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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by J. Brady Anderson,
Congressional Black Caucus Event
USAID Administrator
Biotechnology: Reducing World Hunger
September 15, 2000
Good morning everyone, and thank you, Congressman Hilliard.
It's a pleasure to be here and to be talking about agriculture and biotechnology -- the promise of science for addressing one of the fundamental problems of our day.
Biotechnology, as you all know, is part of a broader effort to use agricultural research and technology to help attack world hunger.
Through our partnerships with U.S. universities and with other agricultural research institutions over the years, USAID has worked with many developing countries to increase their food production.
This not only helped those countries to avoid food crises and famines, but it had benefits for the United States as well.
For example, American farmers growing grain crops got better seeds and better crop varieties out of the research USAID funded.
These better seeds have been worth $15 billion dollars to American farmers. At 140 times the original investment, this is a handsome return on our tax dollars.
We have had strong partnerships with a number of U.S. land grant colleges and universities, including many of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, for decades.
Rep. Clayton, thank you so much for organizing this and inviting me. You know how USAID has worked on tropical agriculture with both North Carolina State and North Carolina A&M for many years.
I am glad to see Rep. Bishop here from Georgia and Dr. Hill from Tuskegee University. Georgia State and Tuskegee have partnered with us for years on improving peanuts for both the developing world and America.
Auburn University is one of our partners, and we have supported its research on fish culture, contributing to expanding fish farming in both the U.S. and Africa.
We have had partnerships over the years with Mississippi State and with Florida A&M on improving African agriculture.
It's nice to see David Beckman here from Bread for the World. I expect that many of you, along with those of us at USAID, will continue to work in the coming year on the new Partnership to Cut Hunger in Africa.
Today, at the dawn of the 21st century, despite enormous increases in agricultural production and all the technological advances we have made, hunger is still with us. And it is of particular concern in Africa.
Today, there are 840 million undernourished people in the developing world-more people than the combined populations of the United States, Canada, Russia, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan.
Over the next 25 to 30 years, the world's population is expected to increase by 2 billion. To meet the increased food demands of this new population, farmers worldwide will need to increase food production by at least 50 percent.
Unfortunately, our global natural resource base is already under significant pressure. Fresh water and good quality farmland are both already in short supply.
In twenty years, almost a third of the world's population will be facing an absolute shortage of water for drinking as well as for agriculture.
So the challenge facing all of us today is -- how can we better feed the world's people?
Part of the answer lies in another question -- how can we use science to help us develop crops that are more productive per acre, help us get more "crop per drop" of irrigation water?
This is where the potential of biotechnology holds such promise.
What is biotechnology? I could give you dictionary definition, but for laymen like me, it is easier to understand biotechnology by talking about what it can do.
We can, for instance, use biotechnology to develop new crop varieties that tolerate drought, are resistant to insects and weeds, and able to capture nitrogen -- an essential fertilizer -- from the air.
Biotechnology can also make food more nutritious by increasing the amount of Vitamin A, iron, and other nutrients in the edible portion of the plant.
USAID began to support biotechnology in the early 1990s, collaborating with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute and Monsanto to develop virus-resistant sweet potatoes.
Diseases cause African sweet potato fields to yield less than half the yield in the rest of the world.
The collaboration went on to look at the possibilities for increasing the Vitamin A content of sweet potatoes.
And while USAID is no longer directly involved in this effort, Kenyan researchers have recently begun field testing of transgenic, or bioengineered, sweet potatoes -- the first such crop being grown outside of South Africa.
Besides Africa, we are also supporting biotechnology-related programs in the Middle East and Asia.
We hope that support for continued development of "golden rice" -- rice genetically engineered for higher beta-carotene content -- by the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, for example, will allow this technology to reach more farmers all over Asia.
If introduced and marketed properly, this innovation has the power to help not only the farmers who grow it, but the people who eat it -- in this case these people could include at least a million children who die and nearly 400,000 who go blind every year because of vitamin A deficiency.
There are major hurdles still to be overcome -- both in the laboratory and in the legal arena of intellectual property rights. But the promise of the technology for reducing world hunger and malnutrition is enormous.
There are other ways biotechnology can help address the food challenge by introducing new genes that could make crops easier to ship.
Nearly half -- half! -- of Africa's fruit and vegetable harvest is lost because it rots on the way to market.
If African farmers could grow transgenic bananas that ripened more slowly, they would have 40 percent more bananas to sell.
Indeed, some experts say that Africa has more to gain from agricultural biotechnology than any other region -- and they may be right.
Unfortunately, we must also recognize that there are those who feel that crops developed with biotechnology pose grave risks to the environment and to human health.
They argue that efforts to hone this new tool for even broader applications should be stopped now.
The weight of scientific evidence does not, we feel, lead us to endorse that view. Indeed, there is a lot of evidence that genetic engineering to increase pest resistance, for example, could actually improve the environment by reducing the need to spray for pests.
Florence Wambugu, a Kenyan scientist with whom USAID has worked, also points out that there may be no other option to increasing productivity -- you can't control viruses in the field, and you can't breed in resistance using conventional methods.
And the challenge of hunger and food insecurity is so great that we have every reason to pursue this goal through this application of modern science.
As the recent Washington Post editorial by Hassan Adamu, the Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria, put it so well: to deny desperate and hungry people the means to control their futures by presuming to know what is best for them is not only paternalistic, it is morally wrong.
But as we view its potential, we should also remember that biotechnology is not a silver bullet -- it cannot solve the problem of world hunger, in Africa or anyplace else, by itself. There are other pieces to the puzzle that must also be put in place.
Hunger today is not so much a matter of food production but a crisis of poverty. The millions of people around the world who live on pennies a day simply cannot afford to buy food or the means to produce it.
Biotechnology has the potential to improve the quality and increase the quantity of food available -- but it is up to us to ensure that the people who need it most can afford to grow it and buy it.
We must ensure, for example, that poor farmers in Africa either have or get access to cash, credit, better seeds, and fertilizer.
Under the leadership of the Clinton-Gore Administration, USAID is committed to working with Africans to find workable solutions to the challenges the continent faces -- food security being one of the most important of these.
In 1994, President Clinton launched the Greater Horn of Africa Initiative, which is designed to help the countries in the Horn of Africa improve agricultural techniques and better prevent and respond to conflict.
One thing this initiative has done is improve a new food aid targeting system in Kenya, which today ensures that food aid gets to those that need it the most.
The citizens of Kenya's Turkana District, for example, who were among the hardest hit by the recent drought, used to receive only two pounds of corn per month -- today, thanks to a program implemented by USAID, they get 22 pounds per month.
Four years later, when the President visited Africa for the first time, he announced the creation of a ten-year Africa Food Security Initiative that would build on successes in African agriculture.
In Uganda, USAID helped farmers recover from the onset of cassava mosaic disease: in 1997, cassava production in USAID-targeted areas was less than 1,000 metric tons. Last year, in these same areas, production was over 342,000 metric tons.
In Mali, USAID worked with communities to improve their irrigation of rice. As a result, agricultural growth has been a major part of Mali's impressive overall economic growth.
In addition to the Africa Food Security Initiative, USAID is part of a broader partnership, the "Partnership to Cut Hunger in Africa." I know some of you in this room are involved with this.
It will build on the Africa Seeds of Hope Act -- and we hope that it will help us, and our partners, craft a long-term approach to reduce hunger and increase food production in Africa.
As President Clinton has said, there are a thousand reasons we should work together -- because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is in our self-interest: Africa's future matters to America.
In the new century, USAID will continue working to ensure that that future is bright.
Thank you very much.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
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Last Updated on: July 12, 2001 |
