There’s been a lot of talk lately about Europe’s role in blocking the potential of GM foods to save lives in the developing world, most notably in Africa. U.S. Presi–dent George W. Bush was only the latest critic to invoke the starving masses when he attacked Europe on a swing through Africa in May. Europe was blocking attempts to ease famine in Africa “because of unfounded scientific fears,” he said, vowing to take the fight to this week’s WTO meeting in Cancun. He declared: “European governments should join–not hinder–the great cause of ending hunger in Africa.”
But European resistance is not, no matter what Bush suggests, the only reason why GM foods are not reaching Africa in significant quantity. Bickering and competition within the biotech industry have created a tangle of legal and licensing hurdles through which small researchers must crash if they set out to develop GM foods for Africa. For business reasons, big companies have been slow to experiment with ways to apply and market existing GM technologies such as insect- and disease-resistant crops in Africa. And African nations themselves have caused problems with regulatory bumbling. In short, a wide cast of characters all over the world, including America, is blocking the advance of GM foods to the world’s poorest continent. “There’s a lot of potential,” says Daniel Karanja, a policy analyst of Bread for the World and a former economist at the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute. “Until recently there hasn’t been any widespread push to develop African crops.”
The sad story of neglect begins in the early 1990s, when genetically modified foods first hit the market. Back then Africa was little more than an afterthought. Though companies like Monsanto set up a limited program to research potential in the developing world, it was the lucrative markets of Western Europe, the United States and Canada that stretched forth with seemingly infinite promise for profit. Those prized markets prompted the trade war looming this week–but only after infighting among biotech companies set a legal precedent tough enough to scare away many would-be do-gooders in the mid-1990s. “As soon as they proved genetically modified food worked, and the farmers were interested, the companies began suing each other,” recalls John Barton, a professor at Stanford University Law School who recently headed a panel tasked with studying the impact of intellectual-property rights on research. All told, Barton estimates there were more than 20 major lawsuits, some of which are still going today.
The costly court battles clearly showed that intellectual-property rights for inherited genetically modified traits–such as the viral and insect resistance that could have such an impact on Africa crops–would hold up in court. Golden rice came to market because it eventually found a biotech sponsor in the large multinational Syngenta. Syngenta, which had previously introduced beta-keratin into tomatoes and held a key patent, was able to smooth out legal barriers that would have had Potrykus and his team also negotiating with patent holders on every–thing from the technologies he used to introduce the genetic material into his miracle rice to those used to monitor its growth.
It would likely take a similar devotion of big-company muscle to develop genetically hardened strains of African staples like sorghum, cassava and millet. Monsanto and Syngenta have long offered genetically modified maize and cotton that resists insect pests. Preliminary research suggests that these same traits would work on sorghum, millet and perhaps even cowpeas. If properly adopted, such technologies could increase African yields 10 to 15 percent, Toenniessen estimates.
There is no shortage of ideas for how gene technology could help save hungry people in Africa. In tropical regions of Africa, small farmers lose 10 to 50 percent of cassava yields from cassava mosaic virus. Transgenic rice plants that rely on technologies patented by Monsanto and Syngenta have the potential to improve yields by as much as 20 percent by fighting the yellow mottled virus. But no field testing is underway. Kenyan scientist Florence Muringi Wambugu has done some promising work with sweet potatoes. Wambugu did her postdoc work in the laboratories of Monsanto, applying viral-resistant technologies to the plant. But field trials have so far failed to produce a marketable strain, in part because the effort is on such a small scale compared with big-money cash crops like papaya and corn.
Big multinationals have done even less to crops that can weather that most destructive of African scourges–drought. Biotech companies are pouring millions into drought-resistant maize by giving the plants deeper roots and waxier leaves. But little money is being spent to do the same for African staples.
U.S. universities have also played a part in blocking the humanitarian development of GM foods in and for Africa. Rather than offer new technologies to the public domain, they sold the intellectual-property –rights to biotech companies, sometimes netting tens of millions of dollars. Cornell University sold rights to its “particle gun” for introducing new genetic material into plants to Du Pont. Any researcher leasing the gun had to sign away rights for any commercially viable products to Du Pont or pay royalties.
Even if big Western companies were clamoring to help develop lifesaving GM innovations for the poor, only one African country would be ready to accept them. South Africa has the only government on the continent with the regulatory structure in place to import, test and release GM seeds to farmers. Its solo record would appear to confirm how much all of Africa could gain from GM crops given proper safeguards. According to one study by researchers at King’s College London and the University of Pretoria in South Africa, within two years those adopting Monsanto’s Bt cotton in South Africa had yields that were on average about 16 percent higher than those of farmers who did not use the technology.
To date, many African nations have been reluctant to allow the importation of GM seeds, for fear that Europe would react by shutting all their crop exports out of its lucrative market. That’s why Zambia’s president turned away about 50,000 tonnes of GM corn in the middle of a famine in 2002. Yet many African nations now appear to be reconsidering whether access to European food markets is really worth more than the benefits of GM technology, like seeds that can resist plant-eating pests without pesticide.
In August, President Yoweri Museveni announced that Uganda would allow processed GM foods into the country, and he officially opened a new biotech lab at the Kawanda Research Institute. Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi and a number of other countries are considering taking similar steps and already allow small-scale research.
The West is beginning to break down barriers, too. In July leading centers for plant research announced they would share the benefits of biotechnology more widely, among each other and those working to develop crops in the developing world. The hope is that even if a patent is already in place, by sharing information organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation will be able to fund university research to work around existing patents. Even so, the pace of development doesn’t come close to that of more lucrative crops. For all the potential of GM crops, Africa for now has little to show for it.
