Burkina Faso, Africa's top cotton producer and the sole West African nation to venture into biotech farming, is dropping genetically-modified (GM) cotton on quality grounds. The world's 10th largest cotton producer, with four of its 19 million people dependent on the "white gold", Burkina Faso earlier this month said it was giving up Monsanto's GM Bt cotton because it had proved uneconomical.
Burkina took up GM cotton in the 2000s in the hopes of bumping up returns on what was then its top export product, surpassed in 2009 by gold. But the country's association of cotton producers now say GM cotton, though producing higher yields, has caused a drop in crop quality. With Burkinabe cotton once prized for its purity and length of fibre, it was the fall in quality that weighed in favour of a return to conventional cotton.
In the 2000s, the emergence of GM had fueled hopes of greater production and also reduced the need for fertiliser. This was a key issue in a region prone to drought and where cotton pests had grown resistant to eradication by pesticides. Insecticide-resistant caterpillars -- the 'Helicoverpa armigera known as the cotton bollworm or Old World (African) bollworm -- wreaked havoc on crops and producers' livelihoods in 1991, 1996 and 2000. GM crops were supposed to be a win-win solution -- reducing the number of pesticide treatments as well as boosting yields by as much as 90 percent, boosting per hectare profits.
In 2003, Burkina authorised experimental planting by US seed giant Monsanto and Swiss multinational Syngenta. Then in 2007, Burkina launched large scale production of transgenic cotton. Two years later, the authorities ordered farmers to seed up to 80 percent of their crop with the GM variant, leading to a reduction in labour time and facilitating the backbreaking work involved.
Researchers, political and community leaders were critical of the move to launch GM crops from the outset. Though the country's producers are demanding redress for the loss of income they say they can think again in the future.
