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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios, Administrator, USAID
Biotechnology
at the American Enterprise Institute
June 12, 2003
Thank you very much Chris, and thank you for the invitation to speak today on a subject that makes a great deal of difference to me.
I have seen famine up close. A member of my family, my great uncle, starved to death during the Greek famine during the Nazi occupation of Greece in 1942-1943, where a half-million Greeks died. Oxfam, the great European and American-based NGO was formed by a rabbi, an Anglican priest, and a Methodist pastor at Oxford University to deal with this same Greek famine of 1942 - 1943.
It scarred the memory of the Greek people and of my own family. Basically, the German general staff stripped the country in order to feed Rommel's army in North Africa. It was a poor country to begin with, but by doing that and then having the British blockade on top of it because of the war, it meant food didn't reach the people and literally there were bodies in the streets. My great uncle was buried in a mass grave.
So hunger and famine, to me, are not academic questions. I have taken part in the response to major food emergencies in the world in the last 14 years. I have seen mass graves.
The fact is that we are facing a major problem in Africa, in particular, but also to a lesser degree, in Central Asia. A third of Africans, almost 200 million people, are chronically food insecure. The reality is that more than half of Africa's population, about 300 million people, live on less than $1 a day.
We need to focus our attention on what the countries have to deal with. AID stopped investing in agricultural development after Peter McPherson left AID in 1986 to become Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. At that time, we were spending $1.3 billion a year in agricultural development, $1.3 billion. When I arrived (at AID) back in 2001, we were spending $243 million. We dropped a billion dollars, and that's not inflation adjusted.
If you ask why this situation in Africa is taking place at a time when there's a dramatic increase in productivity in agriculture everywhere else in the developing world, particularly in Latin America and Asia, yet there is a drop in productivity in Africa, I can tell you that when AID cut back on funding for agriculture, we were not alone. When we left agriculture, the World Bank followed, all of the regional banks followed, the Europeans followed, the Canadians. As a result, there's been a dramatic decline in that spending. And the consequence has been, in the poorest areas with the most food insecurity, the most prone to famine, we have a situation where productivity is declining.
Biotechnology, in my view, is one of several answers. It's not the answer to all of our problems because, I always argue, in agriculture you can never separate the scientists from the economists. Because if you produce more food and there's no market for it or there's no infrastructure to move it around, you have a large problem. So we always marry our agricultural economists with our agricultural scientists so the two things meet, and all of our people agree with that.
Let me give you four statistics that are very disturbing about the food situation in Africa. One, basic yield per hectare in Africa are one-fifth, one-fifth of what it is in China. Fertilizer use in Africa is 8 kilograms per hectare, 8 kilograms. In Latin America, it's over 60 kilograms, and in Asia, it's 100 kilograms per hectare.
Only 4 percent of Africa's farmland is irrigated, and most of the major famines in Africa in the last 30 years have been driven by drought exacerbated by war. In the Middle East, that's 29 percent and in Asia it's 34 percent.
The Green Revolution obviously took root in Latin America and Asia, where 60 to 80 percent of the crop area is planted with improved varieties or hybrids. Well, in Africa, the figure is in the 20 to 30 percent range. Much of it is due to the wonderful research that CGIAR -- the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a subsidiary of the World Bank -- has done all of these years. AID has been the largest donor to the CGIAR network since it was founded in the mid '60s. In fact, that network of the Bank, with AID, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation are what led to the Green Revolution in Asia, which has basically prevented famine in much of Asia, with the exception of North Korea and one incident in 1974 in Bangladesh.
In fact, the economic growth of the economies in Asia started when they began making substantial investments in agriculture. People think it's all because of industrialization. But almost all of the countries that took off economically started out by developing large agricultural surpluses. Why we don't get this message and send that to Africa is something that I don't quite understand, except that there's a bias now against this, although that's changing.
When I bring this up among my friends in the development community, no one says, "Oh, you're wrong, Andrew. You're wasting money. Why are we doing this?" They all say, "Oh, you're right, I suppose." And many countries like Canada and the United States have both made a decision to start reinvesting in agriculture.
Agricultural productivity in the last four decades has increased everywhere, but declined in Africa as a result of the lack of investment, bad policy in many countries, and war.
New research published last month in Science magazine showed that the Green Revolution, however, is finally reaching Africa, where improved seed varieties are reaching the populations in West Africa, Uganda, parts of Kenya, Mozambique and Angola. I don't want to say all of that is from AID because it's not, but AID had a large hand in what happened in Mozambique and Angola during the civil wars.
A study by IFPRI, the think tank of the CGIAR network, shows by 2020 to 2026 that 16 million more African children will be malnourished if we do not turn the situation around. If we can increase annual crop productivity from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent, the opposite happens. In other words, we'll have a declining malnutrition instead of increasing malnutrition. That is not an undoable thing. The increases in Asia were much more substantial than that.
Now, let me talk about some of the attacks on biotechnology that have taken place among some of the advocacy groups, particularly in Europe. When we see the tragic force of this, where the politics and the economic competition of the West is being imposed on the developing world, it is troubling. Most African scientists that I've talked to, the Ministries of Agriculture, and our field staff -- we have AID missions in 79 countries around the world and we deal with these people on a daily basis - most scientists in Africa and health offices are outraged by the attacks on GMO food aid that were made during the Johannesburg Summit. We have been eating this same food for seven years. It is integrated fully into our food system and also integrated in Canada.
In fact, you can already get it in Europe. 70 or 80 percent of our soybeans are now biotech, and there's a huge market in Europe for animal feed. They've been using it for years, and they're still eating it. No one says anything because they don't grow a lot of soybeans in Europe. So there's no competition, so the issue is not brought up. But the fact is that the soybean crops in the United States are even more biotech than the corn crop is.
Here are some of the arguments that have been used:
The first is: biotechnology is not what Africa needs. It needs investment in other areas, and we're taking away investment by focusing on it.
The first thing we do know is that, since 1980, 50 percent of the increased productivity in the developing world, in agriculture, is a result of the seed technology -- 50 percent. If we're going to increase productivity in Africa, we're going to have to use science and technology. It's not just by improving traditional methods. It's also improved varieties. It's also hybrids. Each country is different and the needs of their agricultural system are different. One of the answers to the problem of productivity is clearly seed technology, and biotech is a critical part of that.
I had dinner with the leading biotech scientists in South Africa, where, by the way, biotechnology is taking off, not just in Bt cotton, but also in maize production, and it's not just the native seed that we develop here, I mean, in yellow maize, but they eat -- primarily for human consumption in South Africa -- white maize, which we eat very little of here. They're developing their own seed varieties that are appropriate for their agricultural, climatic, and soil conditions in Africa, and particularly in Southern Africa. There is a dramatic rise in the portions of the corn crop in South Africa and the cotton crop that use biotech. They are now an essential part of the South African economy. It's not just for the big farmers; it's also for the small farmers. And if you go into the villages, among poor black farmers in South Africa, they're using this seed, and they're making a lot of money: many of them have gone from a couple thousand dollars a year to ten thousand dollars. We have empirical evidence, in terms of studies, where in a couple of areas there has been a dramatic rise in family income as a result of this technology.
Second and this is the anti-multinational, anti-world economy argument that is being used against the globalization economy: accepting biotechnology crops will make African farmers dependent on multinational companies.
Well, one, our strategy is to develop biotech capacity in Africa. We're taking African scientists who have Ph.D.s already, bringing them here for a post-graduate degree or bringing them here to our land grant schools and colleges to get their Ph.D.s so they can go back and teach the technology for their own purposes, in their country, under their own traditions. Much of this technology in Africa, by the way, is not patented. It is public sector, it's open technology, it's on the open market, and it's not going to be sold by multinational corporations once it gets into the agricultural community. We just opened up, in January of last year, a biotech research center in the Ministry of Agriculture in Egypt, which will begin to revolutionize Egyptian agriculture. And so this is, again, an argument that has no basis in fact.
This is the next argument: biotechnology-derived crops will adversely affect the environment in Africa. I have never seen such a campaign of vilification based on outrageous misstatements from a scientific point of view.
In terms of the environment, these are the arguments out there, and this is what disturbs me the most. Some of the groups in Europe spread this rumor: according to one of the ministers in one of the Southern African countries who came up to me and told me this: in the villages that are Muslim, the groups are telling people that the Americans have put pig genes in the American corn, and if you eat them, of course, you are violating Islam.
Now, I said, "Minister--"
He said, "Is that true, Andrew? Is it true?"
I said, "No, it's not true." I know all of the corn varieties that are biotech or approved varieties, and none of them have animal genes of any kind in them.
Well, "Could we do it?"
"Yeah, we could, but why would we do it? What's useful in a pig that would be put into corn seed? It hasn't been done, and we know there are six or seven varieties that we grow in the United States, and none of them has any animal genes in it."
So, that kind of statement is being spread now in an organized and systematic fashion.
The second argument was, in another country, the Minister of Agriculture said, "They're telling us if we accept your food aid -- this is in the middle of a major drought, by the way, a very serious situation where malnutrition rates have been rising alarmingly - we won't be able to export to Europe. But they don't export much to Europe anyway. By the way, we're the major food donor in the world, fifty-five to sixty percent of the world's food aid comes from the United States.
And I said to the Europeans, "If you would like your food aid to take the place of ours, go ahead and do it." But there is no substitute being offered. And the fact is there's a huge deficit, in the millions of tons, and it's not something you'd buy from one neighboring country and move to another country.
This is another rumor that's being spread. If you take American corn as food aid, farmers will plant the seeds and it will cross-pollinate. That's the first fallacy. This is all yellow corn. Africans don't particularly like yellow corn. That's just what we produce, and it's available, and it saves people from dying of starvation in a famine. And, secondly, when people are hungry, they don't plant their seeds, they eat them, particularly if they don't think they're going to live to the next harvest. They even eat seeds we give them to plant. This is one of the serious problems we have: people eat all of their seed stock, and there's no seed stock left. That's a problem we're facing in Ethiopia right now.
I've never seen in any famine, in the last 14 years, where people take food aid and plant it, anywhere in the world. I've never heard of that. But more to the point, the seed that we sent, the yellow maize, is inappropriate for African growers. It won't grow much because it's grown for American climatic conditions.
But this is the thing that's disturbing. They don't export maize to Europe, but they do export: coffee, and tea, and nuts, and vegetables and fruit. Now, this is what was told to the African farmer: The corn you plant from American food aid will cross-breed with your vegetables, and your fruits, and your nuts, and we'll never accept them in Europe.
Now, you don't have to be a genius. You cannot have open pollination of corn with fruits and vegetables. You can cross-pollinate one variety of corn with another variety of corn, but you can't do it across different crops. It's not scientifically possible. This is just complete nonsense.
There was one thing that was passed out at the Johannesburg Summit, I'll never forget it. It was by a group in Britain. On the development side, actually, we agree more than we disagree with the Europeans. Half the development ministers in Europe are furious with these groups because they agree with us in AID. Their career ministers, their scientists, their economists say biotech is an answer to part of the problem of productivity in Africa, and they've been promoting it themselves as the hysteria developed over this, which is the thing that's most unfortunate.
So the fact is that bad science has been used to scare people. One of the cards sent out said, "If you eat biotech food, your DNA will be altered."
I called in one of our chief biotech officers and asked him: "Is that true?"
He started laughing at me and said "it's ridiculous." And yet that is one of the rumors that was passed, and I have the card, a postcard, that was sent out en masse from the Johannesburg Summit.
Are there arguments that could be made? Absolutely. There are risks to all technology. But let me tell you a story from a farmer from China. We have a serious problem with the misuse of pesticides in the developing world. Why do they use pesticides? Because of pest problems.
I worked in AID in the first Bush administration, and we were having a terrible locust plague in Northern Africa. One of the ways we dealt with it, because it was going to cause a famine -- Julia Taft, my predecessor, now at UNDP, ran a massive anti-locust campaign in North Africa, and we stopped the destruction of crops and stopped the locusts. It's much better, however, not to use pesticides, particularly in countries that can't use them responsibly. The amount of pesticide poisoning in the developing world is very serious. People die in the developing world because it's not used properly.
You know, Chinese farmers buy atropine. Do you know what atropine is for? It's to prevent certain kinds of poisoning from taking place because they give it to their kids when they're using pesticides on the farm.
The U.S. has developed insect-resistant (virus-resistant and drought-resistant too) varieties that can avoid the use of pesticides and reduce the amount of fertilizers and herbicides that must be used. This means that the damage to the environment from these inputs - which, by the way, Africans can't afford to begin with, and you can see that in the statistical data -- we can solve part of our problem in terms of inputs and lack of capital by improving the variety so you won't need as much of this stuff.
The last argument is that biotechnology dumps unwanted grain and forces people to accept food aid that we would never consume in this country. That is utter nonsense. All of the food aid that we use in the United States or that we buy in the United States for use abroad is bought on the commercial market. There is an illusion that there's a bunch of silos that say "Food Aid." It's not true.
When we want food aid for any country in the world, we go to the same market that everybody else goes to in the United States, commercial, to buy food from the food processing companies. We buy food. That's how we do it.
The only food I know of where there are big stocks is dried milk, not a biotech issue, one. Two, we don't do very much with that. But all of the other crops are, in fact, purchased from the same markets, and we're not dumping surplus that we don't need. It's from our own commercial markets.
We have developed a collaborative agricultural biotechnology initiative called CABIO, and it works with American land grant colleges and research institutes like the Danforth Center in St. Louis to link our scientists with African scientists. We have a scientist here from Tuskegee and other schools. I don't know if any of you remember George Washington Carver, one of our greatest scientists in our history. He was an African American, the son, I think, of slaves. He was a professor at Tuskegee.
I wish he were alive to answer some of these arguments now that are so inaccurate.
We're also working with the Rockefeller Foundation and with IFPRI, whose director is my good friend, Per-Pinstrip Anderson. He's a Dane, a well known agricultural economist. IFPRI is the think tank of the CGIAR network of agricultural research institutes. We have European scientists and economists who are with us on this very strongly, and so we've developed this network.
We're also working on something very important: bio-fortification. Malnutrition is one of the major causes of high death rates in the Third World. The death rate, for example, in Afghanistan, 25 percent of the kids die before they are five years old-- 25 percent.
And by the way, in Iraq, it's 13 percent. In Jordan, it's 5 percent. Jordan, which is poorer than Iraq, has a much lower child death rate because they have much better clinical systems for dealing with these issues than Iraq does. We hope to correct this very quickly in Iraq, the horrible death rates. About 400,000 kids died needlessly in Iraq in the last five years -- 400,000. It is a terrible situation that exists there in terms of water and sanitation.
But anyway, one of the reasons we found this to be true, even in Iraq now, we've had an assessment team looking at this, and we're about to do a bio-fortification system in the grain mills, is a Vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency, if it's not in your regular food supply, and you don't get tablets, will dramatically increase the death rate among young children. If you give two treatments of Vitamin A a year per child, the death rate goes down 25 percent. It's very high. It protects a child against infection.
And so our job is not to get every kid taking Vitamin A pills twice a year because you can't do that. The cost of such a system is too much. So we add Vitamin A to the food supply along with zinc and iron. Afghan women have the highest mortality rate in the world, and it's due in large part to an iron deficiency in their diet.
We can introduce that, because we know spinach, for example, is extremely high in iron, and other crops are as well. By introducing those varieties in the agricultural system, you weave it into the system, you will drive the death rate down then, not just for children, but for women who are pregnant as well.
So we are developing in India right now a consortium to supply Vitamin A mustard oil, with a public-private alliance, because mustard oil is the principal oil used by poor people in India, and they have a high problem with Vitamin A deficiencies.
We are, with Monsanto, Iowa State University, the University of Illinois and two CGIAR centers, developing a Vitamin A-enhanced corn called Golden Maize for African use, and we're also developing what's called Golden Rice, which is a high Vitamin A rice, which also will be used in Asia and Africa.
So there's a lot of things we can do, and my solution is to try to deal with these deficiencies and drive down hunger rates. Biotechnology is a tool, and we believe that we need to develop in Africa the capacity to use it on their own.
Let me just quote from a recent report, and I'll end there, and I quote, this is an African report by African scientists who declared "their commitment to... building Africa's human and physical capability in biotechnology to be able to engage with global public and private sector partners to capture the advances needed to sustainably intensify African agriculture." This is a report that was just recently concluded.
We are now providing $350 million in food aid to stop Ethiopian food insecurity, $350 million. Almost 60 percent of all the food going to Ethiopia comes from the United States Government. We shouldn't have to do that. Now, biotechnology is not going to solve all of the problems, but it will solve some of them. The research being done is very helpful to southern Africa on the drought issue.
One South African scientist is developing a corn variety that will be extremely resistant to drought, and she was telling me when I had dinner with her last August that they were taking a gene from a plant that requires almost no water to grow. And they're going to transfer that and cross-breed it with a corn variety of white maize available in the United States to produce something suitable for the agro-climatic growing situation in southern Africa, and it could deal with this repetitive tragedy of poor people having to face the prospects of starvation every time there's a drought.
Those are my comments. I'd be glad to answer any questions.
Thank you.
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