The fight to feed Africa

The local African organizer of this effort, who was not a farmer himself, later explained that he was opposed to GMO foods because he had been told they would change the genetic composition of the human body. An African minister at this meeting asked US AID Administrator Andrew Natsios "if it was true" that GMO crops contained pig genes.

These fear campaigns, mounted by European activists and paid for with European money, were unfortunately effective in Africa. As of 2008, only one country on the continent - South Africa - has made it legal for farmers to plant any genetically-engineered crops at all. South Africa was able to avoid the damage only because it had a science-based regulatory system for GMO safety in place several years before activists from Europe began campaigning against the technology.

Why are governments in Africa, with their citizenship of mostly poor and non-productive farmers, adopting an urbanized European perspective toward this new technology? Africa follows Europe in this case, rather than the United States, because of a trio of continuing post-colonial relationships.

Africa's farm exports to Europe are six times as large as exports to the Untied States, so it is European consumer tastes and European regulatory systems that Africans feel they must mimic. Africa also gets three times as much foreign assistance from Europe compared to the United States, so when European donors counsel against GMO crops, African governments must listen. Europe also contributes three times as much to the Trust Fund of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as the United States, so when the United Nations Environment Programme uses GEF money to show Africans how to regulate GMOs, they favor the stifling European approach.

The richest of tastes are being imposed on the poorest of people.

Fortunately some independent-minded Americans and Africans are looking for ways to break out of this pattern. Since 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been braving criticism from anti-science NGOs to provide private-grant funding for a new initiative called an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, chaired by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. This project will use conventional scientific plant breeding techniques to bring improved seed varieties to African farmers.

When this project was announced, an NGO from Europe named GRAIN tried to argue that improvements in crop genetics in Africa would only lead to greater poverty, and an NGO from the United States named Food First criticized the project as "naive" for its assumption that African farmers needed more science-based productivity.

Yet this year the Gates Foundation has gone ahead with another research project in Africa, to develop improved varieties of drought-tolerant crops, using not just traditional breeding techniques but genetic engineering as well. Crops better able to tolerate drought are precisely what poor farmers in Africa need to work their way out of poverty, so it is reassuring to see at least some private philanthropic donors keeping Africa's need for more and better farm science utmost in mind.