Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
2008). The risk for Africa in following this assessment is that it can easily be used to
endorse the status quo. Most smallholder farmers in African today practice something
suspiciously close to pure agroecology:  They use traditional seeds, plant their crops
in polycultures, irrigate with collected rainfall, and purchase almost no inputs such
as nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides from off the farm. They also work with great skill
from dawn to dusk, yet the result is that their cereal crop yields are only 10-20  per-
cent as high as in North America, they earn only $1 a day on average, and one-third are
undernourished.
The best approach is usually to combine agroecological insights with Green
Revolution seeds plus off-farm inputs. For example, integrated pest management (IPM)
combines biological controls of pests with Green Revolution seeds, plus the limited use
of chemical pesticides as a last resort. Integrated nutrient management would combine
manuring and legumes with some nitrogen fertilizer, but not as much as currently used
in the developed world. Yet the polarization of viewpoints between Green Revolution
advocates and Green Revolution critics makes this sort of integrated approach extremely
difficult.
One illustration is the current political battle over introducing genetically engineered
crops (referred to as GMOs) into Africa. GMOs have enjoyed safe and widespread use
over the past fifteen years in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, China, India,
the Philippines, and elsewhere—but not in Europe, where consumer anxieties and regu-
latory restrictions have kept them out of farm fields. There is a strong scientific con-
sensus in Europe that the use of genetic engineering in farming has not yet introduced
any new risks to either human health or the environment, a view endorsed by Royal
Society in London, the British Medical Association, the French Academy of Sciences,
the German Academies of Science and Humanities, and the Research Directorate of the
European Union (Paarlberg 2008). In 2010, in fact, the Research Directorate issued a
new report that stated, “The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than
130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving
more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular
GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies”
(European Commission 2010). Government policies in Europe nonetheless remain
strongly prejudiced against the technology, and because Europe continues to exercise
a strong postcolonial influence over Africa, governments in sub-Saharan Africa have
largely been persuaded to follow Europe in blocking the planting of agricultural GMOs.
As of 2013, it was not yet legal for farmers to plant any genetically engineered seeds in
forty-three out of forty-seven countries in Africa. In the majority of these countries it
was not even legal for scientists to do research using these seeds.
Five channels of external influence from Europe help to explain this blockage of agri-
cultural biotechnology in Africa. First, Africa's official development assistance (ODA)
from Europe is three times as large as ODA from the United States, and governments
in Europe have used their ODA influence to encourage African governments to draft
and implement highly precautionary European-style regulatory systems for agricul-
tural GMOs. European funding also shaped an important UNEP-GEF Global Project
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