Research

(Cross-posted from Global Food for Thought) Global food politics are riddled with paradoxes. While threats to global food security are becoming increasingly evident, efforts to stall the adoption of new technologies appear to intensify. There is a clear disconnect between comfort with familiar agricultural practices and the food challenges that lie ahead. Though food is recognized as a national security issue, it has yet to acquire the strategic importance it deserves, especially in African countries.

  Euphoria swept across Sub-Saharan Africa when Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States in 2008. Kenya, the ancestral home of his father, declared a national holiday to mark his victory. His re-election in 2012 has generated little celebration. This is mainly because in the last four years Africa has learned to relate to President Obama as a leader of another sovereign state and not as a relative of whom much is expected. President Obama’s seeming distance from the continent has helped Africa to reflect on its place in the world in a more mature and self-reliant way.

Inequality between men and women remains one of the most critical sources of low economic productivity in Africa. Many of the efforts seek to address the challenge by creating new training institutions. A complementary strategy is to identify and upgrade promising local initiatives. In her preface to the new Gender Equality and Female Empowerment, of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton states that achieving US global development objectives “will demand accelerated efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Critics of agricultural biotechnology have long maintained that the technology is unsuitable for small-scale farmers and harmful to the environment. But according to newly-released adoption rates, evidence is pointing in the opposite direction. In its latest report, Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2011, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) shows that biotechnology crops now cover 160 million hectares worldwide. Of the 16.7 million people who grew transgenic crops in 2011, 15 million or 90% were small resource-poor farmers in developing countries.

The on-going famine in the Horn of Africa has put in sharp focus the urgency to raise the continent’s food production through improved agricultural innovation. This cannot be done without reforming the continent’s research system by creating greater synergies between research, training, extension and commercialization. Africa’s research and higher education systems are dominated by fragmented approaches where research and teaching are carried out in separate institutions often under different ministries.