Farm Journal | November 1999 | Patricia Peak Klintberg
Florence Wambugu has, according to this story, no patience with well-fed Europeans who worry about genetically modified (GM) crops. Raised on a seven-acre farm in the highlands of Kenya, she sees nothing but potential and promise for biotechnology to increase Africa's food supply. She calls biotech seeds "user friendly" for those who cannot read and write, and essential tools for preventing losses from insects and disease. The average corn yield in Africa is only one-fifth that produced in the United States.
Wambugu was cited as saying she worries that the biotech controversy in Europe and in Japanmay threaten the availability of the technology to Africa, adding, "I have met with these people [environmentalists] and they do not want to know the truth. They portray Africa as a victim of biotechnology. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not victims. We are stakeholders."
Wambugu is director of the African Center of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). There are four other ISAAA centers, in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Philippines. For all that, it operates on a budget of about $1 million a year. Donations come from philanthropic foundations and companies like Pioneer, Monsanto, Novartis and AgrEvo as well as government agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is a patron of ISAAA.
The story says that ISAAA persuades companies to donate proven technologies to alter significant crops in developing countries. It has projects in Mexico, Asia and Africato control viruses in sweetpotatoes and maize, in Brazil to cure maize diseases and in Africa and Latin America for cassava.
The story says that small-scale mock field trials are underway at four sites in three different climates in Kenya. Thus far, only local sweetpotato varieties have been planted, readying a baseline to compare with their transgenic cousins.
Anatole Krattiger, ISAAAUs executive director based at Cornell University was cited as saying this type of partnership allows "the countries access to technology so critically needed for poverty alleviation. The GM sweetpotato trials will begin in the near future and all of Kenya is very excited by the hope this represents."
Val Giddings, vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, was quoted as saying, "The irony is ISAAA provides a solution to the charge environmentalists make that multinationals are trying to control the worldUs seeds. Wambugu is getting private technology into the public sector, increasing choices farmers around the world will have. She is one in a million. I wish we could clone her."
