How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa

Robert Paarlberg, in a recent Reason interview:

My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.

This and other dicey issues are tackled with grace by the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, out now from HUP. Paarlberg, an advocate of GMO seed varieties for African fams, takes this unpopular position because he believes that improvements in seed varieties and farming techniques are African farmers' ticket out of a low-yield agriculture that keeps most of them mired in hunger and poverty. He wrote Starved for Science in order to explain, in Reason editor Kerry Howley's words, just why "cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed." Also available online is a talk Paarlberg gave recently at the International Food Policy Research Institute, which works to find "sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty."