Jeff Otieno
17 July 2007
Nairobi — Genetically modified foods were not the only solution to Africa's food crisis, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan said yesterday.
The challenges confronting agriculture in Africa were complex and it would take more than genetically modified foods to address them.
"Poor seeds, low prices for agricultural produce, lack of storage facilities and poor markets and infrastructure all contribute to the continent's food crisis," he said.
Green revolution
The Alliance for a Green Revolution, of which he is the chairman, will not focus on GMOs but on traditional foods that Africans have grown and fed on for generations.
"The organisation will use the known conventional methods of breeding seeds for improved agricultural production and also intervene in other areas that hinder farmers from benefiting from their activities," he told reporters at the Serena Hotel, Nairobi.
"We don't know what science will have for us in the next 10 to 20 years and we are ready to learn and apply appropriate technologies," Mr Annan, also a Nobel laureate, added.
GMOs are foods that have had their genetic codes altered through engineering.
They are produced by inserting DNA taken from another organism and modified in a laboratory to produce new traits.
Mr Joseph De Vries, the director of the Green Revolution programme for Africa's seed systems, said conventional breeding that helped revolutionise agriculture in other continents had not been fully applied in Africa and the new organisation would focus on this method.
Mr Annan, who arrived in Kenya last Saturday, has visited various agricultural sites to popularise the goals of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
One of its aims to is to help lift millions of small-scale farmers out of poverty by focusing on high quality seeds, soil health, provision of water, boosting their access to markets and advocating for favourable agricultural policies.
Mr Annan said African scientists who had developed hybrid crops suitable for various ecological zones should be supported in their efforts to increase agricultural yields in the continent.
To enable the organisation succeed in its quest, Mr Annan urged governments to improve infrastructure and formulate appropriate agricultural policies to benefit millions of small-scale farmers who make up a large chunk of the continent's rural population.
Agriculture permanent secretary Romano Kiome said Kenya had launched a strategy for revitalisation of agriculture to raise agricultural productivity by five per cent per year, starting this year.
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