I spent three years collecting traditional varieties of crops in Africa, visiting farms almost daily, talking to farmers and seeing the good and the bad. Based on this close experience, I disagree with Kofi Annan’s recipe for agricultural development in Africa.

On his appointment as Chair of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) Annan assured the world that the Alliance “is not engaging in genetically modified food”. AGRA (2007) endorsed this: “We have chosen to focus on conventional breeding” to tap “the inherent genetic potential available in African crops”.

This is a certain way of squandering Gates Foundation funding and sending Africa to bed hungry. There is an unanswerable case for using GM technology to overcome pest and disease problems in African crops (Gressel et al. 2004).

But there are more faults with the Annan dogma. Annan and AGRA are promoting crop xenophobia: African crops are ‘locally adapted’ and therefore better than introduced crops; African crops have an ‘inherent genetic potential’ lacking in foreign crops; GM solutions are alien to Africa’s needs. This is wrong and dangerous.

Increased reliance on indigenous crops would be an ecological nightmare, rather than a future for African farming. Instead of a general ‘inherent genetic potential’ claimed by AGRA, Africa’s indigenous crops have a major weakness: they grow next to their wild relatives which are reservoirs of major pests and diseases. Even with the latest technology it is difficult for plant breeding to keep ahead of rapidly evolving local biotic constraints.

There is another way for Africa: introducing crops from elsewhere. This works: seventy percent of crop production in Africa is from introduced crops, some dating back millennia. There are major staple crops from the Americas (maize, common bean, potatoes, peanut, cassava) and from Asia (plantains, rice, sugar cane, wheat). The reservoirs of co-evolved pests and diseases of these crops are distant; infestation is lower; and yields higher (Wood 1988).

A recent paper (Sax et al. in press) now provides an ecological reason for the wisdom of African farmers. The paper claims that biologists going back to Darwin knew that species are not optimally adapted for their environment. Crops and domestic animals may perform better away from their region of origin.

There are two modes of local evolution, one abiotic – climate, day length; and the other biotic – constraints of local pests and diseases. You can with success transfer crop adaptations of the first type to other continents: by doing so crops escape co-evolved biotic constraints of the second type. The economic advantages of manipulating these two complementary modes of crop evolution are known to farmers globally, but not to Annan and a rag-bag of NGOs who are always burbling about native crops being better.

My recipe for African agriculture is to give emphasis to further introductions of major crops with a substantial past research investment (including biotechnology). The success of soybean is the best example of an introduced Asian crop becoming of major importance, first to the USA (Lockeretz 1988 called it the ‘spectacular rise of the soybean’) and now Brazil. In return, Africa can help world agriculture by ‘out of Africa’ crops: perversely, for Annan and AGRA, the ‘inherent genetic potential’ of African crops is best deployed in other continents: coffee in Brazil, oil palm in Malaysia, sorghum in the USA.

References:

AGRA 2007 http://www.agra-alliance.org/about/genetic_engineering.html

Gressel, J. et al. (2004). Major heretofore intractable biotic constraints to African food security that may be amenable to novel biotechnological solutions. Crop Protection, 23, 661-689.

Lockeretz, W. (1988). Agricultural diversification by crop introduction: The US experience with the soybean. Food Policy, 13, 154-166.

Sax et al. (in the press). Ecological and evolutionary insights from species invasions. Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Wood, D. (1988) Introduced crops in developing countries: a sustainable agriculture? Food Policy, 13, 167-172.

Written for CropGen by Dave Wood and reproduced here with his permission

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