Sustainable biotechnology for sub-Saharan Africa: can it be implemented and maintained?

The industrialised world’s plant biotechnology portfolio is based on a limited number of large commodity crops and input traits, and in general is unavailable and unaffordable, if not unsuitable, to the needs of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where per capita agricultural production has decreased since the 1960s. Governments and organisations involved in providing technological help must take into account the conditions under which small-scale — often subsistence — farmers of a particular region work. It is suggested that in order to be sustainable, biotechnology for SSA should in the first instance be tissue culture-, molecular marker- and biocontrol-based, as well as stongly orientated toward regional crop diversity. However, many of the constraints that retard development in SSA, for example, poverty, chronic malnutrition, urbanisation and HIV/Aids, will also initially affect the implementation and maintenance of viable biotechnology programmes. Increasingly, reports on the ills that have befallen developing countries identify a main cause as lack of political will on the part of these countries’ leaders.