USAID: Making the world hungry for GM crops

A report by GRAIN

This briefing examines how the US government uses USAID to actively promote GM agriculture. The focus is on USAID's major programmes for agricultural biotechnology and the regions where these programmes are most active in parts of Africa and Asia. These USAID programmes are part of a multi-pronged strategy to advance US interests with GM crops. Increasingly the US government uses multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements and high-level diplomatic pressure to push countries towards the adoption of many key bits of corporate-friendly regulations related to GM crops. And this external pressure has been effectively complimented by lobbying and funding from national and regional USAID biotech networks.

Introduction

In 1990, two Monsanto executives got in touch with Joel Cohen, the Senior Biotechnology Specialist for USAID (the US Agency for International Development). Monsanto wanted USAID to help develop a GM crop for Africa that would give GMOs a good name. Cohen, who had come to the agency from the US seed industry, turned to USAID's most trusted research institute in Africa-- the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). The three men set up a meeting with KARI and began to put their plan into action.

They decided to work on sweet potato, a crop neglected by seed companies and scientists but for which there were some promising GM applications being developed in the US. KARI had the perfect person for Monsanto to collaborate with - Florence Wambugu [3], a KARI scientist who had just completed a PhD programme on sweet potatoes. Monsanto immediately hired Wambugu to work in the United States on a GM sweet potato resistant to the Sweet potato feathery mottle virus. Fourteen years later, it is pretty clear that Wambugu's sweet potatoes are far from ready for the fields of Kenya's farmers; in recent field studies the GM crop failed to resist the virus and underperformed the non-GM local varieties.

But getting the GM sweet potato out to farmers was not the real intention anyway. The overriding goal was to open doors to GM, and in this it was a great success. Most importantly, the project served as a vehicle for driving forward a regulatory framework conducive to GM crops. And this is where USAID is making it's mark - getting Southern countries to set up the regulatory frameworks and the technical capacity that US corporations require to build-up global markets for their GM crops.