Worry over agricultural bio-techniques

While some maintain that Africa needs to eagerly embrace various forms of agricultural biotechnology in order to have any hope of overcoming its agricultural productivity problems, others argue that some of these techniques actually pose a further danger to the continent's food security.

Seventy NGOs from 12 African countries said at the just concluded World Social Forum in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundation partnerships were trying to shift African agriculture to a system dependent on expensive, harmful chemicals, hybrid seeds, and ultimately genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

They said Africa's wealth of seed diversity and farmer knowledge was under threat from the initiative. African farming represents a wealth of innovation. For instance, Canada's main export wheat is derived from a Kenyan variety called "Kenyan farmer." The US and Canada grow barley bred from an Ethiopian variety and the Zera Zera sorghum grown in Texas originated in Ethiopia and the Sudan.

The future of agriculture for Africa and the world, they said, will have to build on this biodiversity and farmers' knowledge, especially in the current context of climate change.

Another initiative funded by the G8 group of nations is pushing biotechnology in agriculture through four new major biosciences research centres in Africa. "GM companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta are entering into public-private- partnership agreements with national agricultural research centres in Africa, in order to direct agricultural research and policy towards GMOs," they said in a press release.

These initiatives under-represent the real achievements in productivity through traditional methods, and will fail to address the real causes of hunger in Africa and are coming at a time when the world is realising the need for organic agriculture.

These initiatives, they insisted, will destroy the bases of biodiversity, knowledge and adaptive capacity at a time when it is needed most.

"This push for the so-called green revolution or gene revolution is being done once again under the guise of solving hunger in Africa."

Chemical-intensive agriculture, they stated, is already known to be outmoded as "fertilisers have killed the soil, creating erosion, vulnerable plants and loss of water from the soil."