Agroecology in Africa: Silver bullet or pathway to poverty?
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Agroecology in Africa: Silver bullet or pathway to poverty?
A MODEL of agroecology that limits farming inputs in Africa to solely indigenous materials is meeting resistance from farmers and others who worry it will most likely force even more people on the continent into poverty and hunger.
By Joseph Opoku Gakpo
“The agroecology promoters will use terms like indigenous foods, indigenous crops, indigenous everything. Like we want to exclude new varieties that are coming. But even the corn we eat today is not from Africa. It’s from America,” observed Pacifique Nshimiyimana, a young farmer and agricultural enterpreneur from Rwanda.
Credit: International Potato Center (CIP)
This article or excerpt is included in the GLP’s daily curated selection of ideologically diverse news, opinion and analysis of biotechnology innovation.
Research on Ghana’s first gene-edited crop a high-yielding sweet potato with increased beta carotone content is under way at the University of Cape Coast.
“For sweet potatoes, we want to look at how we can use the CRISPR-Cas9 system to increase beta carotene,” said Samuel Acheampong of the university’s Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, who has been working on the project for the past year. “Beta carotene is a big deal for us because as animals, when we eat beta carotene, our cells are able to convert them into vitamin A.”
4 Years, 11 Walkouts – The Minority’s aggressive record in the 7th Parliament
The 7th Parliament which’s proceedings I’ve reported on eagerly from its birth on the dawn of 7th January 2017 till date, will go down in history as one of the most contentious in Ghana’s history.
By every measure, what we have witnessed over the last 4 years has been an aggressive minority that has taken advantage of every single opportunity it can lay hands on to push government beyond its thick walls of convenience in parliament.
There is a lot that this Minority can claim credit for. Including helping stop the controversial Agyapa Royalties deal and pulling breaks on the new AMERI power deal that Boakye Agyarko took to parliament for approval in July 2018.