Simbi Kusimba
15 May 2004
Nairobi — Adoption of biotechnology to create genetically modified crops could be the ultimate answer to Africa's falling food yields.
An estimated 200 million people on the continent are malnourished, and research findings by the Rockefeller Foundation, an American charity organisation indicate that average agricultural production is one tonne per hectare in Africa, whereas in Asia it is three tonnes.
The New York based organisation cautions that without more and better trained local scientists, the cycle of poverty caused by inadequate technologies, low yields and poor markets was likely to continue being experienced.
The charity now advocates growing of tissue cultured bananas that are free of pests and diseases, which yield over 50 tonnes per hectare, and the new rice varieties for Africa that record yields of up to three tonnes per hectare with low fertiliser use.
The new rice was developed by researchers at the West Africa Rice Development Association and is now widely grown in Uganda and West Africa. In Western Kenya, the Sustainable Agricultural Centre for Research Extension and Development Africa) has began trials of Nerica in Bungoma.
Sacred Africa's executive director, Dr Eusebius Mukhwana, told the Nation that the crop would do well if the rainfall patterns did not change drastically.
"Biotechnology-genetic engineering-holds the considerable promise in solving Africa's food production problems and new technologies must be accessible to the poor in particular so we must ensure that proprietary technologies are available to African plant breeders," Rockefeller president Gordon Conway said.
He observed that the rise of a sophisticated global intellectual property system covering many building block technologies locked out public researchers from accessing new ideas and tools in their field of specialisation.
Dr Conway said Rockefeller helped set up the African Agricultural Technology Foundation to gain access to new proprietary technologies and make them available to plant breeders in Africa.
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