It’s usually the kidnapping of schoolgirls or imminent famine that puts Nigeria in the headlines. But this last July offered some good news. A new variety of genetically modified (GM) cowpea is going into the fields in Nigeria that promises to be a game-changer for subsistence farmers. It’s a seed that’s taken 40 years to develop: 20 to improve its traits through traditional breeding and another 20 to use genetic engineering to shield the cowpea against enemy number one, the Maruca pod borer. The army of African and international devotees who’ve devoted their careers to the improvement of cowpea have high hopes.
And the stakes are high. Around 70% of Nigeria’s 200 million people are subsistence farmers. Most cannot afford to use pesticides. And with the low yields, Nigeria – the world’s largest producer of cowpea – still needs to import 500,000 tonnes of the staple each year.
Mohammad Ishiyaku, a geneticist and cowpea breeder at Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria, says farmers have been impressed by what they’ve seen in field trials.
In adopting the GM cowpea, Nigeria has bucked a trend. Campaigns by anti-GM groups have blocked the uptake of genetically modified crops in many African and Asian countries. While Nigerian farmers are now free to buy the GM cowpea, anti-GM activists in neighbouring Ghana, supported by their European counterparts, have filed a court injunction to block approval.
It’s not just Ghana’s farmers who are missing out. The phenomenal success of anti-GM campaigns has taken GM crops off the drawing boards of many commercial and public enterprises.
Nigeria is leading the pack as far as following the science. “It’s the one place advanced biotechnology is not going backwards,” says Robert Paarlberg, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School for Government and author of Resetting the Table: Straight Talk about the Food We Grow and Eat.
Poor man’s meat
For Nigeria’s subsistence farmers, what they grow is what they put on the table. And when their crops fail, their families starve. Some 91 million people are at risk. Out in the savannah they live in hamlets dotted
