Food, one of the basic human needs is not available to everyone in most of developing countries. It requires a great effort to attain it every day that’s why most of them frequently seen beseeching to the developed ones for support to feed their population. Begging always for support may cause to be surrender to donors. But working hard and applying advanced agricultural technology as a timely requirement will possibly enable the developing nations to ensure food security.
A Global Report on food by the Global Network against Food Crises indicated that more than 113 million people in 53 countries experienced acute hunger requiring urgent food, nutrition and livelihoods assistance. Ethiopia also incorporated in the list facing severe hunger in 2018.
Over the past three consecutive years more than 100 million people across the world have faced acute hunger. Due to this, high levels of acute and chronic malnutrition in children living in emergency conditions remained a critical concern. The immediate drivers of undernutrition include poor dietary intake and disease. Climate change is one of the factors that drive the hungers in the aforementioned countries. However, the question always remains on that how the developed countries resist climate change impact while the developing ones are yet unable to revive from it.
It is about applying latest technology that enables to produce agricultural outputs twice or more per annum. Moreover, the developed world uses up-to-date biotechnologies including genetic engineering to gain more products with little efforts.
Biotechnology has been applied in various fields including agriculture, medicine, industry and environment. In agriculture it helps to improve food, and bring modified plant and animal species among others. These days various countries are applying advanced biotechnology. In this regard, USA, Japan and Canada lead the world with food crops cultivation approval of bt products. In Africa, Sudan and South Africa are the major countries in bt crops coverage per hectare. Today Ethiopia is applying the technology via tissue culture, biofortification, mutation breeding, diseases diagnosis, and genetic engineering among others.
The country is conducting research on bt plants in Holeta, Debrezeit and Melkasa agricultural research centers. Among these, the studies on maize, enset and cotton are achieving better performance.
Ibsa Fite, a researcher on genetic engineering believes that biotechnology is important to increase productivity through creating disease resistant and modified gene plant through gene editing from bacteria or other ingredient. He said that it is a must to use the technology to increase productivity and enable feeding the world population that is increasing instantly. It is a significant field of study to duplicate plant and animal species to a level where the output can resist disease, climate change and gives more products to reduce scarcity.
Currently, the country is working to apply bt on maize to increase productivity. Almost half of the Ethiopian population consumes maize. However, it is a vulnerable crop to about nine pest species regardless of other diseases. Such hinders brought a highest reduction in the production of the crop across the globe. Accordingly, world researchers have been trying their level best to find solutions to such yield hindering problems. Finally, they prefer genetically modified (GM) maize, said Tadesse Daba (PhD) Agricultural Biotechnology Director at the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR).
It is internationally recognized procedure to modify crops with gene mixture and the developed world always working on that and it is gaining increment in yield. For example, USA uses such modified maize types and it is the leading nation in the world with maize productivity.
“Therefore it is functional to apply the technology and we have no doubt on that,” he said. Ethiopia is also conducting trials on GM maize and the experiments are in a good shape. “But it is important to check whether this fruitful crop types grow in our country’s environment. That’s why the trials are being conducted.”
On the other hand, Ethiopia has been facing reduction in cotton product due to the cotton pests called bollworms that are hard to prevent and need the spray of more than seven types of pesticides. To curb the problem the country has adopted bt cotton that resist the aforementioned pests. Accordingly, better results have been achieved as the bt type cotton resist the pests and increase productivity in response.
Moreover, the country is also working on enset modification by Ethiopian biotechnologists to prevent diseases and it is under restricted laboratory trial. Of course, saving the plant from diseases will help millions of citizens who use enset as a staple food.
There is also a plan to adopt more biotechnologies to follow the path where the current global agricultural advancement reached. It is all about implementing modified plant species that are capable of resisting climate change, pests and increase production. It is also very important to improve nutrients in food.
Demilew Deres is a plant biotechnology researcher. He works at the Holeta EIAR on plant tissue culture. As to him the country’s biotechnology especially the tissue culture is well operational. He said that the center uses tissue culture to duplicate plants, keep them free of diseases and deposit better seeds for long.
Tissue culture is a recent phenomenon in Ethiopia. Of course it takes time to reach on the current global tissue culture stage where it has a great opportunity to develop pure outputs of plant species where they are free of any diseases and sophisticated in the procedure. For example, the protocol in duplicating species and the technology the developed nations are applying allow them to provide millions of coffee seedlings per annum while we are yet at thousands.
“We are doing our level best to the development of the sector by identifying about 15 various plant species including coffee, variety of potatoes, and sugarcane, pineapple and apple among others.”
The effort is to curb seedling shortages in the country and provide in number and variety each year. As to Demilew, the Holeta biotechnology centre distributes about 30 thousands of seedlings that are free of diseases per year. However, thanks to the age of convergence today the development of IT allows everyone to use advanced system and knowledge of the 21st century. “Therefore, though we are late beginners in tissue culture, we can manage it to the sophisticated level shortly by learning from the developed world,” he said.
As a country that has a wide range of weather condition and abundant plant and animal resources, Ethiopia needs to develop the agriculture sector through applying the state of the art technologies. Therefore, expanding and supporting the efforts in various agricultural research centers ought to be the responsibility of all stakeholders.
To sum up, among other reasons the government needs to advance agricultural biotechnology to increase agricultural products and ensure food security. By doing this, it can also improve the lives of farmers and the people in general from earnings and well-being of the public. Therefore, all stakeholders need to work closely to advance biotech to erase the country’s name from acute hunger affecting countries’ list.
The Ethiopian Herald September 10, 2019
BY YOHANES JEMANEH
