Exploring Agricultural Development Technologies In Africa: What Factors Influence the Acceptance of Organic and GM?.

Understanding the socio-economic factors that contribute to developing countries’ willingness to adopt agricultural technology is necessary to ensure that governments, consumers and farmers can reap the benefits of available technologies. Both organic and GM agriculture have been proposed by their advocates as important technologies for achieving food security in a changing climate. In Africa, organic agriculture has been promoted vigorously by many civil and donor organizations engaged in agricultural development. Certified organic products are grown in more than half of African countries. In contrast, adoption of GM agriculture has been met with skepticism in much of Africa, with only three countries approving GM crops for commercial planting. Recent qualitative arguments have asserted that Africa lags behind other developing regions in its application of agricultural biotechnology due to an anti-science based agriculture movement among policy elites on the continent. This argument posits that the turn against modern farm science is being exported to Africa via European dominated NGOs, foreign assistance programs, and commodity markets. In this paper, we empirically tested several factors that may explain African attitudes toward GM and organic agriculture, by a newly generated dataset on agriculture, trade, and development indicators for a subset of African countries. We found that African countries’ openness to GM agriculture is significantly predicted by variables for wealth, organic agricultural area, colonial legacy, past rejection of GM, and the percentage of the country under land protection. We interpret these analyses to reveal that European attitudes and policies are partially responsible for African attitudes toward GM, but that openness to GM agriculture is positively correlated with prevalence of organic agriculture. We conclude that African countries that are committed to agricultural development appear to consider, and in some cases deploy, both organic and GM technologies, indicating a more nuanced approach to agricultural development within countries than usually reflected in the global agricultural debate. An understanding of the complex factors influencing the adoption of agricultural technology in regions such as Africa will help scientists and development experts to better design and implement appropriate solutions to sustaining global food security.