Before we adopt GM cotton, first sort out the mess in the industry

African farmers must be most sought after in the quest for genetically modified cotton. An ongoing campaign, coming after the renewal of the preferential trade agreement under the African Growth Opportunity Act, is harping on improving productivity and profitability of cotton in the continent by reducing dependence on pesticides.

However, critics worry that major issues affecting the cotton industry may be brushed aside.

Kenya has pledged to start cultivating the crop while in Malawi, a subsidiary of the US biotech giant, Monsanto Corporation, submitted Bt-cotton material for approvals in May.

Ethiopia is reportedly reforming its biosafety laws to create easy access to the genetically engineered cotton and other products. By changing the law, Ethiopia is looking for an opportunity to raise cotton production through the cultivation of Bt-Cotton.

“Currently, there is shortage of cotton production in Ethiopia, which imports cotton from Tanzania and China every year,” Dr Endale Gebre, director of biotechnology research at the Ethiopian Institution of Agricultural Research, said, adding that “applying biotechnology in cotton production would minimise cost and save foreign currency.”

But as African countries prepare for the cultivation of GM-cotton, they appear to have not only overlooked issues raised by researchers and the anti-GMO lobbyists but also ignored lessons from countries such as India, Burkina Faso and South Africa.

READ: How govts, biotech firms push for adoption of GM cotton

For example, in Kenya, the Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research and Analysis (Kippra) had observed in a 2006 study that the sector requires home-grown solutions to be sustained since the external factors that support the production of Bt-cottton may be short-lived.

On their part, farmers groups and the civil society have asked African countries to consider the link between cotton production and the difficult experiences African people have gone through in history.

For example, Michael Farrelly, the programme co-ordinator of the Tanzania Organic Agriculture said the push is reminiscent of slavery in the cotton fields of the southern states of the US, where millions of Africans were bought and sold.

“Now 250 years later, the Missouri-based Monsanto Corporation, the world’s largest producer of genetically modified cotton seeds, has targeted Africa as the final frontier in its drive for world market domination.”

Mr Farrelly counselled caution because of risks such as increased input costs, huge pest and disease problems, and major loss of biodiversity and farmers seed sovereignty. “The lessons of history — from slavery to biotechnology — need to be well understood before this risk-prone and highly controversial technology is unleashed on millions of unsuspecting East African farmers,” he said.

Monsanto hails the technology

But in its website, Monsanto hails the technology saying that by cultivating the GM-cotton, African farmers stand a better chance of eradicating losses caused by over-use of pesticides since the variety has in-built mechanism to get rid of the bollworm — a nuisance pest that attacks cotton.

The company also says that adoption of Bt-cotton would help increase farm productivity and economic fortunes of farmers:
“Biotechnology-derived crops have contributed to a substantial reduction in pesticide volumes used in production agriculture and have provided economic and social benefits to growers in both developed and developing countries by reducing time and production costs, and increasing yields.”

There are also indications that Monsanto is aware that the weed targeted by its chemicals could end up developing resistance to the herbicides. In its website, the company tells producers that as they utilise the benefits of biotechnology, “it is necessary to pursue the prescribed resistance management programmes to prevent herbicide and insect resistance, specifically bollworm resistance.”

Critics have nevertheless read mischief particularly on the part of the multinationals and the multi-lateral and bilateral agencies bankrolling this. “Cotton, like any cash crop, is not just a lowly plant in the ground,” say William G. Moeley and Leslie C. Gray in Cotton, Globalization and Poverty in Africa.

They argue that for Africa, the history of why cotton is grown, where, by whom and in what quantity and techniques involves “international politics, colonial power, environmental factors, and, in many instances, coercion.” They go on to say that cotton grown in Africa “is sold on international markets at a price largely related to the actions of the global powers.

To the two, the price farmers in Africa get depends on whether China will be exporting or importing cotton in a given year and the level of American subsidies to its cotton farmers). Prices are also related to “the whims of international consumers and particularly on whether they prefer cotton or synthetics). “So cotton is …a commodity with consequences for local livelihoods, that is situated in an international web of economic transfers reflecting historical and contemporary power structures.”

Africa needs to handle this matter with care because cotton production is plagued by many more issues that cannot be solved by merely taking up a new seed technology. For example, cotton accounts for up to 40 per cent of export revenues of West and central Africa and 10 per cent of gross domestic product in Mali, Benin, Chad and Burkina Faso.

In Kenya, the Cotton Development Authority says that about 40,000 farmers are engaged in cotton farming but cotton and allied industries have declined over the past three decades. While the country produced over 38,000 tonnes in the 1980s, it produced 16,000 tonnes in 1990s before falling to 11,000 tonnes by 2010.

Reports show that following the decline, the country’s ginnery industry has been operating at 13 per cent (some say 8.2 per cent), compared with Uganda’s 20 per cent, Tanzania’s 26 per cent and Madagascar’s 20 per cent. This is interesting because although ginnery operations have been quite low in Tanzania and Uganda, the two countries have been exporting 35 per cent and 63 per cent of the cotton lint required in Kenya.

To keep its textile mills running, Kenya is forced to import 80 per cent of the cotton lint required to produce the estimated 225 million square metres of fabric for the mills. At the same time, the country’s 20 vegetable oil processing and refinery firms are hardly satisfied from local supply. Indeed, they produce only about 30 per cent of the national edible oil demand.

According to a 2012 report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the decline of the cotton sector in Kenya is related to what FAO terms a “monopsony market structure,” reliance on old ginning technology and poor quality seed. The spinners and textile mills are said to have significant market power over ginners and farmers such that the losses borne by the farmers end up as gains for the spinners and millers.

The Cotton Development Authority attributes the decline to periodic drought, volatile producer prices, delayed payments to farmers, lack of access to quality seeds, high cost of pesticides and competition with other farm enterprises over scarce resources.

It also says that the collapse of co-operative societies and former state-owned textile firms as well as competition from synthetic fibre and cheap imports of new and second-hand clothes have sent the country’s cotton sector to the dogs. This assessment is largely supported by the World Bank.

“Can such a production scenario be tackled merely through the introduction of Bt-Cotton?” asked Dr Daniel Maingi, from the Kenya Food Alliance.

Kenya’s potential for cotton production is nothing but great. The FAO report, Analysis of Incentives and Disincentives for Cotton in Kenya, says that the country has approximately 384,500 hectares of land available for cotton production but only 10 per cent is utilised while the national production potential for the available land is around 200,000 tonnes of seed cotton.

By comparison, Tanzania’s cotton seed production stood at 245,000 tonnes against Uganda’s 65,000 tonnes. Mozambique and Malawi were producing at 140,000 tonnes and 50,000 tonnes, respectively. Zambia’s cotton production stood at 200,000 tonnes in 2005, a major rise from 20,000 tonnes around 1994.

Zambia’s success story

How has Zambia succeeded in its cotton sector? A report — Zambia Cotton Study — shows that the country’s apparent success was driven by the private sector.

After the country liberalised the sector, it went into a concentrated market-based cotton production for 10 years with two multinational companies, Cargill Cotton and Dunavant, starting their own market chains. At the same time, the number of smallholder farmers receiving treated seed, pesticides, and foliar feed fertilisers on credit rose, leading to a rise in yields particularly among experienced farmers.

However, the positive turn in fortunes has not been reaching to smallholder cotton farmers whose plantings has been falling by between 40 per cent and 50 per cent.

The current push for Bt-cotton cultivation comes in the wake of a renewal by the US government of the preferential trade agreement under Agoa. This means that the elimination of all duties and quotas on African textile exports to the US market has been renewed.
Before the renewal, Kenya and other countries had raised their textile exports to the US by a big margin. For example, Kenya’s textile exports to America reached a peak in 2004 as the country raised $300 million. But reports show that this brought very few benefits to local cotton producers largely because Kenya’s textile industry continues to import most of its factory inputs rather than purchase domestic cotton lint.

For Kenya to spread the Agoa benefits to tens of thousands of cotton farmers, FAO report suggests an improvement in the quality of seed available to the farmers.

“Improving the quality of cotton seed available to farmers is a critical issue that can only be addressed through the co-operation of both farmers and ginners, since ginners produce a large portion of the seed available to farmers for planting.”

FAO also calls for both groups “to agree on formal quality standards for cotton seed, which could be enforced by the Cotton Development Authority in collaboration with producer organisations.”

With or without the adoption of Bt-Cotton, African countries cannot out-compete cotton production in the US, where the government has maintained a long-running cotton subsidy that tend to distort its global prices. In The Impact of U.S. Subsidies on West African Cotton Production, Andrea R. Woodward argues that the US cotton subsidies “results in at least 10 per cent reduction in global cotton prices.”

Data from the International Cotton Advisory Committee indicates that subsidies given to US cotton farmers amounted to about $5.8 billion between 2001 and 2002.

“Such subsidies lead to worldwide overproduction and distort cotton prices, depriving African countries of their only comparative advantage in international trade,” say Presidents Amadou Toumani Touré of Burkina Faso and Blaise Compaoré of Mali in a statement (“Your farm subsidies are strangling us”) published in July in The New York Times.

Other people have criticised the subsidies saying that they have tended to deny African producers a good price that could help to boost production of other crops, they say that the subsidies have merely been keeping afloat an inefficient US cotton sector that would otherwise crumble from lack of profits.