Is GM Technology really safe for African farmers?

In the past few years, there has been a raging debate in Africa as to whether transgenic crops, more popularly known as GM crops, should be adopted. GM foods currently suffer a bad press in Africa and in many developing countries, and it will take a long while before GM crops can be grown on a small scale, let alone on a large scale.

Nevertheless, GM crops are currently being grown in a number of African countries. In 2010, almost 100,000 farmers in Burkina Faso planted GM cotton on some 260,000 hectares of land. This represented a 126 percent increase over the previous year. According to GM technology expert Dr. Ademola Adenle, GM cotton contributed at least $100 million to Burkina Faso’s economy over this period. In South Africa, the continent’s biggest producer of GM crops, GM technology is reported to have enhanced farm incomes by $156 million in the eight year period from 1998 to 2006.

If these statistics are to be believed, then there is real potential that gene researchers could use GM technology to develop drought resistant crops which could potentially help alleviate the perennial famines in the continent and in the process, help boost food security. Institutions such as the African

Agricultural Technology Foundation and The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa- Agra, are working to promote public-private partnerships to ensure that resource-poor farmers have access to farming technologies including GM. This may help to counter the negative perception towards GM crops in the continent.

Clearly, even more research needs to be done on the potential drawbacks of GM technology. For one, Africa does not have the regulatory environment that the developed countries have. For instance, the US Food and Drug Administration- FDA, has stringent standards upon which the GM technology proprietors must adhere to. However, the regulatory authorities in many African countries are not as developed to examine the opportunities as well as the perils of GM technology.

Even then, one of the major challenges for GM technology in Africa is the lack of strong and effective Intellectual Property Rights- IPR laws. This can create difficulties for developing countries in accessing the technologies, as biotech companies are often reluctant to invest in the development of this new technology in Africa.

The lack of sharing of biotechnology will likely result in a monopoly by the global biotech companies, further marginalizing poor small scale farmers. Increasingly, the call for wide scale adoption of GM technology in Africa could lead to rampant land grabbing, in which global agribusinesses will lease out millions of hectares of land throughout the continent, further pushing out the local farmers out of the value chains. This could result in an increase, and not a reduction, of food insecurity in the continent.