Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa
Robert Paarlberg
Harvard University Press, 2008

It’s quite unintuitive, actually. African nations, some of the poorest on Earth, have experienced little to no improvements in agricultural productivity since the dawn of modern agricultural science, yet they maintain some of the tightest restrictions on agricultural biotechnology in the world.  With the exception of South Africa, purchasing or planting genetically modified (GM) seeds, or sometimes even accepting unmilled GM grain as food aid, is illegal in every single African country. Given that many of these same developing countries are comfortable with comparatively loose or no regulations in other categories, this contrast poses some questions.

Many critics of globalization had actually expected a “race to the bottom” in regulatory policies. They predicted that rich countries, as they moved their investments into poor countries, would find it competitively advantageous to accept the looser regulatory standards of developing economies. However, what we see with GM technology in Africa is the exact opposite: poor nations are “trading up” regulatory standards.

In Starved for Science, influential agriculture policy advisor and political scientist Robert Paarlberg argues that, in the case of GM food crops, this is a policy step that Africa’s 344 million undernourished people cannot afford to take. He argues that Africa needs GM crops desperately, but its current rejection of GM technology has little to do with science or Africans’ actual needs and everything to do with postcolonial influence from rich countries that do not like GM but can afford to live without them.

Needless to say, these statements have lit up an already highly charged international debate about GM crops, in which GM proponents are often emphatically shot down as supporters of multinational agricultural conglomerates, environmental degradation, social injustice to smallholder farmers, and neocolonialist globalization. High-profile GM opponents, such as Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, have vociferously decried GM and attracted a substantial base of international followers. The majority of environmental NGOs and activist groups also vocally oppose GM, and ultimately, public opinion in developed countries has also effectively remained anti-GM. Fears about the potential pervasiveness and invisibility of GM’s effects on consumers and allegations of the immorality of large and “evil” GM companies has made this debate intensely emotional and political.

However, in Starved for Science, Paarlberg invites us to abandon what has become a dangerously polarized and politicized policy stalemate, and replace it with a more nuanced and thoughtful assessment about how to bring prosperity to Africa’s poor. His reasoned, well-researched arguments have cut through the turbulent invective of the GM debate to become influential. The book, introduced by Green Revolution pioneer Norman Borlaug and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, has received public praise from Oxford University economist Paul Collier and longtime English Parliament Dick Taverne. In 2009, Paarlberg was invited to speak on hunger alleviation before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and his arguments were echoed by Nina Federoff, science and technology advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State and the administrator of USAID.

International development experts, agriculturalists, and policy advisors such as Paarlberg himself are increasingly calling for the introduction of GM food crops into African farms to reduce costs for farmers (first-generation GM crops) and bolster nutrition (second-generation GM crops). Even as Africa remains the only region on Earth where human poverty and hunger continue to increase, African nations have little access to the modern agricultural science that more developed nations do. Genetic modification, unlike conventional breeding, which is time-consuming, less accurate, and limited, allows specific genes to be targeted and substituted for those that occur in other organisms like bacteria, so that special traits like herbicide resistance or water efficiency can be added with greater control, reliability, and speed. Creating a new variety of potato, for example, would take 15 years by conventional methods but only six months using GM technology. For African countries facing mass undernutrition, low productivity, widespread poverty, and now variable climate, this could be a game-changer.

However, GM is not favored by consumers in developed countries. Which is understandable, Paarlberg explains, because rich countries do not have much to lose by rejecting GM. Tracing the evolution of American farms from horse-plowed beginnings to industrial-scale production systems, Paarlberg demonstrates how modern agricultural science successfully improved farmer welfare and met the needs of the growing country without raising food prices. Developments in powered machine technology, chemical science, biological science, and information science not only transformed agriculture in America, but even the structure and prosperity of society.  Once the infrastructure for efficient productivity had been established, however, developed-nation consumers were in a place where they could question the benefits of modern agricultural technology without risking food shortages or price spikes.

Herein likes the darker side of the anti-GM phenomenon in Africa. Focusing on Europe, which still holds postcolonial influence—economically, culturally, politically—over Africa, Paarlberg asserts that rich countries are going farther than simply regulating GM in their own countries; they are exporting their “rich tastes” into Africa. European countries have exercised their postcolonial influence on African nations through their aid programs, power in the UN system, commodity markets, and NGOs. Even if the direct effects of anti-GM lobbying are limited, high-profile conflict and debate over the safety of GM crops have driven many traditional donors from continuing to invest in agricultural biotechnology. Judging from the state of GM policy today—the only country in the continent in which GM crops can be grown is South Africa—anti-GM influencers have been very successful.

Ultimately, Starved for Science provides a forceful, but informed, counterweight to the strong claims of environmental NGOs working both in the U.S. and Europe. This book provides the foundation for an informed and nuanced conversation that will hopefully lead to a pro-poor, pro-environment, and pro-Africa solution.