Biotech crucial to Africa’s productivity

Biosafety Managing Editor, Mr Barack Gogo recently interviewed Dr Eugene Terry, the Implementing Director of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) on the vision and prospects of the new initiative by four of the world’s largest agricultural firms to share their technology royalty free with African scientists to boost food production in the continent:

Question: Can you briefly outline what this new initiative is about?
Answer: The food security and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa demands that we utilize a lot of advanced technologies that are coming from the advances that are being made in science and technology to address the situation and the initiative is geared towards that goal.
A lot of public and private sector institutions both in Africa and America are doing work in areas that produce technologies that can be used by resource poor farmers to boost food production.
However, these resource poor farmers do not have this access to the technology. The purpose of this foundation is to act as a broker for the farmers to access these technologies through negotiations to have them donated on a royalty free basis, on a humanitarian basis, and to sub-license these technologies to research and development institutions who will adapt these technologies to be used by our framers in the continent.
Q. Lets get this right. You said technologies would be transferred to Africa on a royalty free basis. Assume for instance a company like Monsanto has a seed variety that may be of interest to a Kenya seed company which wants to sell these seeds to resource poor farmers in Kenya. How would this arrangement work out to the benefit of the farmer if the seed company were doing business?
A. If all the conditions are right these technologies will be negotiated for to the AATF. The foundation will then select those who will best handle this material and make it available to farmers on the most reasonable cost basis. In the end it is an arrangement whereby the farmers will have access to materials that they could not have access to if a licence on humanitarian basis had not been negotiated with the company. This is not to say that seed companies are not involved in other types of technologies, which had no proprietary protection clause, attached to them. That’s a separate issue and we are not involved very much with that.
We are mostly involved in negotiating on humanitarian grounds, technologies that could have otherwise not be accessible to resource poor farmers.
Q. You are hoping therefore to be like an honest broker?
A. Absolutely. And the seeds need not necessarily have to go through profit making seeds company… they could go through NGOs cooperatives and various other channels that could reach the farmer on a reasonable cost basis and a system may be developed whereby the farmers can have vouchers to access these materials even when the improved variety is coming through a profit making seed company. That is another way of ensuring that the farmers are accessing these materials and would not be denied access to it simply because they are resource poor and cannot afford the technology.
Q. Are we talking about all seeds varieties or biotech seeds?
A. Actually the technologies that we are going to be using as interventions point for the farmers do not necessarily involve seeds. It may just be information to solve an interactive problem; it could be storage materials, grain detoxification methods. So it is not all seeds. It is a broad spectrum. A range of technologies.
I made it clear in my opening remark that this is an agricultural technology transfer foundation for technology transfer not biotechnology transfer.
Q. The companies behind your initiative are actually biotech based?
A. Not necessarily. These are companies that are producing technologies other than biotechnology. As a matter of fact some of these companies have just entered into biotech business.
I think it’s a fallacy to assume that most of the multinationals are interested in biotechnology. They are producing other types of genetic materials that might not be transgenic material, that is the area that a lot of people concentrate on. That area generates a lot of sensationalism.
A lot of my colleagues in the conference talked about tissue culture that is a biotechnology too, and is not a controversial thing and it is not transgenic.
Q. And in terms of short-term programmes could you tell us what is the line?
A. What we are looking for are some areas that have not yielded solutions through conventional breeding and conventional approaches. For example striga has been identified, as one of the priority areas where some advanced technologies may be required to address that problem. So we will be looking at all aspects of striga, we will be looking at banana plantains and the problems affecting the production of the food, to see whether some advanced technologies can be used to address that problem. We are also looking at the insect problem in maize and nutritional qualities of some vegetables.
There is a wide range of things that we have been looking at, but we believe farmers will base the final selection on the type of project we shall implement on the demand.
Q. Will you do some kind of survey of African farmers continent wide?
A. We are already synthesising information acquired in surveys. As you see in this conference people are reporting on their priorities and the national priorities are derived from participation of farmers in surveys to identify their most urgent problems.
These national demand driven initiatives have been filtered up through sub-regional institutions and may be are going on a continental basis so that anybody an institution like United Nations Industrial Development Organisation(UNIDO) that is looking at global constraints on a regional hierarchical basis so that it might have a broad impact rage.
Q. But this is a Herculean task. How much money are you going to inject into this initiative?
A. Lets say the foundation is going to be facilitated in a lot of its work. It will not be doing all these activities on its own. It will utilise the infrastructure of institutions that have the manpower, but may not have the ability to access… So it will go back to the original functions of the foundation where it shall seek to provide the access. This is what we will be doing.
Our function is part of a long chain of activities that will be handled by our partners at different levels of implementation.
Q .Do you think the issue of African agriculture calls for more than just good seeds, marketing and distribution?
A. And there are other institutions and agencies, which are involved in that and would be linking much with us. This is not a one fit situation. You know there are agencies working on different areas, related to the national programmes, regional programmes and other areas of agricultural development. There are people who are involved in infrastructure. This foundation is on the business of technology generation and transfer.
Q. What impact do you envisage because I think there are other similar institutions ahead of you like ISAA, which has been doing a similar thing? Do you see yourself succeeding?
A. I must tell you that this is an experiment that is going to be tried and it will be for the first time be bringing an unique opportunity for the public and private companies to work together in complimenting each other to solve a problem. The public sector had tried by itself, the private sector has tried making profit on the bottom line…in this case here you are trying to make the need of the farmer uppermost in the minds of both parties and ensure that the best practices utilised by the private sector and the public sector are brought to bear on the farmers problems and the resources that are available. So it is a unique experiment.
Q. Do you think that there is sufficient goodwill from the multinationals to be able to share these technologies?
A. If you read in the Washington Post of March 11th you will see that the technology providers, the multinationals and others like universities have been interviewed and have indicated their interest in joining ranks with us to address such problems in the Sub-Saharan Africa which represents itself as a market for some of these products. We have to get there somehow. And that is the long-term interest.
Q. Do you think there is sufficient goodwill for your initiative to succeed?
A. Goodwill, yes, but we will need more than goodwill for us to succeed in addressing the problems of the food security, the poverty and the people, who live below a dollar per day. About half of Africa’s estimated 300million people live on less than a dollar per day. I would like to put it in terms of the need to invest in their kinds of interventions and the need has been demonstrated. It is up to the major players, policy makers, all the actors, the farmers, organisations and NGOs to put their resources together to access the best that science and technology can offer to solve problems.
Q. One of the foundations behind your organisation is the Rockefeller Foundation and I stand corrected, which had huge experience in the Asian green revolution. Do you see them have that kind of interest –as in the revolution - in Africa?
A. The Rockefeller Foundation has determined that for the next decade or so it is going to be making heavy investments in the food insecurity alleviation in Africa. It is a commitment they have made. The Washington Post of 11th of March 2003 preceded any announcement by the Rockefeller Foundation president in Washington that this (the African technology transfer foundation) is one of its initiatives to push for food security to be achieved by the greatest number of African peoples.
So it is a declared commitment and not a speculation.
Q. So what is your starter fund once again?
A. This year, 2003, which is looked upon as a substantive year for start up has a 2.4 million dollars (US) budget and we believe we will be able to achieve it.
Thank you very much.
Q. When do you expect your Nairobi office to become operational?
A. It is already running and it is temporarily based / housed at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) premises until we get our own offices.