Kenya has stepped to the forefront of African agricultural biotechnology with the inauguration of a ”level II biosafety greenhouse” in Nairobi that will allow containment of genetically modified crops at the experimental stage.
Neighbouring Uganda also has a biotechnology laboratory, which is now carrying out tissue culture of bananas, coffee and other crops. Ugandan scientists are preparing to carry out research experiments involving genetic modification at the Kampala laboratory. But Kenya and South Africa are the sub-Saharan countries to possess the high-security level II biosafety greenhouses.
The Nairobi greenhouse will allow Kenyan scientists to conduct genetic modification experiments that conform to international biosafety standards. Scientists from elsewhere in the region will also be able to develop research projects within the greenhouse.
Officially opening the facility, Kenya’s president Mwai Kibaki endorsed the use of genetically modified crops to increase yields but warned that guidelines were necessary.
”We have to move quickly and embrace biotechnology in our farming,” said Kibaki, who stressed the financial impacts of crop pests and disease in Africa. ”With judicious application of biotechnology, it is possible to save this country from incurring these losses.”
Masa Iwanaga, the director general of the International Centre for Maize and Wheat Research, which trained local scientists to manage the facility at its centre in Mexico, says the Kenyan greenhouse will open up a stream of new opportunities.
”With this greenhouse opening, and the training of competent staff to manage it, Kenya and the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute have positioned themselves to be leaders in sub-Saharan Africa in the use of biotechnology to meet the rapidly growing need to increase food production”, says Iwanaga.
The greenhouse was built as part of the Insect Resistant Maize For Africa project. This aims to develop a maize variety resistant to the stem borer, an insect that causes massive crop losses in Africa. It cost $11,5-million and was funded by the Kenyan government and Switzerland-based Syngenta Foundation.
Access by small-scale farmers in East Africa to the latest in agriculture technologies was given a recent boost when Kenya’s agriculture minister Kipruto Arap Kirwa officially launched the African Agricultural Technology Foundation.
The Foundation ”will work with you all, not to duplicate the good work that is being done, but to facilitate partnerships and innovative linkages, and bring technologies that increase productivity within the reach of African farmers,” executive director Mpoko
Bokanga told the launch audience.
Bokanga said the foundation’s top priorities included combating ‘witch weed’. The pest is estimated to cause US$7 billion of crop damage in Africa each year, depriving over one million of food, and reducing the income of many small-scale farmers.
Other projects include enhancement of vitamin A in maize to counter nutritional problems of dietary vitamin deficiency and an initiative to increase cowpea productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.
The foundation is a public-private partnership that aims to boost incomes and food security for the rural poor in sub-Saharan Africa by promoting both classical plant breeding approaches and novel lab-based genetic modification approaches. Funding comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development and the UK Department for International Development.
The Foundation hopes in particular to overcome the high costs and restrictions imposed by intellectual property rights that act as barriers to African farmers’ adoption of new technology. It will do this by seeking to obtain royalty-free licenses from producers of agricultural technologies, and to adapt such technologies to African needs.
Meanwhile, neighbouring Tanzania is seeking help from Egypt so that its farmers can produce genetically modified crops. But the offer was made during Cairo talks between the countries on the sensitive issue of access to water from the River Nile, raising the question of whether the help is a negotiating tactic.
”We are ready to support any of your projects,” said Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture, Youssef Wally, responding to a request from Tanzania’s Minister for water and livestock, Edward Lowassa. Wally told the Tanzanian delegation that the new technology was inevitable. Egypt is already testing genetically altered strains of cotton, sugarcane and other crops, although it has yet to grow any commercially.
”We must not be too sensitive about this issue,” Wally said. ”It is like unnecessary fear of globalisation, computer technology or the internet.” But Wally warned that generating the ability to develop genetically-modified crops is an expensive process. He suggested that Tanzania should seek further assistance from developing countries such as China and India, both of which have considerable experience with gene modification.
The Tanzanian delegation was visiting Egypt primarily for a week-long official dialogue on issues surrounding the use of water from the River Nile. Tanzania is refusing to recognise the 1929 Nile River Agreement between Great Britain and Egypt, which bans any country from using water from the Nile for irrigation without Egypt’s permission. The treaty also restricts East African countries from using waters from Lake Victoria, hundreds of kilometres from the Egyptian border.
Egypt’s deputy prime minister declined to comment on whether the offer of aid for genetic modification was related to his country’s efforts to persuade Tanzania to take a more flexible stance on the treaty. Nor did its minister for water and irrigation, Mohamed Abu Zeid, who said that there are issues other than the Nile on which the two countries can collaborate.
Meanwhile, views remain divided among ordinary Tanzanian farmers about genetic modification. Some — as elsewhere in East Africa — are openly hostile.
”Genetic modification involves large scale farming accompanied with highly modernised technology hence it is likely to kill the livelihood of peasantry farming in Tanzania, ” says Said Hassan, a farmer from the outskirts of the main city, Dar es Salaam.
But others say they lack sufficient information to make an informed judgement.
”I have read about GM products, through newspapers, but I can’t tell exactly what it is,” says Majura Ndege, a farmer from the coast. ”What I can say we depend much on the government’s decision to lead us: if wrong decision is done, then we will be in trouble; if the decision is right, then we reap the profit.”
This article first appeared online at the Science and Development Network