa's low agricultural productivity because of how it highlights the many inter-related factors that are the cause of the continent's hunger and that cannot be addressed purely by biotechnology.