By Mark Kinver
Environment reporter, BBC News
 |
| Biotechnology could help improve African agriculture's resilience to future climate changes |
Sub-Saharan Africa's agricultural sector needs to
harvest the fruits of biotechnology in order to establish sustainable
development, says a report.
A key challenge is to attract funding for
biotechnology projects on staple crops, such as cassava, it added.
These crops were often ignored by commercial funders
because they had a limited market, the authors suggested.
Africa missed out on the previous green revolution
that boosted food output in many Asian and Latin American nations.
The report, On Trial: GM Crops in Africa, published by think
tank Chatham House, said: "Increasing agricultural productivity and
adapting farming to climate change are central to Africa's development
prospects."
It added that there were opportunities to boost yields
and increase resilience by improving existing crop varieties, and that "in
some cases, biotechnology, and in particular genetic modification (GM), offers
advantages over conventional plant-breeding approaches", such as drought,
pest and disease resistance.
However, the continent was in danger of missing out on
capitalising on innovations offered by the 21st Century green revolution, just
as it had done in the previous century.
"If you look at what happened in Latin America
and Asia in the second half of the 20th Century with the Green Revolution, there
was a range of technologies, new high-yielding hybrid varieties of wheat, rice
and maize, new irrigation platforms, etc," explained co-author Rob Bailey,
research director for energy, environment and resources at Chatham House.
'Growth spurt'
 |
| Crops that do not have a global market do not attract the same level of private sector R&D investment |
"Now, we are in a situation where Africa needs
this growth spark in its agricultural sector, because it is primarily where
most of the poorest people are, and it makes up a significant share of African
GDP," Mr Bailey said.
"But they are also in a race against time because
climate change is gathering pace because the forecasts suggests that this is
going to have a very profound impact on farm productivity."
He explained that the need to increase resilience to
forecasts of a changing climate was likely to increase the importance and need
for innovation and R&D offered by biotechnology projects.
"The key challenge that African agriculture faces
is that a lot of food security and livelihoods are dependent on these so-called
orphan crops, such as cassava and sorghum, which do not have large commercial
markets in the way that maize or wheat do. Therefore they are not attractive to
large private sector researchers," he told BBC News.
"So the first thing that Africa has to do is
attract and mobilise public sector money to fund research into these sorts of
technologies."
Mr Bailey explained that biotechnology offered a range
of advantages over traditional breeding methods: "A lot of the staple
crops that are grown in Africa have quite narrow gene pools. There are not huge
seed banks, with lots of different varieties of cassava or sorghum, that can be
tapped into. It is not like maize or wheat.
"Biotechnology can be useful there because it
provides plant-breeders with the opportunity to introduce genes or traits from
outside of the species' genomes.
"If you can identify a trait for pest resistance
in another species and cannot find a trait like that within the cassava genome,
then a conventional plant breeder is a bit [stuck].
"If you are using transgenics then you have the
opportunity to bring that trait in from another species."
Growing support
But he added that this was easier
said than done because many sub-Saharan governments had limited resources and
scientific capacity, and there was a danger of simply adopting models developed
for Western food crops.
Mr Bailey said: "The problem
with these sorts of models is that they do not properly engage the farmers.
"They have to be careful to
make sure they are working with farmers from the outset so then they can
understand what are the farmers' needs, how they can be addressed and included
in the technological process so they are more likely to use and adopt it when
it is ready.
"A key message from the report
is that you need to start with the farmers, understand their context and their
market environments. This is the platform you use to judge whether or not you
can develop a technology-based solution.
"If you come in and try to
parachute something in from elsewhere because it has worked in Europe or North
America then the risk of that technology failing or not being used are much
higher."
Culled from www.bbc.com
