If you live in Europe or the US, genetically modified food might sound like a luxury. But for people in poor countries, it鈥檚 the difference between a square meal and starvation, according to Florence Wambugu, one of Africa鈥檚 leading plant geneticists. Would you expect anything else from someone who鈥檚 been on the payroll of Monsanto? Perhaps not. Yet Wambugu is no puppet of agribusiness. She鈥檚 the daughter of a subsistence farmer from Kenya who went into agricultural research to help farmers like her mother. 鈥淎 hungry person is not a myth,鈥� she told Fred Pearce. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a person I know.鈥�
Campaigners against GM food portray you as an apostle of Monsanto in Africa. Are you?
Some people say I am fighting for the company. But I say I am a stakeholder in this technology. It is twenty years of my life. I believe in the benefits it has for our people. So I fight for the credibility of the technology.
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How can GM technology benefit the poor when it is an alien, expensive technology controlled by rich countries and large multinationals?
GM may be better for Africa than older technologies, like those of the Green Revolution. In fact the Green Revolution, which failed in Africa, was alien because it came from the West. Africa鈥檚 farmers had to be educated in the use of fertilisers, for example. But transgenic crops can get round that because the technology-to control insects, for instance-is packaged in the seed. GM also means higher yields. Right now maize yield in Africa is 1.7 tonnes per hectare; the global average is 4. But if you insert the Bt gene as a genetic insecticide, 20 per cent of that shortfall comes back. I鈥檓 not saying that transgenics alone will solve all the problems. But it will lead to millions of tonnes more grain.
So unlike some people in Europe, you don鈥檛 think GM technology is a bit of an expensive luxury?-
In Africa GM food could almost literally weed out poverty. In Europe, some people oppose crops with herbicide genes. In Africa most weeding is done by women-50 per cent of women鈥檚 labour in Africa is tied up with weeding. Reducing that would have a major impact.
In developed countries food is getting cheaper because they use more and more technology, but in tropical Africa it is getting more expensive because it is all manually produced. People with a small salary spend almost all of it on food. If we can increase food productivity in rural areas it will bring the price of food down, and generate more money for investment to turn the wider economy round.
Surely what African farmers really need is fertilisers and better irrigation? Won鈥檛 putting money into GM technology divert attention from these more basic needs?
I think that is like saying Africans don鈥檛 need aircraft, we should go by road. Or that we should be denied computers until everybody has bought a typewriter and mastered it. We are part of a global community. Of course, we need to look at why existing agricultural technologies have had so little impact in Africa. Africa needs to pick and choose technologies, to learn which ones are compatible.
Don鈥檛 you think it鈥檚 right for Europe to be cautious? This is an untried technology and we don鈥檛 know the risks.
Europeans tell us it is too dangerous. They tell us: 鈥淎frica, this is not for you. Keep off.鈥� You in Europe are entitled to your own opinion. But I think it is dangerous when you tell everyone else what to do.
But you鈥檙e not a farmer. What would a scientist from the capital city know about the needs of the rural poor?
My mother was a subsistence farmer and she was the inspiration for my career in agricultural research. We had a small farm with all kinds of crops. It provided our whole income as well as our food. Sometimes there was not enough, so I know about hunger. My mother would always look for ways to increase production. She would look for better seeds. We didn鈥檛 have chemicals but she would use things like ashes to control insects. She made enough money to send me and my brothers and sisters to school. But it was not easy.
I have always wanted to use science to go back and make an impact on the communities that I came from. I鈥檝e studied in many countries. I did my PhD in England. I did my postdoctoral degree in America and worked in the private sector there. But my heart never left the village. I decided to come back.
People are dying of hunger in Kenya now, in Turkana. I don鈥檛 want to go to international meetings and only see these problems on the television: I want to be part of it. A hungry person is not a myth, it鈥檚 a person I know.
Why did you choose to focus your research on controlling the sweet-potato virus?
The sweet potato is a major staple crop. It is always there in the backyard if there is nothing else to eat. My mother grew it. I know it. Sweet-potato yields are very low in the tropics-a third that in China-largely because of the virus. I worked at the University of Bath in Britain and did my field work in Kenya with farmers like my mother, who grew the crop. I wanted to solve a national problem. We were making little progress using traditional plant breeding. And there was a well-defined need to generate resistance to the virus that biotechnology could address.
How did Monsanto enter the picture?
Monsanto had the technology to attack viruses and were looking for an opportunity to work on an African root or tuber crop. It offered to train and support someone and donate the intellectual property rights to Africa. It approached me. I went to the company and brought seven sweet-potato varieties familiar to Kenyan farmers. I had to learn everything from the beginning. Transferring the gene into the sweet potatoes took me about three years. Then we selected virus isolates from the fields in Kenya and sent them to Monsanto to test them on the sweet-potato varieties in the greenhouse. It鈥檚 taken me ten years to reach to the point where we are about to begin field trials in Kenya.
It鈥檚 very noble of Monsanto to donate the intellectual property to Africa. But other companies may not be so generous.
If a company comes here and inserts a gene into a local variety, there is joint ownership. Kenyans should benefit. Of course, we need to be certain that the local genes are not just taken up and then sold back to us. That鈥檚 why we need to enter into business partnerships. But we come to the table as stakeholders, not beggars. We tell companies: 鈥淵ou have the genes. We have the germ plasm. We know the fields. We know the insects and pests that are here. Let鈥檚 work together.鈥� If we develop a victim mentality we become losers.
The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute has the intellectual property rights on behalf of the whole of Africa for the GM sweet potato. We are building a research infrastructure to develop it. This product now belongs to Kenya. It has no commercial value to Monsanto, except as PR. Next we will bring in transgenic cassava, using the products of public research. So again, no problem.
So, what you鈥檙e saying is that GM crops will not be as expensive as we鈥檙e being led to believe.
Absolutely. I have worked on tissue-culture bananas, which are improved through biotechnology rather than conventional breeding. We show the farmers how you can purchase a product and make a profit to buy some more. The tissue-culture banana costs 100 shillings [85 pence], double the old price. People told us that farmers could not afford to buy them. But this is a myth, part of the donor mentality. There is money in rural areas if farmers can see the benefit.
We set about building confidence. We showed them some samples, and how to manage it, how the plants are uniform and vigorous and without disease. The demand for the new banana was unbelievable. Once they have seen the productivity of this material they have gone in and bought it with their own money.
One woman I know sold 48 bunches of the fruit in one day and made about US$500. She had never sold more than five bunches before-never made money like that in her life. She could afford to expand her kitchen. Now she has a team of 50 women. She is a consultant. We have put money into providing microfinance for the farmers. These farmers can eat more and sell more. We need this kind of impact to demonstrate biotechnology. This is the way we are going to turn Africa around.
If GM is so successful, why do you think many aid agencies and even governments are so adamant that better food distribution is the answer to food shortages?
Some aid workers here-I won鈥檛 name them-are being pushed into an anti-GM position from their European office. They鈥檙e being brainwashed. We tell them we may not be the world鈥檚 top scientists, and we know there are risks but we think we can manage them. When we bring the GM sweet potato here, we will be doing monitoring. We are not going to drop it and leave it. Many of them have come round. But they cannot tell their bosses in Europe.
But opponents of GM include some big-name scientists like Hans Herren, director of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, a big agricultural research centre, based in Nairobi.
To me Hans has a typical European view. Hans will tell you he is not against GM but that not enough testing has taken place. Well, there has been ten years of testing. We know enough to continue. How are we going to know more if we ban field trials? What I am afraid of is being dictated to from Europe. You have surplus food in Europe. There is no real need for transgenic crops in Europe-nobody is hungry. But there is a real need and real hunger here.
Some scientists in the developing world think there is a hidden agenda behind Europe鈥檚 stance on GM crops-an agenda to deprive poor countries of advanced technologies. What do you think?
I think the anti-biotechnology lobbyists are the only people benefiting out of this. Greenpeace is a $100 million company. To keep that budget you have to be doing something and doing it well. European people are having opinions forced on them through manipulation and half-truths about how dangerous the technology is.
Are you worried that the influence of the environmental lobby will extend to Africa?
It will not happen. We don鈥檛 have the mass push of products coming from America. Things are coming one at a time. As we bring the transgenic sweet potato to market, we have enough time for people to debate rationally.
GM crops are unlikely to be introduced in Europe without strict long-term field testing of their environmental and health impacts. Is the regulatory regime in Africa developing along similar lines?
We have not compromised anything in regulation. You wouldn鈥檛 believe the number of meetings that have taken place because there is so much money to help Africa build a regulatory system. When we applied to the government for a permit for the transgenic sweet-potato field trials, ours was the first application. Apparently, a regulatory system did exist, but had never been used. It took two years to get the permit. But we now have it and field tests will begin here later this year. As a result of this process we have a regulatory system that is not brainwashed and which people respect. We haven鈥檛 had mad cow disease here, after all.