As one in a family of nine children growing up on a small farm in Kenya's highlands, I learned firsthand about the enormous challenge of breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger in rural Africa. In fact, the reason I became a plant scientist was to help farmers like my mother, who sold the only cow our family owned to pay for my secondary education. This was a sacrifice in more ways than one because I, like most children in Kenya, was needed on the farm.

I have since made it my mission to alert others to the urgent need for new technology in Africa to help counter hunger, environmental devastation and poverty. African growers desperately need access to the best management practices, fertilizer, better seeds and biotechnology to help improve crop production, which is currently the lowest in the world per unit area of land. Traditional agricultural practices, which continue to produce only low yields and poor people, will not be sufficient to feed the additional millions of people who will inhabit the continent 50 years from now.

At the beginning of my career, I worked side by side with farmers in Kenya's fields trying to improve production of sweet potatoes through traditional plant breeding. Sweet potatoes, a staple crop in Kenya, are besieged by viruses and pests, which result in a significant reduction in yields for growers. Just improving the sweet potato's resistance to one particularly prevalent virus would play a critical role in the fight against hunger in Africa.

But after years of hard work and frustration, I finally realized I would not be able to develop a virus-resistant potato through traditional plant breeding. Biotechnology scientists at Washington University in St. Louis had already developed technology to protect crops against attack by plant viruses. They were willing to share their knowledge with me and to support my work through the U.S. Agency for International Development and Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI).

After 10 years of research in Monsanto and KARI laboratories, field tests of virus-resistant sweet potatoes were initiated in Kenya last year, and good progress continues to be made. Soon African farmers may grow sweet potatoes protected from this disease, potentially increasing yields by 80 percent.

So the question becomes, why aren't these types of biotechnology applications more readily available to African farmers? I believe blame lies with critics who claim that Africa has no chance to benefit from biotechnology and that our people will be exploited by multinationals. These critics, who have never experienced hunger and death on the scale we sadly witness in Africa, are content to keep Africans dependent on food aid from industrialized nations while mass starvation occurs.

It is time for Africa to begin thinking and operating as a stakeholder, rather than accepting the "victim mentality" created by some opponents of biotechnology. The priority of Africa must be to feed its people and to sustain agricultural production and the environment.

We may have missed the green revolution, which helped Asia and Latin America achieve self-sufficiency in food production, but we cannot afford to be excluded or to miss another major global technological revolution.

The people of Africa cannot wait for others to debate the merits of biotechnology. America and other developed nations must act now to allocate technologies that can prevent suffering and starvation.

Recently the United Nations Development Program issued a report endorsing and encouraging continued adoption of agricultural biotechnology in developing countries. I hope it will encourage President Bush and other world leaders to communicate their support for biotechnology research and applications, and to make it a priority to bring those benefits to the underprivileged in Africa and other developing regions.

The writer is director of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications-AfriCenter, a nonprofit organization that receives aid from governments, foundations and private businesses.

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