Publication: Washington Post
Date: Monday, December 08, 2003

The poor, rural area of Makhathini Flats in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province is one of the few places in Africa where farmers are already growing gene-altered crops. Far down a dirt road, a man named T.J. Buthelezi recently sat in a sandy yard and told the story of his rising fortunes.

Farms in this province are tiny. People tend to plow with donkeys or oxen and spray their crops with tanks strapped to their backs, and they harvest by hand. Electricity, cars and indoor plumbing are rare.

Buthelezi said he was wary, a few years back, when a man from the local cotton company began pushing a new type of biotech seed, developed in America, that was twice as expensive as local cotton. But he was curious, so he planted some of the seed near his regular cotton. He was stunned by the differences.

Cotton is an arduous crop to grow, with African farmers typically spraying expensive, dangerous chemicals 10 or more times a season to fight off fast-moving worms and other pests. That is a huge constraint on Zulu farmers — lacking modern equipment, they can grow only as much cotton as one or two people can spray by hand in a day, limiting their farms to a few acres.

The new crop, Buthelezi said, required far less spraying, only a couple of times the whole season in his case. The yields were higher, and despite seed costs, the overall economics were much more favorable than with regular cotton. He realized that he could plant bigger crops, eventually giving him the money to build a new home and send his children — from his five wives — to school.

Researchers at Britain's University of Reading, in the most elaborate study of its kind yet done in Africa, have verified the economic benefits of biotech cotton. And a half-dozen farmers interviewed in the Makhathini Flats told tales similar to Buthelezi's.

The Reading researchers found evidence that the new crop is safer, too: Hospital admissions for pesticide poisoning, an occupational hazard for cotton farmers, are falling.

Cotton is not a food crop, of course, but the extra cash the biotech cotton is throwing off has allowed farmers to buy the food they need.

Biotech seeds can cost twice as much as traditional ones, but the crops they produce require less fertilizer and pesticides, and less work to maintain — generating higher margins.

Many of the cotton farmers in the Flats are women, and they said the easier-to-grow cotton has been particularly helpful for them, since the spray tanks they strap to their backs are smaller than those for men.

Doris Gumbi is the sole support for her husband — he is old and ill, she explained — and four children. With the new cotton, she said, a woman farming alone is able to make a living for her family.

Behind her stood a new house, with a metal roof, that she said she built with the profits from biotech cotton. She laughed about her leaky old hut, standing nearby. A telephone wire and an electric cable dropped down from a pole to the house: The Gumbi family has joined the modern age.