This post was commissioned as part of a Pulitzer Center/Global Voices Online series on Food Insecurity that draw on multimedia reporting featured on the Pulitzer Gateway to Food Insecurity. Share your own story here.

Sunset over farmland in South Africa by Irene2005 on Flickr

While there have been significant increases in agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America over the last 30 years, productivity in Africa has stagnated and 1 in 3 people in sub-Saharan Africa still go chronically hungry. Many solutions have been proposed to help combat hunger in Africa, but one in particular remains controversial: biotechnology.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 1.02 billion people do not have enough to eat in the world; more than a fourth of these people live in sub-Saharan Africa. The reasons for the region’s food insecurity range from economic crisis to an expanding population. In a Penn State University blog on biotechnology, Dr. Terry Etherton in the United States elaborates on these challenges:

In sub-Saharan Africa, where more “ultrapoor” live, developing technologies to boost productivity is especially difficult because of greater threats from pests and diseases, poorer soil, and drought. In addition, Africa’s R&D [research and development] establishments are small compared to those of South Asia—half had fewer than 100 scientists in 2000. Compared to Latin America, Africa has less than half the rural roads per hectare, 1/40th the capital per farmer, and 1/50th the rural electricity supply per worker. Despite some success with maize [corn], cassava, and some horticultural crops, few African countries have experienced a Green Revolution.

On a global scale, Africa uses the least fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid or genetically modified (GM) seeds of any continent, although many experts suggest that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could help ensure food security by increasing crop yields, producing hardier crop varieties, enhancing a crop’s nutritional value, and improving storability. Others claim there are numerous risks associated with adopting GMOs in Africa.

Bloggers following the debate alternately wonder whether Africa is being bullied into accepting biotechnology, or whether Africans are being needlessly scared off by anti-GMO activists.

Journalist Gregory Simpkins in Washington D.C outlines the debate in his personal blog Africa Rising 2010:

Those who don’t trust what they see as Big Science and capitalists, believe GM agricultural products are “Frankenfood.” Those alarmed by the rise in both malnutrition and food prices see a crisis that may be alleviated by using science to jump-start the Green Revolution in Africa. The problem is that there is not enough evidence that these products are either unjustifiably dangerous or completely safe. Africa’s brain drain doesn’t make this situation any easier since many of the scientists who could ensure that their homelands don’t use unsafe agricultural products or take advantage of existing technology to prevent starvation live and work in other countries.

Resistance to GMOs is high. Currently South Africa is the only country on the continent to have approved GM seeds for planting.

Reporter Philip Brasher traveled to South Africa and Kenya to chronicle the role of biotechnology in an article series for the DesMoines Register sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He says more than 70 percent of South Africa’s latest corn crop, the country’s largest in decades, is biotech. While some African countries have allowed imports of this GM corn as food aid, others, such as Zimbabwe have rejected these products despite the need.

The U.S. government and American biotech companies say Africans should drop their opposition to GM crops in order to help feed the continent. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also jumped on board, by helping to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and more recently by funding research to engineer more drought-resistant corn. Some agriculture experts in Africa are also calling on Africans to embrace agricultural technologies to boost food production. The blog GMO Africa also believes Africans should be able to take advantage of biotech:

An open-door policy to new technologies, especially in the field of agriculture, is what Africa needs. When activists intimidate Africa, through fear, into not exploring potential benefits of GM foods, the continent suffers. They stymie a rational debate about whether GM foods have any relevance to Africa.

However, many bloggers are weary of widely introducing GMOs in a continent comprised mostly of small farms. An article on the progressive pan-African website Pambazuka News by Nidhi Tandon outlines the concerns:

The risks to Africa of fully adopting industrial agriculture in general and GM seeds in particular include:

- transferring its food and farming decisions to global corporations

- losing ecological and agricultural diversity as genetically modified crop varieties spread, and driving small- and medium-scale family farmers off their land because they cannot afford the expensive inputs, including genetically modified seeds, that industrial agriculture demands.”

In South Africa itself, reactions to GMOs also remain mixed. On the blog of a South African family that cultivates “heirloom” and open pollinated seeds, called Livingseeds, Sean Freeman says there isn’t enough evidence to support GMOs even though they were “forced onto the South African public”:

‘All the evidence’ shows that GMO is the best thing since sliced bread, however the problem we have is that all of the evidence is slanted and prepared by a) GMO houses b) Scientists that have their research grants supplied by GMO houses or c) Universities that are sponsored by GMO houses. All impartial evidence is wiped sorry forced sorry explained away and serious anecdotal evidence is discredited as not having any scientifically credible weight, as it’s not…… scientific. However here is some anecdotal evidence that is pretty indisputable.

Freeman links to a news story about widespread crop failures in South Africa in 2008/9 due to “a breeding error” in genetically engineered seeds sold by the global corporation Monsanto. An online petition initiated by the African Center for Biosafety says Monsanto compensated commercial farmers who lost their yield but banned them from speaking to the media, and made no mention of whether they compensated resource poor farmers who were given the seed and lost their yield as well.

Most agricultural experts do agree that GMOs alone won’t solve Africa’s hunger issues. Other solutions suggested by bloggers include organic farming, growing your own food, and promoting social change. Whatever the solutions, on Africa Rising 2010 Simpkins argues we need to openly consider all options, including biotechology:

The behind-the-scenes debate over GM foods needs to be brought into the open and examined carefully. Promoting products that may be dangerous is unacceptable. However, in the face of growing hunger in Africa, we owe it to the hungry to explore every possibility for meeting their needs while they still live.

This article was originally published on Global Voices.

Despite common assumptions and their perceived differences, the indigenous knowledge and global knowledge systems have become much closer in the past decade. Indigenous knowledge practitioners have begun leveraging different media to exchange ideas and publicize traditional learning to the larger world.

At first glance, the relationship between indigenous knowledge and the Internet seems fraught. Indigenous knowledge provides a distinct set of beliefs, practices and representations avidly tied to place; the internet lauds itself for erasing boundaries and borders.

On one hand, the traditions encapsulated in indigenous knowledge are culturally unique, using local understanding to solve local problems. This makes it an important component in the fields of ecology, education, agriculture and health security. On the other hand, the internet is lauded for spreading information to help people, but it is also a bazaar, tilted towards large corporations and the economies of scale: Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, PayPal. Indigenous knowledge has certain spiritual and ceremonial components; the internet is largely agnostic, and makes a good deal of money peddling pornography.

For all their perceived differences, the indigenous knowledge and global knowledge systems have become much closer in the past decade. Indigenous knowledge practitioners have begun leveraging different media to exchange ideas and publicize traditional learning to the larger world.

A researcher in Ethiopia argues Internet and Communication Technologies, called ICTs, can be used as cheap methods to capture, store and disseminate various forms of indigenous knowledge for future generations.

ICTs also increase access to indigenous knowledge systems, especially to schools, where this learning can be incorporated into classrooms.

Moving into education systems

As stated above, ICTs provide a perfect example for integrating indigenous knowledge into both formal and informal education systems. Technology could facilitate disseminating ideas about local cultures to students and provide schools the possibility to teach some curriculum in a local language.

Before we get into specific examples, let’s follow this debate with two bloggers on the importance of making students aware of different knowledge systems. For one, does increasing access to traditional knowledge give it more credibility in the eyes’ of students?

Perhaps. George Sefa Dei, at The Freire Project blog, argues that in both development and education issues, scholars and practitioners need to find a balance between tradition and modernity.

Students have often queried why and how is it that certain knowledges count more so than other ways of knowing. There is a realization on the part of learners that knowledge is operationalized differently given local histories, environments and contexts. Unfortunately, the processes of validating knowledges fail to take into account this multiplicity of knowings that can together comprehensive speak to the diversity of the histories of ideas and events that have shaped and continue to shape human growth and development. In questioning the hierarchy of knowledges learners also allude to the problematic position of neutral, apolitical knowledge. It is important then in our teaching of Africa we lay bare and grasp the processes through which for example, Western science knowledge positions itself as neutral, universal and non-hegemonic ways of knowing, and furthermore seeks to invalidate and devalue other ways of knowing.

This sounds good in theory. How well does it work in practice?

Passionate Pedagogue, in a comment to the above post, illustrates a major hurdle.

I spend hours combing the Internet looking for sites about the peoples I teach in my history classes written by the peoples I teach. Oftentimes the sites I locate are too complicated or tacit for students to understand. Other times, the sites (rightfully so) are so culturally-specific that a teenager with no cultural capital about the area or peoples involved cannot possibly understand them. This leaves little actual “indigenous” information that is accessible to students.

I trust that during my career as a teacher critical pedagogues will work to create student-centered access to indigenous knowledge. My hope is that the information that we gleam from the invaluable contributions of indigenous peoples does not become relegated to university sociology textbooks or primers in critical pedagogy. While it is of course wonderful for graduate students and academics to take the lessons that Native Peoples the world over have to offer to heart, perhaps we should be weary of becoming Napoleon’s in our own right; publishing surveys of Native history by Natives that only serve the higher echelons of academia.

Where there are no sources

When finding source material becomes too difficult, some teachers have decided to make their own. Here are two examples of projects where technology can be a boon for students learning about different cultures. The first comes from Australia, from Scot Aldred, who writes the blog e-learning.

Specifically, I’m interested in developing a WIKI section devoted to indigenous Australians; their diverse culture, history, language and their land. While there is some publicly available information in hard copy publications, it is not substantial and does not detail all of Australian indigenous nations and their people. Online the situation is much worse with very little accurate information available.
Just imagine if all of Australia’s school students had an opportunity to contribute to a public WIKI with information about the indigenous people native to their geographical area. Much of Australia’s indigenous history is passed down by an oral tradition of story telling. The old people, the elders and some historians have information that could be shared with all Australians and the world.

… What about having a shared Webspace available to all of Australia’s schools (public and private) where schools would submit a list of eligible persons who could create content and collaborate. Additional roles/permissions for moderators who would again be nominated by the schools.

A comment from Ginga, who is from the American state of Alaska.

Your ideas on collecting indigenous knowledge, and sharing it with the world in a collaborative environment (wikis and more) run parallel to several projects happening in the Bering Strait School District in northern Alaska.

Our staff and students are creating wiki-dictionaries in Inupiaq, and Siberian Yupik to document the native languages in our area. Students post a sound file, local image, and other information they have collected. We’re also trying to develop other projects that have flexible formats for student sharing and collaboration on our wiki.

The tower of Chinglish?

At least one expert argues that with all the promise of ICTs, many traditional organizations feel they get lost in the “overload” of the Internet. Their websites lag in search engine relevance and (sometimes) lack a polished feel.

One problem is language. It is hard for a website written in say, Greenlandic (spoken in Greenland) or Cha’palaa, a language from Ecuador, or Bisaya, from the Philippines, to compete for page views with websites written in Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese or Arabic. Translating pages is often difficult and time consuming.

However, ICTs have the potential to expand a language’s reach. Perhaps it is through online classes or through tutorials or small applications for phones and computers. This is especially important because of the sometimes-frail environment indigenous languages now live.

Here is a good discussion of the issues surrounding language and technology from Heather, who lives in the US and blogs at flex your info. She brings up the fact that technology may provide a good means to communicate for members of her tribe living in distant places. However, “[t]echnology can be put to even better uses: cultural revitalization and preservation.” This does come with its own share of issues.

Native languages have long been endangered by a combination of urbanization and modernization, as well as past governmental policies of removal, relocation, and termination of native populations.

Today’s technology is such that you can easily record information and make long-distance contact with others, so it seems as if it should be easy to record, preserve, and make available native language information. However, there are a number of other concerns which must be balanced with the urge to preserve language through recordings, primarily issues around ownership and access. Language is closely tied to culture; even if tribal members don’t use their language day-to-day, they probably use in their ceremonies. Language and ceremonies may only be shared with certain people: sometimes with all members of the tribe, other times with only a select few. There may be people who are protectors of knowledge, language or otherwise. It’s important to make sure that programs created to record and preserve languages are sensitive to these issues.

Another issue to be considered is misappropriation or exploitation of this information. Indeed, some tribal elders have chosen to not share their knowledge with non-tribal members; by recording it, the chance that an outsider will access the information increases. Not recording such information allows tribal members to retain control over their cultural information. Another way to maintain control is to closely involve tribal members and elders in the design and creation of preservation programs. As more Natives become involved in the work to preserve their languages, they inform the protocols and practices used to collect and make available information. Whether a tribe decides to record and preserve language or to continue to share it only with tribal members orally, their positions must be respected.

Language learning on the telephone

With this in mind, she announces a new application for a mobile phone system that will teach the language of the Cherokee Nation, originally from the southeastern part of the United States but in the 1830s forcibly removed by the US government to the center of the country.

…The application includes flashcards, recordings, and games for language learning, and there is also a version for the Nintendo DS. The idea of using popular technology to help preserve and revitalize languages is exciting, because it makes language information available to all tribal members, not just those who live near tribal lands, and in a way that can be easily integrated into their lives.

…The use of technology, such as the Cherokee language iPhone application, can help dispersed tribal members to learn their tribe’s language. Software can be used to create multimedia teaching materials for lessons, while web conferencing technology can be used for teaching and for oral practice with other speakers. However, such programs must be sensitive to the issues of control and access by closely involving tribal members and elders, and respecting their wishes.

This article was originally published on Global Voices.