While the West debates the ethics of genetically modified food, Florence Wambugu is using it to feed her country.Civil war in Angola and Sudan and drought in Eritrea mean that the continent is on the brink of another mass famine like the one that swept Ethiopia in the early 1980s. Florence Wambugu knows the kind of hunger that swells the stomach and dulls the eyes. She grew up with it. Now she has the makings of a cure. Wambugu was born in 1953, just a few miles away from Treetops, Kenya's famed game reserve. (That was the same place where, a year earlier, England's Elizabeth II was on holiday when her father, King George VI, died during the night and she awoke as queen.) But proximity to the posh highlands resort and the titled travelers who lodged there didn't spare Wambugu and her nine brothers and sisters from going a day or two at a time without eating. When Kenya's colonial government crumbled in 1963 Wambugu's father was rounded up--like so many young men--and trucked off to work on a white settler's farm. That left her mother and ten kids to scratch a life from the land. They stayed alive on sweet potatoes, a rich source of calories, vitamin A and beta carotene.
"The sweet potato is a woman's crop, a security crop," Wambugu says. "If we didn't have sweet potatoes, we had nothing." But pests love it as much as people need it. Growing underground, it is prone to infestation by the feathery mottle virus and worms. Africa's year-round tropical temperatures offer no winter to freeze off disease cycles, so each year nearly half the sweet potato crop fails. In Africa the sweet potato harvest averages two and a half tons an acre; the global average is more than twice that. African yields rank dead last in every major crop harvested, from corn to cotton.
Today the dismal yields are improving, thanks to Wambugu's decade-long effort to genetically modify crops to withstand pests. Into the sweet potato she has spliced in a gene from the pyrethrum, a white flower whose ingredients are fatal to insects and the feathery mottle virus.
This shuffling of genes is a hit-and-miss, years-long affair. First Wambugu isolates the gene that codes for the production of insecticidal pyrethrins in the pyrethrum flower and extracts them. Next, tens of thousands of copies are made and mixed together with tungsten balls just one micron in diameter. Thousands of genes stick to each ball, and the combination is loaded into a "gene gun," which consists of two small stainless steel chambers and a vacuum pump. Using compressed helium, the gun shoots the microscopic gene-bearing balls into sweet potato leaves. Some of the genes migrate off the tungsten and into the nuclei of the leaves' cells, and are absorbed into the collection of DNA that defines the plant.
It was a breakthrough 25 years in the making. From the time Wambugu entered the University of Nairobi's plant pathology program as an undergraduate in 1975 until she earned her Ph.D. in plant virology from the University of Bath, U.K. in 1991, she tried various conventional hybridization techniques to outbreed the viruses that wipe out the otherwise drought-resistant and energy-rich tuber. Nothing worked--nor did her experiments over a decade-plus at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. Then, in 1992, the U.S. Department of Agriculture offered her a grant to study transgenetics in St. Louis in collaboration with Washington University and Monsanto, the agrochemical giant. For three years Wambugu labored in Monsanto's labs, trying to splice genes for viral resistance into the sweet potato. It took another two years to test the transgenic tubers in greenhouses and yet another two years to obtain the necessary permits from Kenya to plant the crops for field testing. Now halfway through field trials, the results are astonishing.
The sweet potato is sub-Saharan Africa's first genetically modified crop, and its yields so far are double that of the regular plant. Potatoes are bigger and richer in color, indicating they've retained more nutritional value. On a continent where population growth outstrips food supply growth by 1% a year, Wambugu's modified sweet potato offers tangible hope. According to the World Bank, biotech crops could increase food production in the developing world by 25%.
Wambugu overcame long odds even to get the education she needed for this venture. When she was 13, with food scarce and every child's hands needed to work the family plot, her mother sold the family cow to pay for Wambugu's boarding school 10 miles away. Her mother needed a dispensation from the village council to sell the animal; most thought she was crazy for educating a daughter when it would be easier to marry her off.
Today Wambugu, who lives and works in Nairobi, faces a different sort of obstacle. Groups from Greenpeace to the Union of Concerned Scientists fret that Africa is being manipulated by multinational corporations, in effect serving as one big--and potentially dangerous--genetic experiment. Some Africans are so freaked by plant technology that Zambia's government would rather have its citizens starve than accept donated food that includes genetically modified corn. Concerned with the misunderstanding about transgenic corn, Wambugu created A Harvest Biotech Foundation International to serve as a pan-African voice on the issue.
Wambugu concedes that GM crops are experimental but insists the potential good far outweighs the risks. It's like penicillin, she says. Some people are allergic to it, but the medicine has cured far more people than it has hurt. "This is not a question of export to Europe or America," she says. "If they don't want it, they don't have to have it. We have local demand. We're dying, so can we eat first?" Her former boss, Cyrus Ndiritu, former director of the Kenya Agriculture Research Institution agrees. "I would like to make something very clear. It is not multinationals that have a stranglehold on Africa. It is hunger, poverty and deprivation. And if Africa is going to get out of that, it has got to embrace GM technology."
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