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Africa in the middle of U.S.-European biotech trade war
By Eric Hand
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
12/12/2006
The story is the stuff of legend.
Drought leads to famine across southern Africa. The U.S. ships aid across the Atlantic: millions of tons of corn, some of it genetically modified.
European environmental groups warn about the dire effects of allowing the corn in. The Zambian president calls the corn "poison." Food is locked in warehouses while people go hungry.
Four years ago, these events were a prism through which both sides of the biotech debate saw their worldview refracted. Supporters said: Here is the human cost of European irrationality and the missed opportunities of biotech. Skeptics said: Here is a deliberate provocation by the U.S., which could buy grain in Africa but instead works to secure a foothold to market its own biotech products.
The biotech conflict between Europe and the U.S. is a trade war that's being fought by proxy in Africa in a way that recalls an African proverb: When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.
"It's not about science, really. It's about trade," says Wisdom Changadaya, a pro-biotech scientist in
Malawi, which today mills donated biotech corn into flour to prevent it from being planted as seed. "These big nations are fighting. We happen to lose."
Scientists at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur say the suspicions aroused by the trade war have hampered their efforts to field-test a biotech cassava, one of the most important food crops in Africa. Seven years ago, they genetically engineered the cassava to resist a virus that is ravaging the crop. The nonprofit biotech center wants to give the plant away.
But Lawrence Kent, the center's director of international programs, has been unable to get field tests approved. While the cassava virus continues to advance on farmers' fields, the biotech debate continues in government offices. Several African nations have banned biotech, several have embraced it, while many remain on the fence. Last summer, Kent went to Kenya, Uganda and Malawi to push yet again for the technology that could double cassava yields in the virus-affected areas.
"You want to do something with your life before you die," he says. "When I don't see (results) coming, I feel sad and lost. I need someone to sometimes say, 'Keep going. Keep going.'"‰"
A 'Trojan horse'
Zachary Makanya wishes Kent and other biotech pushers would stop. He is the country coordinator for an anti-biotech nongovernmental organization near Nairobi that coordinates the efforts of groups throughout Africa. Makanya levels a barrage of criticisms against biotech, but they are political and economic criticisms, not scientific.
He says U.S. food aid is a "Trojan horse" that would put African markets in jeopardy. Crops like corn pollinate via the wind. When genetically modified corn arrives in a new location, genes can flow and mix with existing corn crops. In the eyes of European regulators, African corn exports therefore would be tainted.
"By bringing (genetically modified food) into Africa we are actually killing our only market — for organics," he says.
But it's a potential market, not an existing one, so Michael Hall, a U.S. Agency for International Development biotechnology adviser, doesn't buy Makanya's argument. The biotech crops that African nations are worrying about — corn, rice — are staple cereals for which Africa is a net importer.
"Africa is not going to be a (corn) exporter to Europe," he says. "They're dreaming they will be an Iowa."
But even the presence of biotechnology in a country in Africa has caused some European importers to ask for expensive genetic testing or segregation of crops. "It's a big problem," Hall says. "It scares the daylights out of African traders."
In Malawi, for example, tobacco growers worry about biotech tobacco seeds slipping into the country, for fear its organic European export market would be threatened.
The politics of biotech have influenced trade decisions in other parts of the world. China has grown biotech cotton for a decade. But it does not grow biotech soybeans, even though it imports some for feed. That's because it can export homegrown, nonbiotech soybeans at a premium to Japan and Korea.
In the U.S., Monsanto withdrew a planned commercial release of biotech wheat partly because of industry concerns that Canadian growers would resist growing the biotech wheat and would capture export markets to Europe, which was likely to balk at taking U.S.-grown biotech wheat.
Europe's de facto freeze on biotech imports, though it ended in 2003, has raised African suspicions, Makanya says.
"Europe has more knowledge, education. So why are they refusing (genetically modified foods)? That is the question everybody is asking," he says.
Precaution and risk
The U.S.-European divide on biotech has much to do with competing cultural approaches to food and risk.
Europeans are intimate with their food. They want to know where their wine and cheese hail from. Food safety scandals such as a mad-cow disease outbreak in Britain left consumers shaky. Some risk experts say the scandals spurred European fears of biotech.
The "precautionary principle" now forms the official basis for European Union environmental policy. One definition of the principle is: Lack of knowledge or certainty about a risk means that steps should be taken to limit that risk.
The precautionary principle led Norway to ban Kellogg's Corn Flakes because of the uncertain risk of added vitamins and minerals, while Denmark banned cranberry drinks because of the uncertain risk of extra vitamin C. The bans were later overturned.
In contrast, the U.S. tends to celebrate risk-taking. The burden of regulation is on government agencies to show evidence that a company's product is risky before steps are taken to stop the company.
The U.S. is the No. 1 grower of biotech crops, representing 55 percent of the global biotech area planted last year.
The World Trade Organization ruled this year that the European Union was wrong to ban biotech imports between 1999 and 2003. Since then, a few European nations, including Germany and France, have allowed small test plots to go forward, though it is unclear whether consumers will accept biotech products. Activists last summer continued to burn biotech test fields in France.
Africa is caught in the middle. In the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union pitted African nations against one another and supported like-minded regimes. A similarly checkered map has now emerged with biotech. For example, South Africa grows genetically engineered crops, while Zambia and Benin have banned biotech. Most countries remain undecided.
The debate is occurring in the ministerial hallways of African capitals. In the dry, red fields of southeastern Uganda, biotech still is a mystery.
In Kadimukoli, a loose federation of shade and shacks down a dirt track teeming with pink-frocked schoolchildren, a handful of farmers didn't have an opinion about biotech. They didn't have an opinion because they didn't know what genetically modified crops are. They just knew that their cassava was sick.
One of the farmers, Jane Wattaba, says it has been hard to support her 10 surviving children since her husband, a member of Parliament, was murdered in the early 1980s. Her small cassava grinder is broken, the repair money sacrificed to pay school fees for her children.
Over a lunch of boiled cassava, she says that farmers have weathered the damage caused by the cassava virus by obtaining varieties that show better resistance — one is called "Red Cross" after the aid organization that brought it to Kadimukoli. She says she would like to test a cassava called "St. Louis."
Deadlines to meet
When Kent returned from Africa last summer, he was more optimistic that this could happen. In Kenya, field tests of conventional cassava plants have begun. These plants will be compared to biotech cassava in future field tests that Kent said could happen next year. He said Ugandan officials were so enthusiastic that they approached him. Malawi was a bit more skeptical but still interested in the cassava project, he says.
Even if Kent gets permission for field tests, biotech cassava is still years away from farmers' fields.
And deadlines must be met. "Donors put pressure on us. You have to deliver," Kent says.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Monsanto Fund have given the Danforth Center millions of dollars to genetically modify the cassava so that it is virus-resistant, fortified with vitamins and minerals and lacking in cyanide-producing chemicals. The grants are for five years and specify more than 100 mileposts in the coming years, from rounding up intellectual property rights to performing human trials of the zinc and iron fortification.
Kent says a significant milestone will occur early next year, when field tests for the first genetically modified cassava — for the reduction of cyanide-producing chemicals — begin in Puerto Rico. Danforth Center scientists won't be able to test their virus-resistant cassava in Puerto Rico because the disease doesn't exist there. But Kent hopes that a test of genetically modified cassava on U.S. soil will allay African officials' fears that they are guinea pigs.
Flirtatious governments have disappointed him before, but he doesn't indulge in cynicism. Kent credits his local priest with giving him some newfound perspective.
Before he left for Africa, the priest gave him a poem from Archbishop Oscar Romero, an activist Salvadoran priest assassinated in 1980.
The poem begins: "It helps now and then to step back and take the long view / The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts / It is even beyond our vision
"We plant the seeds that one day will grow / We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise
"It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way."
Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, copyright 2006.
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