If African countries can’t plant genetically modified crops to produce more and healthier food, vulnerable populations will be at risk, argues Calestous Juma.
Calestous Juma is the director of the Agricultural Innovation in Africa Project at Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He is author of The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).
To survive the droughts, wars and other major causes of famine, Africa must embrace technologies that enable it to produce more, better food with less effort.
Indeed, without the advances in molecular biology and other scientific fields that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, African nations would be much worse off than they are now.
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Without this Green Revolution, which enabled developing nations to import cheaper grains and grow high-yield seed varieties, analysts estimate that crop yields in developing countries would have been 23.5 per cent lower and prices between 35 per cent and 66 per cent higher in 2000.
Read the full, original article: Preventing hunger: Biotechnology can only help
