The status of agricultural biotechnology in sub-Saharan Africa

by Dominic Glover

African agricultural biotechnology research and development efforts are not evenly spread across the continent. While some countries such as South Africa have both institutional and regulatory agri-biotech capacity to rival some more developed nations, others, such as Angola, Botswana and the Gambia have not reported any agricultural biotechnology research and do not yet have fully functioning regulatory systems in place.

South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ghana all have at least six institutes with some capacity to conduct biotechnological research. South Africa and Nigeria have the largest portfolios of biotech research and development projects in Africa.

The great majority of agricultural biotechnology research in Africa is on crop improvement, although not all of this relies on the use of genetically modified (GM) technology. For example, Nigeria is host to over 60 projects exploring non-GM biotechnology - for example, micropropagation of cassava, date palm and ginger.

Several African nations, including Kenya, are moving towards officially releasing GM crops, with individual varieties of maize and cotton, for example, at the field trial stage. But South Africa is the only country in the region that has fully commercialised transgenic crops, namely insect-resistant or herbicide-tolerant varieties of cotton, maize and soybean. In 2006, South African farmers, including several thousand smallholders, cultivated a total of about 1.4 million hectares of GM crops.

Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe are commonly regarded as Africa's most advanced countries in terms of combining biotechnology research capacity with the necessary policy frameworks and biosafety regulatory systems.

A large number of sub-Saharan African countries are party to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety - an international agreement governing the import and export of GM organisms. Most of these have received technical and capacity-building support through the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and Global Environment Facility (GEF) to help them set up risk assessment and regulatory systems for managing the trade in GM organisms.

There is a marked difference in capacity between South Africa and other nations on the continent, despite the fact that South Africa is the only country that has not drawn on the support of the UNEP-GEF projects.

A number of high-profile research projects and initiatives have been undertaken, or are currently being set up, across sub-Saharan Africa.

To date, GM crops commercialised in the region have focused on varieties of cotton, maize and soybeans initially developed for farmers in the global North, particularly North America. But a few efforts have also been made to develop transgenic crops specifically for African farming. These have mostly relied on help from outside the continent, often involving the private sector.

In Kenya, a project supported by Monsanto and the United States Agency for International Development created a virus-resistant variety of sweet potato, although the crop failed in the field.

Scientists at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center - a not-for-profit organisation in St Louis, United States - are working to introduce virus-resistance into a variety of cassava that is a staple crop in much of Africa. While they have succeeded in introducing the trait, it has not yet proved stable over multiple generations.

Research centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) are also exploring GM crop traits relevant to African agriculture. For example, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics based in Hyderabad, India and with regional hubs in Nigeria and Kenya, is working on transgenic varieties of pigeon pea, groundnut and pearl millet.

The International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) in Mexico coordinates the Insect Resistant Maize for Africa project in collaboration with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and with the support of the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture.

Meanwhile, the first GM crop plant developed entirely in Africa - a virus-resistant variety of maize created by scientists at the University of Cape Town, South Africa - is scheduled to begin field trials in late 2007.

One of the most prominent non-GM biotechnology projects in Africa is KARI's ongoing work to produce tissue-cultured banana plantlets and disseminate them to farmers across East Africa.

Researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have examined the status of biotechnology research and development in public-sector institutions in three sub-Saharan African countries, among other nations, up to 2003.

They documented work carried out by five institutions in South Africa, four in Zimbabwe and one in Kenya and found 37 individual instances ('events') of successful crop transformations : 20 in South Africa, five in Zimbabwe and four in Kenya.

Scientists in all three countries were found to be working on maize and sweet potatoes. In Kenya, researchers are also looking at cotton, while in Zimbabwe they are concentrating on cotton, cowpeas and tomatoes. In South Africa researchers are working on a dozen or so crops including pearl millet, potatoes, sorghum, soybeans, tomatoes, sugar cane and indigenous vegetables.

Across the study as a whole, a little more than half of the events identified were for virus resistance or insect resistance. The remainder encompassed improved agronomic properties, fungal resistance, improved product quality, herbicide tolerance or bacterial resistance.

South African research spanned all seven of these 'phenotypic traits', whereas research in Zimbabwe and Kenya covered a narrower range dominated by virus resistance and herbicide tolerance. Only in South Africa have any of the resultant GM crop varieties - cotton, maize and soybeans - been commercialised.

In all three countries examined by IFPRI, partnerships with the private sector contributed to some, if not all, the events achieved. Such partnerships included working with multinational companies or, occasionally, local seed companies. South Africa's public research institutes achieved the majority of their transformation events (21 out of 28) independently, but in Zimbabwe only three out of the five events were achieved independently and in Kenya none of them were. Across all three countries, 85 per cent of the genetic resources used originated in the local public sector rather than private or foreign sources.

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