Theme: AFRICA IN THE NEW MILLENIUM

Sub-theme: Health, Politics and Contemporary Africa

In The End of History and the Last man (1992), American thinker, Francis Fukuyama argued that history was over because the world was converging toward societies of democratic capitalism. But the events of September 11, 2002 in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh and Washington D.C. seemed to nullify Fukuyama’s thesis. History was still being made through the terrorist bombings of capitalist institutions. Similarly, recent advances in biotechnology appear to be building up a new historical text whose implications to human life could be far-reaching. At present, there is a raging debate among scientists, religious leaders, politicians and economists with regard to the new biotechnological revolution. Biotechnology has allowed scientists to engineer new crops by splicing together particular genes rather than relying solely on the uncertain crosses that are hallmarks of traditional crop breeding. For some people, this is a horror. Tinkering with nature’s order, they argue, will backfire when engineered genes escape to the wild and disrupt delicately balanced ecosystems. But for others, plant engineering signifies more nutritious food and more productive and disease-resistant crops which will in turn alleviate hunger and reduce the amount of land and pesticides used in agriculture. Plant engineering could also give birth to more forests and new medicines for ailments which have, to date, failed to respond to modern medicine. But applied to both human beings and animals, the biotechnological knowledge has so far shown great capacity to change the course of life. The biotechnological manipulation of human beings could move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history. The advent of human clones might disrupt our existing political order, increase our lifespan and create super humans with far-reaching social, economic and cultural implications. Our modest intervention in the raging debate focuses on Africa. As the world embraces this new technology, Africa remains a consumer rather than a producer of biotechnological knowledge and its products. This paper highlights some of the biotechnological advances that have so far taken place and argues that most of these changes have mainly occurred in the West. Noting that Africa needs to be at the centre of the biotechnological revolution in order to benefit, the paper sustains the argument that poverty and shortage of funds are major impediments to the continent’s participation in the new technology.

1. Introduction

Over the past ten years, a great deal of intellectual energy has gone into the problematic of biotechnology. This is because, as a scientific discipline, biotechnology is an enterprise which directly affects humans – individuals and humanity as a whole – and brings with it many potential benefits and consequences. Broadly, biotechnology entails cloning, stem cell research, genetic engineering and neuropharmacology. Generally, the science of biotechnology targets, for its research, both plants and animals, including human beings. But the urge to embrace biotechnological innovations has not occurred in a vacuum. Various problems facing humanity today – famine, conflicts, diseases, population explosion, food shortages and desertification – have forced us to look for solutions everywhere including the tendency to undertake biotechnological experiments. As we settle into the new millenium, there is little doubt that we will soon be able

to manipulate human embryos in order to develop desired traits. Biotechnological science might also allow scientists to delay aging and to insert genes that enhance physical and cognitive performance, combat disease or improve looks into embryos. The biotechnological revolution might also give us opportunities to produce many tree seedlings that could turn deserts into a forests in a very short time. We need not emphasize that current advances indicate that biotechnological research could also increase food production, reduce famine and alleviate poverty.

Yet, to be fair, the biotechnological changes currently taking place in the world are fundamentally funded and controlled by the rich West. Developing, countries – most of them in Africa and Asia –are mere spectators and consumers of the biotechnological advances, raising fears about the safety assurances of the entire project. This paper looks at the biotechnological breakthroughs on animals, including humans, and the consequences of those advances for Africa. It also interrogates the various ways biotechnology has changed the patterns of plant and crop production with specific reference to the African continent.

1. Biotechnology: Humans, Animals And Africa

The revolutionary promises of biotechnology have become exciting centres of focus by modern scholarship. In The end of History and the Last Man (1992), American thinker, Francis Fukuyama argued that history was over because the world was converging toward societies of democratic capitalism. But this hypothesis was put in doubt as a result of the events of September 11, 2001. History was still being made through the terrorist bombings of Western capitalist institutions by the al Qaida network. Early this year, Fukuyama published another controversial book Our Posthuman Future (2002). In this volume, the author observes that biotechnology had brought about the "the recommencement of history". By that he means that the biotechnological manipulation of human beings may well move us into a ‘post-human stage of history’ by changing human nature in ways that erode the foundations of the putative convergent political order. Obviously, in stating his case in this manner, Fukuyama assumes that history is a unilinear narrative moving in only one direction. Yet as we know it from the Greek days of Plato and Aristotle, history could mean going back rather than forward; it could also imply cyclic motions. However, despite his narrow perception of history, Fukuyama’s observation that biotechnology will bring about profound changes in human nature (and create a new form of history) cannot just be dismissed. To date, a number of scientific innovations have been made to alter the genetic make-up of both humans and animals. Let us briefly examine some of these changes.

Most of the industrialized world is already busy patenting and manufacturing genetically altered organisms (Shulman 2002:1). Canada, for example, has the second largest biotechnology industry in the world, after the United States. Roughly, Canadian biotech companies will do a projected $5 billion worth of business this year (Ibid). Along with the United States, Canada has made drastic steps towards human cloning. Human cloning is at our doorsteps. But what are we actually talking about when we speak about cloning? The technology at the centre of the debate works like the procedure which Ian Wilmouth of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute used to create the famous cloned sheep "Dolly". First you remove the nucleus from the egg then take a body cell from the person you want to clone and extract the nucleus from it. Then you inject this nucleus into the first egg cell, replacing its original nucleus. Next, you stimulate this cell through electric impulses until it starts dividing as an embryo (Bedford-Strom 2002:7). Since the cell nucleus contains the complete set of genetic information, the developing embryo is genetically identified to the donor of the body cell. In the case of the cloned sheep "Dolly", there were hundreds of failures before the procedure worked and experts say that in the case of human beings, the medical risks and the probability of misfits are even higher (Ibid) . Ian Wilmuth himself has become one of those who warn most fervently against transferring the technology which he used for animals to human beings.

Recently, Cuban President Fidel Castro ordered his country’s biotechnologists to clone a new breed of cow. The aging caudillo sees the cloning project which attempts to replicate White Udder, a cow that became legendary for its milk output in the 1980s, as a solution to Cuba’s chronic shortage of dairy products (Gray 2002:1). Cuba’s leader is doing what other countries, especially those in the West have done. Each year for example, the Samex Alliance, the Canadian biotechnological firm begins a new five-year long "genetic proving-program" on 500 bulls, testing their female progeny to milk production, protein and fat content (Shulman, Op.cit. 2). Semex exports four million semen doses and sells two million in Canada mainly for dairy cattle. Up to 5% of its business is selling cow embryos (Ibid). But the crucial point to note here is that, it is becoming increasingly difficult for scientists to confine their research, on genetic modification, to animals alone. Although the official policy of the United States government is against human cloning, many private firms have undertaken to perfect this technology in that country (Caplan, 2002:1)

There is no doubt that most people have an intuitive reaction against efforts to clone human beings. Genetically speaking, cloned human beings are the same as identical twins. From a purely religious standpoint, the intuitive reaction against cloning has some ethical basis. While twins have come into existence as genetically identical human beings by coincidence, or from a religious perspective, by the will of God – cloned human beings are produced by other human beings according to the latter’s own personal will. Thus cloning violates the dignity of the human reason because a cloned person is not an end in itself but, in its genetic design, is completely predetermined and therefore instrumentalized by somebody else.

Human embryonic stem cells have come more and more to be the ‘objects of desire’ for scientists engaged in the field of medical genetics. Tremendous hopes are connected with these cells which can be found in human embryos in their earliest stages of development. Doctors hope to find therapies for diseases such as Parkinson’s Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis, which have so far been incurable. The idea is that the stem cells can be used as a ‘fire-brigade’ in the human body. Where human cells degenerate and therefore lead to such diseases, stem cells could be injected into the body and help rejuvenate it by stimulating the growth of new, healthy cells. Emryoni9c stem cells are so interesting for this task because they are not defined in their function. In the early stage of the embryo, they are still ‘pluripotent’ – that is they can still develop into any kind of body tissue, be it brain tissue, heart tissue or kidney tissue. For lay observers, the development of an embryo from a conglomerate of few cells into a more and more differentiated organism is a miracle.

If scientists succeed in exploiting this miracle by understanding the mechanisms which make embryonic cells develop into different types of tissue, they would have found the key to replacing any kind of defective tissue in the patient’s body. New organs could even be grown - a prospect which would revolutionize medicine, since the lack of new organs is a major barrier in helping many patients who have a very short life expectancy. Yet, to some people, this embryonic stem cell research is unethical and unacceptable. But if these new medical techniques can cure diseases, what is the ethical problem? At this stage, embryonic stem cells are not ‘totipotent’ which means that these cells cannot develop into an embryo any more. The ethical problem lies in the generation of these cells. They grow in the first few days after fertilization in the developing embryo. For researchers to isolate and use these stem cells, the embryo must die. Evidently, if the embryo is seen as a human being from the very beginning of its life, the ethical question arises whether it is legitimate to kill human life in order to gain stem cells, even if the goal is the cure of diseases.

But while the consensus on the ethic questionability of human reproductive cloning seems overwhelming, at least for now, the other way of using cloning technology for purely therapeutic purposes is not unanimously rejected by the international community. The issue of therapeutic cloning captured international attention from December 2000, when the British parliament passed a law allowing the cloning of human beings for the purpose of gaining human embryonic stem cells (Gray, Op.cit: 2002). Unlike reproductive cloning which seeks to give birth to cloned human beings, therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, promises to remedy one big disadvantage of the human embryonic stem cell technique. As with any organ transplantation, the injection of stem cells in a patient’s body, in order to restore his or her own healthy cell growth runs a certain risk: since the genetic code of the injected stem cells is not identical with the patients’ genetic code, the injection of these cells could lead to an anti-immune reaction by the patient (Ibid:5). Knowing that this is the main risk in organ transplantation and that it requires the use of strong medication to sustain the use of the new organ by the patient’s body, one can understand why the prospect of overcoming this risk is so tempting. This, probably is what the technique of therapeutic cloning should be able to do once it is sufficiently developed.

Therapeutic cloning will thus follow the methodological prospectus of reproductive cloning. Here, the nucleus of a patient’s cell is injected into an egg cell whose nucleus has been removed. The embryo which begins to grow after electric stimulation therefore contains the patient’s code. After a few days, the embryo produces stem cells which also carry that identical genetic code and therefore no anti-immune reaction will occur. Definitely, the potential for this technique is obvious. It could be used not only for the injection of stem cells into, for example, a damaged brain; it could also lead to the production of organs to replace damaged ones, with no risk of anti-immune reactions. No wonder that experts see a multi-billion dollar market in the future use of this technique.

Yet the medical prospects of therapeutic cloning are not yet quite clear. As the experience with the cloning of animals has shown, hundreds of egg cells are necessary to produce just one clone. Thus millions of female egg cells would be necessary to treat just a small portion of all patients who would be eligible for this therapy. It does not, therefore, require much imagination to see how unrealistic this is. A look at the internet home pages of North American reproduction clinics shows that prices for donated egg cells range between 6,000 and 17,000 dollars (Ibid:5). But more important than the financial limitations is the troubling prospect of women being humiliated as mass donors of egg cells.

Within a lifetime of people who are alive today, it will become feasible to alter human nature. By human nature, we mean the sum total of characteristics that are typical of human species arising from genetic rather than environmental factors (Kevles, 2002:2). From this perspective, humans seem little more than sophisticated animals who posses dignity that sets them apart from other non-human animals. Dignity gives humans a superior moral status that raises us above the rest of the animal kingdom (Fukuyama, 2002). But such dignity resides in a mysterious ‘Factor X’ which is the essential human quality that remains after all of a person’s contingent and accidental characteristics have been stripped away. It is this ‘Factor X’ that Fukuyama wants to preserve from the clutches of biotechnologists. But what is the use of human of dignity in the face of such calamities as diseases, famine and poverty? If we believe what we are told by scientists, biotechnology offers more than the promise of removing genetic defects that contribute to common diseases. It opens up the possibility of redesigning human beings. As a result, the present generation will be able to shape the next in ways that have never been seen before. It also seems likely that as scientific knowledge grows, both disease profiles and personalities of human beings will become altered by human will.

Pharmacology is also an area where great strides have been made within the project of biotechnology. Current fad drugs fluoxetine and methylphemidate (popularly known under their trade names ‘Prozac’ and ‘Ritalin’ could profoundly change the behavioral patterns of human beings. This drugs – powerful, potentially very effective – are just the beginning, and the future will certainly witness the spread of such neurophamacological agents. Prozac is prescribed to alter the depressed mind of girls while Ritalin is meant to reduce hyperactivity in boys. Furthermore, selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIS) help to easy adult worries (New Statesman May 2002). The question is, do we want bland happiness replacing hard- edged creativity? True, the real debate is not about whether biotechnology will undermine our values, but about the kind of values to which we aspire. Do we want human-centred morality rooted in concrete human needs (such as solutions to brain disorders, genetic illness like Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons’ and cystic fibrosis)? Or are we happy with a moral code that undermines the promise of medical advance in the name of mythical human nature? But having said that, what does the biotechnological revolution portend for Africa?

In his two books Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge (1999) and The Future of Life (2001) E.O Wilson acknowledges that biotechnology carries its risks. However, Wilson submits that genetic engineering makes possible to achieve what he calls "the conscious control of human evolution". Generally, the conscious control of human evolution has a couple of advantages for the entire family of the human race. As we have signified, biotechnology could produce wonder milk cows and therefore ensure sufficiency of dairy products for mankind. Through the new technology, beef production could also be increased. From the point of view of human beings, advances in biotechnology could signify a number of advantages. For example, in addition to fighting incurable human diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer or multiple sclerosis, biotechnological advances could herald a new area in which scientists could grow new body organs, effect pre-natal sex selection (by discarding poor quality cells) and stimulate the growth of new health cells to replace defective ones. This will improve the quality of life and hopefully elongate human life by many more years. Furthermore, the new technology gives us hope that we will soon be able to genetically manipulate embryos to develop desired traits through cloning (Stock:1987). Indeed, it is tempting to believe that very soon super human embryos will be sold in supermarkets. These embryos might be labelled with words like, beautiful, high-speed, hype-sexual, energetic, intelligent, handsome, tall, short, etc. Some embryos could have one, some several or all these qualities. Depending on what one wants one could choose designer embryos in order to achieve one’s desired traits. As a result, designer babies could soon hit the market. It will be a race for beauties, designer athletes, hyperactive sexual clones, name it.

But mankind cannot be said to be a homogeneous entity. To date, the world economic forces are biased towards the Western democracies. It is not contestable that the so-called Third World countries are highly indebted to the West. There exists an obvious unequal political, cultural, economic and scientific relationship between countries of the South and those of the North. Globalization, at least in its neo-liberal dispensation, has enhanced the domination of many developing countries, including those in Africa, by multinational corporations. From the African standpoint, therefore, the continent’s position in the new Western advances in biotechnology is vague.

Evidently, while the rich Western countries have the luxury to spend huge sums of money to do research on animal and human cloning, Africa cannot raise enough cash to feed, educate, house and cloth millions of people on the continent. It is an open fact that out of Africa’s population of over 700 million people, about 310 million live on less than a dollar everyday (Siringi 2002:2). How can such a continent be part of these new biotechnological advances? The only hope for Africa’s participation, it seems to me, lies in its apparent readiness to consume, wholesale, biotechnological products from Europe and America. The continent’s research input has been overlooked because of shortage of funds. Obviously, when Africa enters the biotechnological field only at the level of consumption rather than research, it may never be possible for us to assess the actual impact of the technology on the people of the continent. But there is also another problem too. Given that Africa might enter this movement only at the level of consumption and implementation, how many Africans and how many African countries could possibly raise enough funds to buy embryos of designer babies? In the event that many African people cannot afford the costs of the new technology, we are likely to have another problem. Europe and America and probably Japan will have designer human beings competing for the same educational, economic, cultural and natural resources of the world with ordinary Africans who might not have similar traits. How, for example, can a super-intelligent, designer young man from the United States, be expected to sit in the same graduate school at the Harvard University with an ordinary young man from the rural enclaves of Kenya? Will the lecturer of the two young people also be superhuman or ordinary? Generally, as Europe and America goes posthuman, how is Africa going to relate to it? I suspect that this scenario could create a new type of domination that would condemn Africans into total oblivion as their resources become the focus of exploitation by biotechnologically designed geniuses. It is a new kind of colonial frontier that might create new forms of human conflict.

Since Africa is so far excluded from the biotechnological project of the West it could, at the level of consuming the products of the new science, easily be manipulated to serve the military interests of the West. Our argument here is that military uses of biotechnology could pose a threat comparable to nuclear war. Genetically selective weapons may be developed to target certain racial and ethnic groups in Africa. Long-acting toxins may be devised that can devastate populations many years after being disseminated. Further ahead, reproductive cloning may be used to mass-manufacture soldiers more immune to emotions of sympathy and self-preservation than even today’s suicide bombers. Produced in Africa, such soldiers could destroy the entire continent.

Francis Fukuyama’s Posthuman Future suggests that there is need for a united front to regulate the new technological advances so that they do not destroy humanity. But how can this happen if, today, humanity has failed to forge a common front against imperialism, racism, conflicts, religion and poverty? With a burning desire to dominate each other and to make high profits, human beings will continue to use their growing knowledge in science to service their most urgent needs – however conflicting, or ultimately destructive these may prove to be. There can, therefore, never be a united front to control and regulate biotechnology but we certain some general ground rules to control our excesses. Indeed, without considering its specific needs, Africa cannot blindly celebrate the biotechnological advances we are witnessing in the West as if they represent some form of universal achievement for the whole of mankind.

As we signified earlier on, biotechnology is at the threshold of delaying human aging. This has serious implications on population growth. If the West increases its population through a deliberate programme that delays aging, there will be more people who will require goods and services; there will be more who will also require land jobs and housing. Consequently, The West will need a vent through which such surplus population could be absorbed. Modern America, it is important to remember, was founded on the premise of surplus population of criminals, poor people and religious zealots who could not fit in the social life of Great Britain. Thus, our argument here is that changes in demographic figures in America and Europe as a result of biotechnology could target Africa for solutions in one fundamental way. The African population could easily be destroyed or made inactive through the new technology so as to give room for the Euro-American surplus. As a result, the superbeings from Europe and America could then come over and settle on the continent whose population would have been destroyed or inactivated. In the end, Africans will continue to play the role of being perpetual servants to the Europeans.

The next fundamental challenge which the new biotechnological revolution poses for Africa concerns human and democratic rights. Our current obsession with human rights is derived from our continuous trust in the project of Modernity and Enlightenment. Through the venerated philosophers of the Age of Reason including John Locke, Friedrich Hegel, Emmanuel Kant and Spinoza, mankind came to define certain universal rights and values that have come to dominate our daily lives. These rights include the right to life, liberty and pursuit for happiness; the right of choice, the freedom of assembly, speech and action. Obviously, the modernist philosophers understood that all these rights should be exercised with responsibility and without the tendency to infringe on the rights of others. But since Friedrich Nietzsche declared that "God is dead’ over a century ago, it has become almost impossible for mankind to treat the above rights as universal and transcendental. It has also been untenable to exercise those rights within a responsible framework. In the post-Kantian era, rights at least as conceived by the West have moved away from being universal givens to cultural contingencies, extremely fungable and unable to oppose the threat of biotechnology. From the basic standpoint of modernity, human beings have a right to make choices including the choice of participating in human and animal cloning. The choice to undertake this project can never universally affect humanity in one uniform way. To some, it brings about happiness because this science helps to increase dairy products, to fight certain incurable diseases and to create personality traits desired by human beings. But to others, this development violates God’s will and infringes on the human rights of animals and on the human rights of embryos. Will the increasingly religious Africa take the stand that biotechnology violates the will of God?

The unfolding postmodern world therefore becomes an area of infinite possibilities, rights and values. If biotechnology will alter human nature in the West then there have to be fresh changes in the definition and categorization of human rights too. What, for instance, will be the human rights of super-models, super humans and super-geniuses with unnatural urges? Given that Africans are not, strictly-speaking, part of the biotechnological researches going on in the West, how will the rights of a normal human beings be harmonized with the rights of genetically produced beings in such international fora as the United Nations? Indeed, at this point, who will define democracy? The posthuman beings or the ‘normal’ beings? As populations migrate from one part of the world to the other, genetically cloned humans will find themselves living together with normal human beings. Will these human variants enjoy the same rights in spite of one group having superior genetic advantages over the other? How will African nations conduct their political affairs against the backdrop of cloned and non-cloned citizens? For example, what are the rights of cloned humans who are sexually hyperactive visa vis the rights of ordinary humans with ordinary sexual urges? How do these different categories of humans exercise their sexual urges in our common society? Can Africa cope with this challenge? Let us briefly turn to some biotechnological developments that have so far taken place with regard to the plant kingdom..

Plant Biotechnology and Africa

Plants are a critical source of food and medicine for mankind. But with changes in the climatic

and demographic patterns of the world, available plants might not, in their natural disposition, guarantee enough food and medicine for humanity. Consequently, in the coming decades, the world faces the extraordinary challenge of conquering poverty and achieving genuine food security with a very potent new tool: agricultural biotechnology (Conko, 2002:18).

In general, transgenic technology seems to hold the potential to increase food production, reduce the use of chemical pesticides and actually make foods safer and healthier. These advances are critical in a world where natural resources are finite and where one-and-a-half billion people most of them from the developing world suffer from hunger and malnutrition (Ibid). Already, farmers in the United States, Canada and even China are embracing the first generation of engineered crops. These have spread rapidly because the crops are engineered to make farming more efficient (Victor and Runge 2002:108). According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), farmers in less developed countries now grow nearly one quarter of the world’s transgenic crops on more than 26 million acres (Conko, opcit: 18).

Evidence shows that South African farmers are already growing transgenic pest-resistant maize and this year they begin planting soy (Ibid). South African and Chinese farmers have also been growing transgenic insect-resistant cotton for several years. This transgenic cotton, similar to varieties popular in the United States, is expected to boost yields. In the Makhtini area, a tranquil corner of Kwazulu Natal province in South Africa, the power of plant biotechnology is being harnessed to give farmers new hope. Cotton, the only major crop grown in the area, had ceased to make money as a result of bollworm, a serious cotton pest responsible for between 60 and 90% of yield loses. To control the pest, farmers needed to spray at least eight times a season, a great loss in money and time. Often, it was unprofitable to grow cotton (New African 2002:1-2). But in 1998, a few pioneering small-holder farmers in Makhatini planted their first insect-resistant cotton developed by a US firm Mosanto Company. This cotton, called Bollgard, contains a gene from a naturally occuring microorganism, Bacillus Thuringiensis (Bt) whose pesticidal properties protect the cotton from harmful bollworm – while being harmless to birds, wildlife or beneficial insects. The results were outstanding. Farmers not only realized a yield increase of up to 27 per cent, but also reduced their use of insecticide by 80 percent, increasing their incomes by up to 135 US dollars per hectare (Ibid:2). It also saved them from walking long hours to spray the cotton. An added benefit was to farmers health and the environment, through reduced exposure to insecticides (Kenny, 2002:2).

Kenya is a few steps a head of most African countries in the field of plant technology. It has been doing trials of an insert-resistant genetically modified maize and a virus-resistant potato – but the new varieties have not yet been released (Wendo, 2001:1). But even if the new crops have not been released to farmers, the revolutionary potential of these biotechnological trials could be enormously profitable.

At present, the African continent is faced with the daunting task of dealing with serious health problems for its people. There are many diseases including malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, and now HIV infection. In the sub-Saharan Africa, only about 35% of the region’s 600 million inhabitants have access to basic health facilities. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 0.4 million adults and 1.6 million infants died of AIDS-related deaths in Africa between 1998 and 1999 (Siringi, 2001:1). Malaria continues to cause at least half of all rural deaths in Africa and at least half of the region’s 1-year olds have not been immunized against measles, poliomyelitis or tetanus. And simple life-saving therapies as oral dehydration, that would normally be taken for granted in the developed world, are not available to treat an estimated 50% of diarrhea cases in sub-Saharan Africa (Ibid). The situation is critical. A New African Initiative passed in Lusaka, Zambia, in July 2002, recommended the use of new technologies as a basis of Africa’s socio-economic recovery. The initiative, which brought together Africa’s top scientists and policy makers stressed the introduction of new scientific and technological skills in such areas as agriculture, mining, fisheries and public health (Ibid: 2).

The spirit of the Lusaka Initiative, it seems to me, might have developed from the exemplary biotechnological advances by Cuba. Cuba has successfully deployed biotechnology to develop vaccines for meningitis B and hepatitis B. The meningitis B vaccine is being used in many countries, generating for Cuba an estimated US$100 million annually from the sale of the vaccine. Indeed, more than 97% of Cuba’s children and adults have been vaccinated Siringi Op.cit:2. Africa should obviously take this challenge. A number of initiatives seem to be working on the continent towards this goal. Let us cite some examples.

In the June 2001 issue of African Business, Anver Versi relayed the attention-grabbing news that a cure for cancer had been found from traditional medicine used by communities in South Africa. A similar article was printed in a British newspaper the Observer (13 May, 2001). The new drug is called combretastatin. This drug, based on extracts from the African bush willow (combretum), and manufactured by the multinational biotechnology company OXiGENE, was tested in the UK through funding from the Cancer Research Campaign (Henderson, 2001:2). Researchers were first alerted to the medicinal potential of the bush willow by a study into natural medicines used by traditional healers. However, neither the Observer nor the African Business provided any indication whether the communities whose traditional knowledge was clearly important in the discovery process might be entitled to some form of recompense.

Among the San people of South Africa, the Hoodia Cactus is commonly chewed because it acts as an appetite suppressant. According to Peter Hawthorn, South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) isolated the active ingredients in the cactus and in 1997 patented it as P57. The CSIR negotiated the commerical rights to P57 with Britain’s Phytopharm Company, which in turn sold them to the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for a reported $32 million. Pfizer hopes to have P57 out as a super slimming pill within three years (Ibid:4). This is outrageous. It is equally offensive to the poor San people of South Africa. It also raises the critical issue of continental control of biotechnological knowledge and its products.

First and foremost, it has to be observed that Africa does not own the new technology. Either the technology is developed elsewhere, mainly in the West, or it is developed by Western multinational companies operating in Africa. Consequently, legal and commercial rights for the marketing of biotechnological products – such as the new genetically modified potato or maize variety in Kenya, the new breed of cotton in Makhtini South Africa and the cancer-treatment drug of the Sans of South Africa – remain solely in the hands of multinational corporations. Second, is the issue of poverty. With biting poverty, both the African people and their governments cannot bargain for their proper share in the new technologies. The continent is a mere consumer of biotechnological products, some of them developed within the continent but without the express approval of the local communities. Therefore, our greatest challenge in the 21^st century revolves around the need to alleviate poverty and to fight for our rightful share in the biotechnological revolution.

Another challenge which Africa faces in this regard has to do with information. All the world’s information systems are controlled by the Western democracies. The African continent relies wholesale on information provided by Western media houses and the Western controlled information super highway, the internet. But this is dangerous because Africa cannot possibly be sure that all the positive things Europeans and Americans say about their biotechnological products are true and correct. As we debate this new technology, about 13 million people in six South-African countries – Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe – are affected by a life-threatening famine (Donvan 2002:1). Despite assurances from U.S Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman that genetically modified foods were safe, Zambia has refused to accept the donations (International Information Programs: 30^th August 2002).

The American position was also taken by the World Food Program, (WFP), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) (Ibid). But appeals against genetically modified foods are also overwhelming. For example a few months ago, South African Catholic Bishops warned in a conference that genetically modified foods could harm the region in the long term. Further, the bishops said donated maize should first be ground before distribution arguing that if planted, genetically altered maize would contaminate local varieties through pollen drift. The bishops pointed out that such contamination will ultimately make local farmers dependent on oversees corporations for seed and herbicides. As a result, African countries could loose access to the European export market, which is closed to such genetically modified products, causing long-term devastation to struggling Southern African economies (Donovan, Op.cit:1). It is significant and indeed worrying that the European Union has refused to give consent to genetically modified foods, raising suspicions that opponents of GM foods are after all right in their rejection of these products. The challenge for Africa is, who is telling the truth at the time when millions of people are threatened with famine-related death? Africa needs to establish its own information data-base that could enable it make correct judgements about GM products. In addition, Africa should move away from being an importer of GM foods to a developer of the same products. It would seem to me that as long as GM foods come from the West or developed by Western controlled firms, African consumers are likely to suspicious. Thus African scientists have an unenviable challenge to begin developing GM crops rather than just adopting those developed by the industrialized world.

Overall, however, the debate about plant biotechnology is healthy for the world in general and Africa in particular. Transgenic techniques allow scientists to engineer new crops by splicing together particular genes rather than relying solely on the uncertain crosses that are the hallmarks of traditional crop breeding. For some people in Africa, the transgenic revolution in biotechnology is a horror. Tinkering with nature’s order, they argue, will backfire when engineered genes escape to the wild and disrupt delicately balanced ecosystems. For others, plant engineering is a Promethean step forward that will lead to more nutritious, productive, and disease resistant crops, which will in turn help alleviate global hunger and reduce the amount of land and pesticides used in agriculture.

The optimists could be right about the promise of biotechnology. But the industry requires some ground rules that would ensure safety of products used by human beings. Those who are taking the initiative should also be protected from possible exploitation by profit-hungry financial magnates of the West. For example, the San people of South Africa as well as the Makhtini people from Kwazulu require such protection so that their inventions can produce funds for new investments and further research that would ultimately alleviate poverty in Africa. There is no doubt that, like most innovations, crop engineering poses some risks that require vigilance. Regulators and seed companies in Africa should, therefore, screen for allergies and other threats to food safety. They must also tame environmental dangers such as the prospect of an unwanted ‘gene-flow’ from engineered crops into the environment at large. The phenomenon could for example transfer a resistance to herbicides from crops to weeds, creating a superweed that is hard to kill.

Indeed, Africa faces a real danger of suffering the side effects of biotechnology if some form of regulatory devices are not put in place. The case of Starlink controversy in the United States is quite revealing. ‘Starlink’ is a genetically modified corn sold under the same brand name. Sometimes back, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under pressure from Aventis Crop Science to rush the product to the market, approved it for use in animal feed but rejected it for or human consumption (because it contained a protein with characteristics that might conceivably cause allergic reactions). When ‘Starlink’ corn later showed up in taco cells, some consumers in the united States and importers in Japan and South Korea panicked, canceling orders for US corn in general (Victor and Runge Op.cit: 111). In Europe and Japan the episode was viewed as proof that inadequate regulation in one county could lead to a problem that could spread all over the world. Imagine the scandal if other genetically modified products such as ‘contraceptive corn’ a product engineered to produce antibodies that attack the human sperm got mixed with sweet corn on its way to dinner tables in Africa! In that case, how many African men will suddenly fail to sire children just because of their natural sperm banks have been destroyed by a biotechnological product known as ‘contraceptive corn’? To avoid a human catastrophe of this nature, Africa should only use biotechnological products from the West after careful scrutiny and professional vetting. Until it begins to control its own biotechnological discoveries and until it begins to play an active role in the creation of the biotechnological products currently emanating from the West, the African continent should always remain alert and cautions about the new technology.

It was the objective of this paper to highlight the various advances mankind seems to be making

in the field of biotechnology. We have argued that biotechnology has the capacity to change human nature in a very fundamental way. Because, biotechnology has already been successfully applied to animals, to increase milk production in cows, for example, the new technology could effectively be used to clone human beings. As a result, parents will have opportunities to get designer babies defined by such special features as ‘talliness’, ‘intelligence’, ‘hypersexuality’, ‘beautiful’ and so on. Furthermore, we have also demonstrated that biotechnology can clone human beings in order to fight some of the most disturbing diseases of our times including cancer, polyemelitis, measles, hepatitis B and malaria.

The paper has also given examples to demonstrate that mankind is now utilizing biotechnological skills to produce transgenic crops and other plants. These have serious implications on food production, medicine and the environment. Indeed plant biotechnology, we have shown, could alleviate hunger and bring food to the dinner tables of millions of people in the developing world. Furthermore, plant biotechnology could also help to produce plants that would signal the cure of certain ailments.

However, we have sustained the argument that, so far, Africa remains a conspicuous outsider in the new technology. Consequently, the continent has seen its biotechnological knowledge appropriated by the Western multinational firms without due compensation. In addition, the continent continues to be a consumer rather than a producer of biotechnological products. This experience, our paper argues, is not healthy at all because Africa might never know the long term effects of consuming genetically engineered products from other places. Because most of the research is done by Western controlled firms, we think that Africa does not get all the information needed about the new technology and its products.

Throughout the paper, we have intimated that Africa lags behind in biotechnological advances because of poverty. Shortage of research funds is therefore a critical problem. This leaves the continent without the power to regulate the industry or to appropriate its findings to the needs of the local populations. In conclusion, we realize that the challenges of biotechnology to the African continent are enormous. As we come to terms with the new technology, we must also fight for space in it so that we can take care of the interests of the African people.

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