African Famine - Copyright The Wall Street Journal


Africa Could Feed Itself But Many Ask: Should It?
Commentary: We Can Feed the World. Here's How.

December 3, 2002
PAGE ONE
AFRICAN FAMINE


Africa Could Feed Itself But Many Ask: Should It?
Issue Sets Affluent Donor Countries Against Man Who Sowed Green in Asia

BY SCOTT KILMAN and ROGER THUROW
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


Farmers who use only their hands and machetes to squeeze food from the stingy soil around the village of Fufuo, Ghana, still recall the crop of 1989 with disbelief.

A team working with Norman E. Borlaug, engineer of the "green revolution" that saved millions of Asians from starvation in the late 1960s, had arrived bearing seeds of a new breed of corn, a few bags of fertilizer and several bottles of weed killer. Villagers bought these curious items with small, low-interest loans from the group Dr. Borlaug runs and then followed his directions. For the first time, they planted in straight rows, with a uniform distance between seeds. They spread the fertilizer on a regular schedule. They sprayed the herbicide in carefully measured amounts.

Then they harvested a miracle. "The crops were so big, and there were ears on each stalk," says Emmanuel Boateng. "We were used to having many stalks with no ears." Farmers accustomed to gathering only five 220-pound bags of corn per acre reaped 15 bags. Never before had the people of Fufuo produced enough to feed themselves and still had something left to sell to others beyond their collection of mud brick homes. They paid off their loans and began planning investments in schools and roads.

But in the years since Dr. Borlaug moved on to spread his methods to other villages, Fufuo has been sliding back toward mere subsistence. Western governments and the development agencies they fund no longer countenance his methods or provide aid on a large scale to support them, as they once did. Instead, they say, the free market should determine how Africa feeds itself. The Ghanaian government, pressured by its Western creditors to keep its fiscal house in order, doesn't provide fertilizer subsidies, crop-price supports or other equivalent to the cheap financing Dr. Borlaug started the farmers on. Local banks charge 30% interest on loans.

So the villagers of Fufuo are skimping on fertilizer, and their plots are yielding a third less. Without a well-functioning market for their crops, they struggle to sell even these diminishing yields before they rot. The temptation grows to switch to cash crops such as cocoa and ginger to sell to the West, though with more than two million of its people undernourished, according to the United Nations, Ghana needs more of a food staple such as corn.

"We have shown we can produce more, but sometimes we wonder, 'What's the use?' " says Kwaku Owusu, a Fufuo corn farmer.

The answer is rooted in a profound shift in the international politics of economic development in the decades since Dr. Borlaug was lauded as a savior of the world's hungry poor. In 1970, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for having helped stave off mass starvation in India and Pakistan by introducing high-yielding wheat plants to farmers there. The success of this green revolution depended on Western support, financial and political, as well as local government intervention. The U.S. was unequivocal: In 1965, President Johnson threatened to withhold food aid from India unless New Delhi adopted farmer-friendly policies. It complied, replacing price limits on grain with price supports. By the mid-1970s, India was growing enough grain to begin building vast reserves.

Now, sub-Saharan Africa is staggering toward its worst food crisis in decades, with as many as 38 million people threatened with starvation in the coming months, according to the U.N. To Dr. Borlaug, the solution is simple: sow the seeds of a second green revolution. With backing of about $9 million a year from a foundation of the late Japanese speedboat-racing magnate Ryoichi Sasakawa, he has been working with President Carter's Atlanta-based Carter Center to develop several million demonstration plots in 10 African countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique, as well as Ghana.

"I've done my job. We could double or triple grain production in Africa in three years," says the 88-year-old scientist, bringing his fist down hard on his desk in his office at Texas A&M University. "Something has to change."

Something has changed but not in Dr. Borlaug's favor. To the World Bank and the industrialized governments that control it, giving free rein to free markets is more appropriate for Africa -- even though the U.S., for one, is expanding the subsidies it pays to its own farmers. The theory, as it applies to policy toward Africa, is that an unfettered private sector will jump in to serve efficiently where governments once served inefficiently, and people and resources will be channeled to their best purposes.

Indeed, given Africa's disadvantages -- thin soil, fickle climates, few paved roads and weak governments -- some development experts now argue that helping farmers produce bigger food harvests may only prolong Africa's penury. In the view of the World Bank and other development organizations, Africa needs to develop businesses that can earn the money to import the food it needs.

In a report issued in July, the World Bank suggested, among other things, that rural Africans grow cash crops for export and cater to tourists to earn income. While the report does acknowledge that bigger food crops would help some farmers, it suggests that many are so isolated that they should grow only what they need for themselves as cheaply as possible.

"No one wants to fight with Dr. Borlaug, he is one of the greats," says Kevin Cleaver, the World Bank's director of agriculture and rural development. "But he doesn't bring appropriate technology to Africa."

Dr. Borlaug and his backers say that the poorest countries don't have enough of a private sector to take the place of foreign aid and government support, or to find economic alternatives for the poorest farmers. That, they say, is why in Fufuo and other places where Dr. Borlaug has helped farmers expand their harvests, decline has usually followed initial success.

They also point out that wealthy nations have practical motives for their faith in free markets as the key to economic development, even if they don't practice that faith as purely at home. For one thing, it's cheaper. Development assistance to agriculture from rich nations and international lenders dropped by half in the 1990s, to less than $5 billion a year. While the World Bank has recently increased its loans for agricultural projects in sub-Saharan Africa, the total, at $416 million this year, is less than half the 1990 level.

Incentives to Overproduce

At the same time, the industrialized nations continue to pay their own farmers the subsidies that stymie development in poor nations -- a total of $311 billion last year alone. The subsidies not only protect American and European growers from low world-market prices; they also depress global prices by encouraging overproduction.

"If you want to do an agriculture experiment in Africa, experiment with taking away subsidies in the West for one year," says Kwame Amezah, the assistant director of extension services in Ghana's Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

The World Bank estimates in a recent study that if rich nations eliminated their farm subsidies and agricultural import restrictions, rural income in low- and middle-income nations would jump by $60 billion. As it is, world grain prices have fallen more than 50% over the past two decades, helping sap whatever incentive African farmers may have to push their own green revolution.

"I'm a biologist, not an economist, but even I can see [Western and African] policies aren't working," Dr. Borlaug says. "It's time to face up to reality."

Dr. Borlaug is himself the son of a farmer. Born and raised in Iowa, he studied forestry and plant pathology at the University of Minnesota, where he compiled a wrestling record that helped get him into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. In 1944, he was working at DuPont Co. testing condoms and other World War II military supplies for their susceptibility to the elements when he learned of a job at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a research institute near Mexico City supported by public and private foundations.

The young Dr. Borlaug arrived at the center as a plant disease was devastating Mexico's wheat fields, making the nation dependent on foreign grain. He was assigned to create a resistant variety, a process that then typically took a decade. He greatly shortened the time with a trick he called shuttle breeding: After his prototypes produced seeds in a plot in northern Mexico, he rushed them to southern Mexico, squeezing two growing seasons out of one year. His disease-resistant strains were in the hands of Mexican farmers within five years.

By the 1950s, Mexico's wheat fields were so abundant with grain that the plants had to be retooled so they wouldn't topple over. Dr. Borlaug solved the problem by using a dwarf Japanese variety to develop a shorter, sturdier plant. Soon, Mexico was growing all the wheat it needed.

Shuttle breeding also had the unintended effect of creating wheat strains much more tolerant of variations in climate and light conditions than typical wheat. So when the exploding populations of India and Pakistan overwhelmed those countries' antiquated farming sector in the 1960s, Dr. Borlaug had an antidote ready.

Farmers clamored for his seeds after seeing chemically fertilized plots produce five times as much grain as the same amount of land using traditional seeds and old methods. Dr. Borlaug warned political leaders of a public backlash if they didn't encourage construction of fertilizer plants and guarantee profitable prices for growers. In short order, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ripped up a flower bed in front of her residence and planted Dr. Borlaug's wheat. Farmer-friendly subsidies were created.

Meanwhile, researchers in the Philippines began developing rice plants that would also be used throughout Asia. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development were among the institutions backing Dr. Borlaug's efforts.

By the mid-1970s, India was self-sufficient in grain, depriving U.S. farmers of a client for their wheat. Pakistan's trajectory wasn't as smooth, but it now produces roughly as much wheat as Canada. At the 1970 ceremony where he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Borlaug predicted that the new crops sweeping Asia would give the world three decades of "breathing space" from famine. He retired from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center nine years later, with plans to teach at Texas A&M.

He didn't anticipate the food crisis that then swept Africa. In the 1960s and '70s, the newly independent nations of Africa, though using primitive farming methods, managed to grow enough to feed themselves when Asia couldn't. But then Africa's population began growing so quickly that subsistence farming couldn't keep up. In 1984, a famine centered in Sudan and Ethiopia killed about one million people.

Mr. Sasakawa, the Japanese philanthropist, called Dr. Borlaug at Texas A&M amid the 1984 famine and offered to finance him if he would help farmers in Africa. "I told him I was too old to start over and hung up," says Dr. Borlaug. "The next day, he called back and said 'Young man, I'm 15 years older than you.' "

Dr. Borlaug agreed to five years. They organized the Sasakawa Africa Association, which started work in Ghana in 1986. "I had no idea what I was getting into," he says.

Many of Africa's farmers are poorer than Asia's were before the green revolution. Tractors and irrigation systems are rarer. Livestock for pulling plows are scarcer in many places, killed off by parasites transmitted by the tsetse fly.

Corn, the most important food crop in several African countries, is so naturally promiscuous that its descendants tend to quickly dilute any traits bred into it by scientists. As a result, farmers who want to raise high-yielding corn must regularly buy seed, an enormous expense for a subsistence producer. In Asia, farmers don't face so much expense. They set aside some of their wheat and rice harvests to use as seed the following season. These self-pollinating plants change little between seasons.

The ranks of the world's hungry are swelling the fastest in Africa. One-third of the 590 million people living south of the Sahara desert are chronically undernourished. Foreign food aid puts only a dent in the problem: The food deficit -- the amount the region lacks for meeting its population's nutritional needs -- is five times the amount donated.

Flirting With Disaster

Sub-Saharan Africa's vulnerability to famine is only growing as its farm economy falls further behind its swelling population. The amount of food the region produces for each person has been dropping for two decades. Its farmers now reap just half as much grain from an acre of land as do poor farmers in Asia.

But even on a continent degraded by years of famine and war, Dr. Borlaug has been able to deliver flourishes of farming success. In the highlands of Ethiopia, where the government has backed the work of Dr. Borlaug by lending him personnel, legions of subsistence farmers doubled and tripled their corn harvests in the mid-1990s, some even obtaining the per-acre yield of the average American corn farmer. By 1997, the perennially hungry country was able to export some grain to Kenya. Now, drought once again threatens millions in the country with starvation. To lock in his advances, Dr. Borlaug wants the Ethiopian government to do far more to make fertilizer and credit available to farmers.

His successes have made the white-haired Iowan a household name in parts of Africa. "He's our hero," says Mr. Boateng, the secretary of the Fufuo Growers Association, who fondly recalls Dr. Borlaug sitting with the villagers and husking corn. "Every time we pray, we pray for Dr. Borlaug: 'Lord, we know he's elderly. Please extend his life.' "

With a small staff of its own, the Sasakawa Africa Association has concentrated on training a network of government farm advisers throughout the Ghanaian countryside. It provided a fleet of motor scooters so agents could reach areas where roads are too rough for cars.

The organization also has intervened where the free market has failed. When the Ghanaian government, under pressure from international lending agencies, stopped supporting the money-losing state seed-production company in the late 1980s, the business collapsed. At the time, the government, desperate for development funding, adhered strictly to lenders' requirements that the state withdraw from costly and inefficient agriculture supports.

Ten former employees of the defunct state seed business banded together in the village of Asuoyeboah, not far from Fufuo, to begin growing seed on their own. But they lacked money and technology. Then one of the Sasakawa-trained extension agents came by. He instructed them in Borlaug growing techniques, and production boomed. He also brought a herbicide from Monsanto Co. that greatly reduced the time farmers spent hoeing weeds, allowing them to expand their fields.

Soon, the corn cribs were overflowing. Sasakawa arranged a loan of about $1,500 for the farmers to build 18 more storage bins. Within three years, the farmers had paid off the loan.

The agents also brought a new seed strain that Dr. Borlaug had rescued from the reject pile. The variety, discovered by Purdue University researchers in the 1960s, didn't produce yields big enough to win over U.S. seed companies. But the seed is unusually high in protein, which Dr. Borlaug figured would be attractive to Africans short of meat and milk.

The seed, locally called Obatanpa, or "good nursing mother," now produces one-fifth of Ghana's corn. This corn is a vital ingredient in the mix used by mothers weaning babies from breast feeding and is one reason the number of undernourished people in Ghana has been halved over the past decade.

Mounting Inventory

Today, the Asuoyeboah cooperative is standing on its own but precariously. The 17 members of the group net about $250 a year each, which still leaves them below the rural poverty standard of one dollar a day. Their shelling machine is a 1957 model. They, like the farmers of Fufuo, have begun skimping on fertilizer. And their inventory of harvested seed continues to mount -- and sometimes rot -- for lack of a private or government marketing agent that can purchase the seed and store it until the market improves.

"We have increased our yields, but what do we do with it?" asks William Barnes, the group's chairman.

He points to piles of seed corn covered with plastic and canvas tarps. Farmers won't be buying until planting season begins in March. Mr. Barnes pleads for some kind of inventory credit or other form of intervention from a marketing middleman.

"All of our money is tied up in the seed," he says. "So what are we supposed to do for the next four months, go hungry?"

These questions find echoes in Fufuo.

"Our capital base is so small, where can we get loans from?" says Fufuo farmer Daniel Yaw Banahene. "We know how to use the techniques, but where do we get the money to apply it?"

Sasakawa provides small loans over a couple of years to get farmers in one village started, and then it leaves those farmers on their own and moves to another village. The Fufuo farmers got about $12 for each acre to buy the necessary fertilizer. A pittance in the West, it is a big sum for subsistence farmers who had never profited from their crops before.

"We paid it back 100%," Mr. Boateng says, swelling with pride.

For the first couple of years, the farmers could fund their purchases through sales of their surplus production. But then their fragile economics shattered. The cost of imported fertilizer and herbicide soared from about $12 per acre to nearly $30 per acre over the past decade. At the same time, income from their corn fell as local bumper crops and international gluts depressed the market price.

Some farmers have turned to the rural bank in the bigger village up the road, where interest rates can top 30%. Others have started to cut corners on fertilizer and herbicide use. A few have even stopped using fertilizer and returned to carving new fields out of the bush. That negates an environmental benefit of the Borlaug method, which emphasizes intensive farming on existing fields to reduce the pressure on farmers to constantly slash and burn new land.

The Ghanaian government elected two years ago is trying to tilt the focus back to rural development, but it has neither the financing nor the foreign support to pump huge volumes of state money into agriculture. "With the mere mention by us of subsidies, our development partners start howling, and want to catch us and chew us up," says Franklin Domkoh, a top official in Ghana's Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

So the farmers of Fufuo are once again looking to Dr. Borlaug and his organization for help, not to prepare their growing fields, but to compete better with U.S. and European farmers. Sasakawa's Ghana office, with an annual budget of $250,000, can't offer much more than advice on how the farmers can organize to negotiate lower prices for fertilizer, market their corn and lobby for a better deal. "If the farmers are strengthened, they can walk up to the development agencies and state their case," says Benedicta Appiah-Asante, who heads the Sasakawa program in Ghana.

That will take time -- something that she fears Dr. Borlaug may not have. She recalls a conversation with her mentor three years ago in Accra, Ghana's capital. "Dr. Borlaug was pouring me a cup of tea, and he said, 'Look at me, I'm old. I won't live to see the breakthrough in Ghana's agriculture. But you will. I'm counting on you."'

Now, as Ms. Appiah-Asante bounces along the rutted road to Fufuo, she says, "Dr. Borlaug should have seen the breakthrough. It should have come by now."

Write to Scott Kilman at [email protected] and Roger Thurow at [email protected].
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Updated December 3, 2002

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May 13, 2002
COMMENTARY FROM THE ARCHIVES: May 13, 2002

We Can Feed the World.
Here's How.

By NORMAN BORLAUG

Thirty-two years ago, I was chosen to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, representing the thousands of researchers who created the higher crop yields of the Green Revolution. The extra food created saved perhaps a billion people from starving in the 1960s.

Today, we are faced with another, equally enormous task. We must learn to produce nearly three times as much food for the more populous and more prosperous world of 2050, and from the farmland we are already using, in order to save the planet's wildlands. That's why I am one of the signers of a new declaration in support of protecting nature with high-yield farming and forestry. (Co-signatories include former Sen. George McGovern and Per Pinstrup-Andersen, the winner of the 2001 World Food Prize.)

The high yields of the Green Revolution also had a dramatic conservation effect: saving millions of acres of wildlands all over the Third World from being cleared for more low-yield crops. If the world were still getting the low crop and livestock yields of 1950, at least half of today's 16 million square miles of global forest would already have been plowed down, and the rest would be scheduled for destruction in the next three decades. Mexico, where I have done much of my high-yield research, is nevertheless losingnearly 3 million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farms.

There are people telling us not to raise the yields. Some of them say that modern food is not as healthy as yesterday's, though science can find no lack of nutrients and, all over the world, the people eating modern crops are growing taller and living longer. There are some who still fear that more food encourages population growth, though food security has helped bring Third World fertility rates 80% of the way to stability.

Some of the naysayers claim that modern, intensive farming is risking the world's biodiversity. However, they apparently think it's more important to save man-made biodiversity, such as antique farmers' varieties, than to save the rich web of unique species characteristic of a wild forest. We can save the farmers' old varieties through gene banks and small-scale gene farms, without locking up half of the planet's arable land as a low-yield gene museum.

I've spent the past 20 years trying to bring the Green Revolution to Africa -- where the farmers use traditional seeds and the organic farming systems that some call "sustainable." But low-yield farming is only sustainable for people with high death rates, and thanks to better medical care, more babies are surviving.

The International Food Policy Research Institute recently projected that Africa is a "building catastrophe." African farms are currently locked in a downward spiral, in which the traditional bush fallow periods are shortened from 15 or 20 years to as little as two or three -- which means crop yields are declining, soil nutrients are depleted, and still more land must be planted every year to feed the people.

Africa desperately needs the simple, effective high-yield farming systems that have made the First World's food supply safe and secure, and kept its wild species from extinction: chemical fertilizers, improved seeds bred for local conditions, and integrated pest management (with pesticides). Without those basics, Africa is likely to see tens of millions more undernourished children by 2020 -- even after it clears a whole Texas worth of wildlife habitat for additional cropland. Yet the funding for the FutureHarvest agricultural research network that serves the whole Third World is only about $300 million per year.

If America were losing wildlands equal to the size of Texas, we'd believe it was an urgent problem. We'd demand an increase in agricultural research and a crash program to get new technology to farms. If millions of U.S. children were starving for the simple lack of good seeds and fertilizers, the government would fall.

The declaration that I, and others, have signed does not endorse any particular technology or farming system. It simply notes that if the world is to avoid a Hobson's choice between starving children and extinct wildlife species, the first-order priority is higher yields on the land we already farm.

Mr. Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, teaches high-yield farming systems under the sponsorship of the Sasakawa-2000 Foundation and the Jimmy Carter Center. URL for this article:
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Updated May 13, 2002

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December 26, 2002

Amid a Heated U.S.-EU Clash
On Biotech, Africa Goes Hungry

Tinkering With Banana Genes Could Save
Ugandan Staple, but the Seeds Stay in a Lab
By ROGER THUROW, BRANDON MITCHENER and SCOTT KILMAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Ugandans devour more bananas than anyone else on earth -- about 500 pounds per person per year. They eat banana pancakes, banana mash, banana chips, banana bread. They season their beans with banana salt. They guzzle banana beer and sip banana gin.

So it's a national emergency when disease and pests devastate this staple crop. "It's terrible," said farmer Moses Kato while wandering through a thicket of banana plants in Magoggo, a village north of the capital of Kampala. Many of the big floppy leaves have been rendered yellow and brown by an airborne fungus called Black Sigatoka, denying the bananas the photosynthetic energy they need to grow. "A solution to the disease should be a top priority," he said. "There should be no delay."

The most promising solution, though, is bottled up in a test tube in the world's foremost banana lab 4,000 miles away in Belgium. There, scientist Rony Swennen has genetically modified banana cells to resist the leaf disease. Since 1994 his creation has literally been on ice, in frozen suspension, awaiting the chance to be planted in a test field in a tropical country. His hopes soared three years ago when the Ugandan government came to him for help. He was promised that legislation would soon be enacted to bring his bio-engineered bananas into the country. He is still waiting. Until Uganda constructs a legal framework, officials say he can't proceed.

"It's outrageous when you have the tools to do the job but no one allows you to do it," says Prof. Swennen, forlornly showing off his test-tube creation. "I can't get it into the fields," he complains. "Everyone has their own agendas."

What has happened on the way to a better banana plant is that Uganda's urgent agenda has become pinned down in the heated crossfire between the U.S. and Europe over the future of genetically modified foods. The U.S. government and American biotech industry are pushing to bring genetically modified, or GM, seeds to Africa. The European Union, where consumers are deeply suspicious of the safety of lab-altered food, is trying to convince the Africans to adopt their own go-slow approach to biotech.

The stakes are enormous. The U.S. biotechnology industry has nearly saturated its major domestic markets with its first wave of plants. It is hungry for new markets and, even more so, favorable publicity to counter international fears that it is unleashing 'Frankenfoods' on the world. The industry hopes to polish its image with examples of biotechnology helping African farmers overcome pests, poor soil and drought.

For EU officials, the spread of biotechnology into Africa poses slippery political problems. European consumers are so leery of the technology that EU governments have had a de facto moratorium on new GM crops for four years. European countries have hinted that imports from their former colonies could be jeopardized if they switched to bio-engineered crops. That would dent the already bruised economies of Africa, whose biggest export customer is Europe.

Africa is once again caught in the middle, as it so often is in geopolitical skirmishes fought by the world's developed nations. During the Cold War, this continent was the proxy battleground between the Western and Soviet blocs, with each backing various governments and rebel movements to win over more "client states." Now, Africa, which desperately needs to find a way out of its chronic food crises, is the proxy battleground in the biotech struggle. It brings to life the popular African proverb that says when two elephants fight it is the ants that get trampled.

"We didn't want to get into a war over bananas, but we've ended up getting caught in the middle of something that's beyond us," says C. F. Mugoya, the associate executive secretary of the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, the country's gatekeeper for GM projects. "If I want to eat a biotech banana here, the U.S. shouldn't care and Europe shouldn't care. If science offers us a solution, we should go for it if we want."

Push for Test-Tube Bananas

In 1999, the Ugandan government was moving aggressively toward embracing biotech crops. The crisis in the banana fields was so acute -- in parts of the country, some 80% of plants were being crippled by Black Sigatoka -- that the government pledged to spend $2.5 million over five years on the banana biotech project. It was the first time the Ugandan government, one of the poorest in the world, had put so much money into scientific research. The university dispatched a student to work with Prof. Swennen in Belgium. Plans were made to transfer his test-tube bananas to Uganda.

Then the contretemps over the safety of bio-engineered food between the U.S. and the EU erupted in Uganda, and the fast-track progress hit the brakes. Initially, scientists hoped that by the end of 2001 the government would have approved legislation setting up the legal framework to allow biotech experiments and GM seeds into the country. Now, with rumors spreading that GM food can cause allergies, sterility and deformities, the government has slowed its deliberations to let the public debate percolate in open workshops and newspaper and television forums. The new law may not be in place until the end of 2003. Until then, all field trials in Uganda are on hold.

"Originally the politicians were 100% in support of us," says W.K. Tushemereirwe, the leader of Uganda's national banana research program. "Now, with the whole debate from abroad coming here, they are asking, 'are you sure about this?' "

"If you say 'biotech' here, all hell breaks loose," says John Aluma, the deputy director general of Uganda's National Agricultural Research Organization. He bemoans the emotions that have ensnarled his science.

Economic risks also cloud African biotech efforts. When Ugandan scientists considered an application by U.S. crop biotechnology giant Monsanto Co. to test genetically modified cotton in Uganda, the country's cotton industry lodged an urgent protest. The United Kingdom and other European countries, it said, were threatening to stop imports of Ugandan cotton, worth $19 million a year, if its character was genetically altered.

This gave additional fuel to John Bigyemano, the executive director of the Uganda Consumers' Protection Association and a leading antagonist of biotechnology here. "For us to embrace GM now is shooting ourselves in the foot," he says.

How the fight between the U.S. and Europe plays out could well determine to what extent Africa will use biotechnology to tackle its most intractable problems. Millions of tons of sweet potato, maize, bananas and cassava, crops upon which Africa's poorest depend, are lost each year to pests, disease and drought. Projects underway to give these plants the genetic blueprints to resist assault from the elements could mean the difference between life and death for many Africans. Other scientists are exploring using biotech crops to deliver vaccines and vitamins that can ward off human disease where medical care is scarce.

"We missed the Green Revolution. We don't want to miss the GM revolution," says Patrick Rubaihayo, professor of plant breeding and genetics at Uganda's Makerere University who is overseeing students working on the banana biotech project. "We're being fed by Europe, Asia and the U.S. If we miss the GM revolution, then we're finished."

He shakes his head at the quandary. "Our government is asking us, 'Who's telling the truth on GM? European organizations say it's not safe, the U.S. says it is. Which way do we go?' "

The debate over genetically modified food is difficult because it turns on fears of long-term consequences. The world's leading scientists say there is no evidence whatsoever that biotech crops are harmful to humans and that, if anything, they're probably safer to eat than conventional food because of the additional regulation to which they're subjected.

But some scientists worry that moving genes from an unrelated species into a plant could upset some delicate balance, perhaps igniting a chain reaction that causes the host to produce deadly amounts of a toxin that it normally only makes in small amounts. Transplanting genes between plants could also make it harder for consumers to avoid crops to which they are allergic. Many environmentalists fear that genetically modified crops could harm nature; for instance, there are worries that U.S. corn plants genetically modified to make their own insecticide could be hurting the American Monarch butterfly, a beneficial bug.

Prof. Swennen and the Uganda scientists say bananas should be the least worrisome biotech plant of all. Bananas don't produce pollen, eliminating the greatest environmental fear that they would run wild in the open. Because the genetic engineering is in the leaf and stem it doesn't affect the fruit itself, so nothing would be expected to change for the consumer. And since Ugandans eat or drink all of the bananas they grow, there is no export market to worry about.

Still, the project is engulfed in the fear that is creeping down from Europe, where protesters have destroyed biotech test fields and activists pump out position papers over the Internet. Mr. Mugoya, of the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, says Ugandans ask: If Europeans are concerned, shouldn't we be, too? To quell the doubters, his council is overseeing the task of writing biosafety regulations, many of which likely will be similar to those in force in Europe.

Mr. Tushemereirwe, of the national banana research program, frets over the lost time. "The Europeans have the luxury to delay, they have enough to eat," he says. "But we Africans don't."

The building food crisis in southern Africa has brought the biotech battle to a fevered pitch. The government of Zambia turned away about 20,000 metric tons of U.S. food aid in October, saying the shipments contained genetically modified corn that was unsafe, capable of polluting the country's seed stock and, thus, jeopardizing its export markets, particularly to Europe. This raised suspicions in many African countries, including Uganda, where Mr. Bigyemano and others questioned whether the U.S. was more interested in helping American biotech farmers than hungry Africans.

Bush administration officials were outraged, and called on the EU to clearly assure African governments that American corn was good to eat. At a Brussels press conference, Grant Aldonas, the U.S. undersecretary of commerce for international trade, reacted with fury when a reporter repeated statements from anonymous European Commission officials to the effect that the U.S. was using Africa as a guinea pig to prove biotech is safe. "We provide food aid to starving Africans and that's a cynical act?" he asked. "That's frightening."

A spokesman for the European Commission, the EU's executive agency, hedged when questioned about whether the EU considers the American corn safe. "The EU position as far as food is that it's safe," said spokesman Michael Curtis, adding that "the environmental aspect is a completely different ball game."

The U.S. government, for its part, is spending about $12 million annually on African biotechnology. It has funded scientists in America and Africa to genetically engineer potatoes and sweet potatoes to resist attack by disease and pest. Dennis Gonsalves, a plant pathologist from Hawaii who saved that state's papaya harvest from ringspot virus with a genetically modified plant, has received $200,000 from the U.S. Agency for International Development to do the same for Uganda's crop. He hopes to have a papaya plant ready for launch in Uganda within three years.

That is, if the country has passed its GM rules by then. USAID, in addition to putting money into the banana project, is funding a consultant to help with drafting Uganda's biosafety framework. Alarmed by the American push, the development aid arms of various EU governments are countering with their own biosafety and regulatory funding in Uganda and the East African region.

Funding, Protest Worries

In the Laboratory of Tropical Crop Improvement at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, just outside Brussels, Prof. Swennen nervously bides his time, surrounded by 1,000 varieties of bananas and their cousin, the plantain. He fears that any rash move by him to plant his test-tube creation in Uganda or anywhere else in the tropics would trigger protests and jeopardize any prospect of biotech bananas being planted. He also worries that the lab's $2.5 million in funding, which began before the biotech controversy arose, would be threatened. "I'd have to close up," he says. "I'm scared I'd run out of money."

While he waits for a green light from Uganda, he is beginning work on developing a plant resistant to the nematodes that eat away at the roots of banana plants, even those in his own lab hothouses. The Ugandans say they could use that engineered plant, too.

In Uganda, the banana lab of the National Agricultural Research Organization is getting a fresh coat of paint and deliveries of new laboratory equipment. The scientists, while waiting for the national debate to subside, are busy isolating DNA samples and preparing cell suspensions of the local banana varieties for the day when they might be able to match them with Prof. Swennen's creations.

Out in the banana groves, the farmers are trying to cope with calamity. The root-eating nematodes are toppling plants so fast that new fields are being planted every couple of years, instead of every couple of decades. To strengthen the plants against the Black Sigatoka fungus and weevils that bore into the stem, they have begun cooking up a homebrew of nutrients to add to the soil around each plant: cow manure, cow urine, hot peppers, tobacco leaves, banana peels and local herbs all boiled and fermented together.

This concoction, the farmers say, has helped improve the banana production somewhat, so most of them have a few bunches left over to sell at the market each week. Moses Kato says some of his fellow farmers are using the extra money to buy proper school uniforms for their children. One man, he says, bought a television. Mr. Kato built a latrine for his family.

Priver Namanya, one of the Ugandan scientists, tells the villagers that biotech bananas would boost production, and incomes, even more. "I'll like that," says farmer Yusufu Konyogo, "as long as the bananas will taste the same."

Write to Roger Thurow at [email protected], Brandon Mitchener at [email protected] and Scott Kilman at [email protected]

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Updated December 26, 2002

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