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South African farmers get more from GM cotton
Toby Reynolds
ARTICLE (May 08 2003) : Genetically modified crops have advocates and detractors, but for South African cotton farmer T.J. Buthelezi, the technology is a godsend. Sheltering from the sun in the shade of a tree which his Hlokohloko cotton farmers association uses as a meeting place, Buthelezi describes how the use of insect-resistant Bt cotton has made his life easier and far more profitable.
"This thing has changed my life. I used to have problems with money, but since I started using the Bt cotton, I have got money," he said. "You get more yield, and you have done less work."South Africa is a relatively small producer of cotton, but its farmers represent a broader group of developing-country growers whose large and small-scale activities account for about 70 percent of world production.
Africa currently manages about eight percent of world production, while India, China and Pakistan together account for almost half.Champions of the technology say it is these countries, and specifically their smaller-scale, poorer growers, who will benefit most from GM cotton.
Buthelezi's cotton plants, like those used by nearly all the Hlokohloko cotton farmers, have been artificially modified to contain a strand of genetic material from a naturally-occurring soil micro organism, Bacillus thuringiensis. That Bt gene encodes a pesticide poisonous to the cotton Bollworm, a pest that Buthelezi says farmers would normally need to contain by spraying their crops every week.
"In Hlokohloko maybe 90 percent of the farmers use Bt cotton," he said.Most farmers in the area, a remote, dusty plain some 450 miles (725 km) east of Johannesburg, plant maize and pumpkins to help feed their families, but grow cotton to earn cash.
This year the days have been hot and the rains thin, and the cotton crop has not fared well, but Buthelezi says the transgenic plants he is using will still produce better yields than traditional varieties. "With this cotton, no matter what the conditions, once it germinates you get cotton," he said.
"This is my fifth year farming Bt cotton...I used to get six to eight bales of cotton per hectare. I get 15 to 17 bales per hectare with Bt in a good year. "Currently the yield is around three to five bales because of the drought, but if it was not Bt it would be nothing." Yield is only part of the story, according to a study by agricultural economics researchers at Pretoria University, which looked at production on homestead operations and larger farms.
Small farmers, mostly from the Makhathini flats area where Buthelezi says there are some 5,000 small-scale growers, produced only around five percent of the country's 2000/2001 cotton crop of 157,515 200 kg bales.
The rest of the crop came from about 300 large-scale commercial farmers. Authors Johann Kirsten and Marnus Gouse said in their paper that about 80 percent of all South Africa's cotton farmers were using GM seed, which resulted in higher yields. More importantly, their study found, it reduced worry, workload, and spending on pesticides.
Not everyone thinks Bt cotton is such a great idea. Many anti-GM campaigners say farmers who become dependent on the technology could be trapped if the companies which own the patent on the seed increase their prices.
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Pakissan.com;
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