Katine farmer Paul Odongo ploughing his land. Photograph: Dan Chung
It seems the perfect answer: use scientific advance to develop food crops such as bananas and maize that are capable of resisting the pests, diseases and the vagaries of the rainfall that each year threaten the survival of many of sub-Saharan Africa's small farmers. This, surely, is the key to unlocking its green revolution - and preventing another food crisis like the current one.
Where the rest of the world has seen an explosion in agricultural productivity that has mainly outstripped population growth, Africa produces less food per capita now than it did in 1960. The average calorie consumption is about 600 calories less than required. In some parts of Africa, as much as a third of the population are reliant on some degree of food aid. About 40 years of structural transformation has yielded almost no growth.
Poor soils, increasing salinity, and lack of security are part of the story. But the damage that diseases and pests inflict on crops and livestock is a significant problem. For example, the infestation of maize by a parasitic weed called striga has spread to over a million hectares of Africa's precious grainlands. The East African banana, another vital food source, is attacked by fungi such as black leaf strike and banana wilt, which is creeping south across the Great Lakes region.
Global warming poses another threat. Already farmers are complaining of infrequent and variable rainfalls which the latest research suggests will lead to somewhere between a 17% and a 30% fall in productivity before the end of the century. The difference depends on the use of carbon fertilisers. But they are major contributors to global warming.
Biotechnology seems to offer some protection from these challenges. But doubts persist not only about its safety, which has led to some African countries banning the import of genetically modified maize and soya (as well as Europe refusing to take GM exports), but also about its usefulness in building food security. Africa has been a slow and reluctant recruit to the biotech revolution.
One reason is that technological advances in agriculture are largely done by big business for big farmers. Biotechnology is expensive to develop, and the companies involved such as Monsanto want big returns. Only large-scale commercial farms can afford the investment, particularly when the product is accompanied by licences that restrict its sale and further use. The so-called 'terminator' strategy - now less common - made it impossible to hold back seed for the following year's sowing.
When a new technology is successful on a wide scale it has the effect of forcing smaller producers into the same game. The commercial dominance of the new drives out the diversity of the old, even though it is variety that small producers need to get the most from their land for the lowest inputs. They find themselves forced into a relationship they can't afford with the corporate sector.
Commercial farming carries a high level of risk for a small grower. Relying on a single crop makes them highly vulnerable to drought and flood, while a variety of produce sown at varying times gives at least some resilience. If the worst happens, small producers find themselves in debt, with nothing either to sell or to eat. Far from enhancing food security, it destroys it.
Part of the answer is to reduce the cost of technological advance. That means rebuilding public research centres from the ruins of the privatisations of the 1990s enforced by World Bank economists demanding reform in return for loans. This is now happening across Africa. In Uganda, for example, trials are underway for a genetically-altered banana variety that will resist black leaf wilt.
Bananas are particularly vulnerable to pest and disease epidemics because there are few genetic variations - they propagate by cloning through suckers. But this also means they are safer for genetic modification because there is little risk of them spreading the modification unintentionally through cross-pollination.
But like many African countries, Uganda has allowed its infrastructure of agricultural 'extension' workers - trained agronomists who relay developments from research centre to the farmer, and report on farmers' needs to the researchers - to fall apart. It is the commercial sector that has developed a marketing network in rural areas, not government, and its objective is profitability rather than poverty alleviation.
Nonetheless experiments and trials in GM crops are now underway across Africa, in countries including Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Senegal and Burkina Faso. They have ratified the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and are developing their research and development capacity.
But outside agribusiness, there are few believers in the transformative powers of biotechnology. Equally few rule it out altogether. This week the UK government - unlike the US - accepted the report of the UN-backed International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) from its meeting in Johannesburg in April.
This body of American, European and African scientists recommended a completely different approach to stimulating an African green revolution. Its report is the latest in a growing body of research that says the smallholder is the key to unlocking Africa's agricultural potential and building food security.
This is the agricology approach. As Farm-Africa seeks to do in Katine, it believes that the men and women who work the land are the people who know what problems need to be solved, and in what order. The challenge is to find ways of channelling their knowledge into research and the results back out into rural communities - and the funding to do it.
GM crops may one day be part of the answer. They must not be allowed to become part of the problem first.
