Feeding Africa

If you live in Europe or the US, genetically modified food might sound like a luxury. But for people in poor countries, it’s the difference between a square meal and starvation, according to Florence Wambugu, one of Africa’s leading plant geneticists. Would you expect anything else from someone who’s been on the payroll of Monsanto? Perhaps not. Yet Wambugu is no puppet of agribusiness. She’s the daughter of a subsistence farmer from Kenya who went into agricultural research to help farmers like her mother. “A hungry person is not a myth,” she told Fred Pearce. “It’s a person I know.”…