By Abdallah el-Kurebe
The constant question is, where will food for the fast-increasing population come from, if, according to African Development Bank (AfDB) statistics, 2019; Africa is the most vulnerable continent to climate change impacts under all climate scenarios and Sub-Saharan Africa has 95% of rain-fed agriculture globally; and if Agriculture in Africa continues to be characterized by aged farmers (on average 65 years), most of them smallholder farmers with less than 2 hectares of cultivable land, growing low yielding varieties, often times landraces.
Additionally, they are perennially faced with endemic and invasive pests and diseases and recurrent droughts occasioned by climate change.
Africa is our ancestry as the human race, our continent, and our common home. Her population as of 2016 stood at approximately 1.216 billion people and is estimated at around 1.37 as of 2021, about a 68% rise from the millennium population. In 2022, the population rose to 1,426,736,305, according to Worldometer.
If the continent has adopted blueprints such as the SDGs, which aspires to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030 (SDG2); or the visionary Malabo declaration that promised to end hunger and halve post-harvest losses in Africa by 2025, why does SSA continue to witness the highest number of food insecure people globally (424.5 million -40.5% of the region’s population)?
Many scholars predict that the situation will worsen according to productivity trends for cereals and roots and tuber crops’ performance from 1961–2018 is anything to go by (FAOSTAT, 2020).
While the pressure on land and agricultural production will continue to mount, Africa must turn to technology that promises substantive intensification (increased production on the same or fewer resources), and improved farmer well-being and incomes thus attracting youths to crop production.
For a better perspective, SSA to a large extent missed out on the increased productivity, self-sufficiency on a nation’s arable land, biodiversity conservation, climate change challenges mitigation, not to mention improved health, social and economic benefits ($ 186.1 b) accruing from the commercialization of genetically modified crops between 1996-2016.
Genetically modified crops ushered in an era of accelerated/speed breeding tools, popularly referred to as New Breeding Techniques (NBTs) which work synergistically with conventional tools to introduce useful genetic variation to accelerate the rate of genetic gain.
Genome editing is one of the most notable of the NBTs, which opens a new toolkit for plant breeding to be performed at an unprecedented pace and in an efficient and cost-effective way, enabling crop improvement to go beyond the current limit and move to the next generation.
What is encouraging though, is that African research scientists have embraced the technology and are leading various projects that seek to apply the technology in addressing major challenges facing the continent.
The concern now among developers and investors is that should a restrictive regulatory approach be adopted in many jurisdictions, and genome-edited plants suffer a similar fate as has been the unfortunate case with GMOs, then this would create huge financial burdens, thus discouraging research in the same way.
We must here laud Nigeria and Kenya, the front-runner countries in Africa, who have published guidelines on the regulation of genome editing, and supported to a large extent, the progressive product-based approach.
The two countries in Africa, are clearly demonstrating a desire to move into the future with progressive, cost and time and cost saving technologies that assure food security, environment conservation, and economic prosperity, and so should all African countries.
Therefore, we must all come together to a dialogue, to shape the narrative and public perceptions of genome editing to be able to tap into this technology for the benefit of our continent. This is why, during ABBC2021, ISAAA AfriCenter, and several universities notably Nigeria’s Ebonyi State University, Ethiopia’s Addis-Ababa University, and Kenya’s Kenyatta University among others with the backing of African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) launched the African Coalition for Communicating about Genome Editing.
The coalition is a step in the right direction, to foster open and transparent dialogue on genome editing on the continent, and to draw synergy from the acquisition of soft skills by experts in agriculture, health, and environment applying the technology through interaction with those in social science disciplines, policy leaders, private sector and the media.
