IN the face of growing population and environmental challenges, current farming methods are proving incapable of meeting our requirements for food security and economic growth.
In Africa, farming is the most important economic activity that contributes 33 per cent of the National Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that is, the total flow of goods and services accruing from the use of locally available resources.
Over the last twelve years, per capita food production in sub-Saharan Africa has been steadily declining for various reasons, resulting in many nations increasingly depending on the food imports or food aid.
Of its 620 million people, 194 million are chronically undernourished while 40 million children are severely underweight.
Poverty and unemployment are common in farming communities. In Africa, the hungry and the poor are farmers. According to the World Bank reports, half of sub- Saharan Africa’s population lives in poverty, earning less than a dollar a day.
The available land suitable for agriculture is declining due to environmental degradation that includes soil erosion and soil exhaustion.
Pest, weeds and diseases too have devastating effects on crop yields in Africa causing large losses of farm produce before and after harvest.
Worse still is the cost of insecticides that is considerably high for poor farmers who are forced to use them sub-optimally and hence experience high pest damage.
Boosting agricultural productivity is therefore of paramount importance to improving people’s welfare and the standard of living in Africa.
African governments should embrace appropriate technologies and policies to help transform the agricultural system in becoming more productive and profitable. The debate over the environmental impact of genetically modified crops (GMOs) is growing increasingly intricate, intense and even emotional.
Fears have been expressed over the safety - even necessity - of genetically engineered crops.
While its proponents argue that the technology only promises to put more food on the table, critics are apprehensive of its safety, and are equally concerned about the commercial interests of some companies behind it. Before we fan the debate, let’s first of all dwell on this question: what is biotechnology? Biotechnology is a package of techniques that employs organisms or parts of an organism to make or modify micro-organisms for specific applications. ‘Bio’ stands for living organisms while ‘technology’ is for a technique.
This technique aims at enhancing the production and use of the resulting goods and services for the benefit of human kind. It has evolved from traditional practices such as breeding and fermentation since time immemorial. There are three types of biotechnology, namely; tissue culture, marker aided selection and genetic modification. Not all biotechnology are GMOs, says the assistant Director of African Biotechnology Stakeholders Forum (ABSF), Lucas Sese, adding that the current technology is a modern technique that evolved from traditional biotechnology. “Because of urbanization, few people have little direct connection or knowledge of agronomic history and modern day mass food production,” he says.
Tissue culture is a method that involves the screening of plants to detect whether they are infected. It involves the removal of the tip of the plant taken, cleaned in the laboratory, and multiplied and the seedlings taken to farmers.
Marker aided selection traces the gene in a plant that poses certain characteristics. This particular gene could provide the answer to the yield of the plant or resistance to disease.
This solves the puzzle as to why pests destroy certain crops and not others. The third type of biotechnology is genetic modification (GMOs). Here, a gene is taken from a plant, and taken to the maize in order to help fight the maize borer. There is sufficient evidence that biotechnology has the potential to boost global agricultural productivity in a sustainable way.
The prospects are particularly bright for developing countries where crops such as maize, Irish potatoes have been grown through conventional methods of breeding and are unable to cope with a myriad of challenges constraining the agricultural sector.
The sector’s poor performance has contributed significantly to the escalating food insecurity, malnutrition, poverty and environmental degradation.
This has led many African governments and researchers to intensify the search for appropriate interventions including the integration of the cutting edge science of biotechnology into conventional approaches to the solution to contribute to food integrated approach.
African countries have imported some of these technologies, for example, the case of insect-protected cotton and maize but this solution does not meet the needs of a wider number of crops grown by small-scale farmers.
Orphan crops, such as the sweet potato do not attract much research support internationally and are often neglected. The sweet potato is one of the world’s highest yielding crop with total food production per unit area and time exceeding that of most cereals, including rice and wheat.
In Kenya, the sweet potato is an important food securing and cash generating crop with about 75,000 tons of fresh tubers being produced annually.
Prior to the introduction of the transgenic sweet potato, Kenya had no operational biosafety system. The need to evaluate the genetically modified (GM) material stimulated the development and institutionalization of national biosafety guidelines and regulations. The project was instrumental in catalyzing formation and operationalization of the biosafety system and opened up the approval system for the introduction of other genetically modified products. The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) researchers in collaboration with the International Potato Centre (CIP) established that sweet potato viruses have significant economic importance and that available virus control methods are ineffective or unaffordable by resource-poor farmers. KARI, Monsanto, and Daforth Plant Science Centre-USA, Agricultural Research Council (ARC) among others, have carried out the project in collaboration.
KARI has an operational biotechnology laboratory for further transformation of the local African sweet potato genetypes with technical support from its collaborators.
The contributor is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi