In December, Forbes ran an interesting look at efforts in Africa to genetically modify basic food crops to increase yields. The article focused on Kenya’s Florence Wambugu who has been working for years to increase yields of the sweet potato.
African sweet potato yields are about half the level as other parts of the world. With warm temperatures year round, sweet potato crops on the continent are especially susceptible to infestation by worms and a virus called feathery mottle. As much as half the annual harvest is lost from such infestation.
After unsuccessfully experimenting with traditional hybridization, Wambugu received a grant to work at Monsanto on her efforts to improve the sweet potato. She took what she learned there and spliced into the sweet potato a gene from a flower that kills insects and the feathery mottle virus.
In some of the first trials of this genetically modified sweet potato in Kenya, yields have been roughly double those of the non-GM sweet potato crops.
Of course genetically modified foods are opposed by environmental groups who worry about corporations gaining a stranglehold on developing countries, but Cyrus Ndiritu, former director of the Kenya Agriculture Research Institute, counters that Africa’s problems are not multinational corporations,
I would like to make something very clear. It is not multinationals that have a stranglehold on Africa. It is hunger, poverty and deprivation. And if Africa is going to get out of that, it has got to embrace GM technology.
Source:
Millions served. Lynn J. Cook, Forbes.Com, December 23, 2002.