UN warns of staple crop virus 'epidemic'
UN scientists are warning that a virus attacking the cassava plant is nearing an epidemic in parts of Africa.
Cassava is one of the world's most important crops providing up to a third of the calorie intake for many people. The food and agriculture organisation of the UN says the situation is urgent and are calling for an increase in funding for surveillance.
None of the varieties of cassava being distributed to farmers in Africa appears to be resistant to the virus.
Cassava is a global food source of particular importance in Africa as it does well on poor soils with low rainfall.
But like many crops it is threatened by a number of pests and diseases that hinder its production. Viral infections have periodically wiped out the crop in some regions leading to famine.
Now the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that another virus is threatening the crop in large parts of East Africa.
The scientists say the Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) is on the verge of becoming an epidemic. It first appeared in Uganda in 2006 but in the past few months has been found in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the first time.
According to Mike Robson, a plant production and protection officer with the FAO it's hard to know exactly where the virus is as surveillance systems are poor.
"It is hard to say precisely but we're finding it where we go looking for it "
Robson says that a particular problem with this virus is that farmers may think they have a healthy crop until the harvest, as the symptoms only show on the roots.
"That's a particularly distressing situation where a farmer thinks he has a healthy field of cassava but when they come to uproot it, their expectations of food are not going to be met."
But there are some strategies that can help reduce the impact of the infection, according to Mike Robson.
"The main ways of controlling are to try and control the movement of planting material. Cassava is propagated from cuttings and if you move a cutting that has the infection you're effectively moving it to a new area"
"The other thing that farmers can do if they suspect they have the disease is to harvest early. They will get smaller roots of cassava but they will be less affected by the disease - it shows up late in the production cycle."
The FAO scientists say they are in a race against time with this particular strain of virus. They are calling for a rapid increase in funding to improve surveillance. They also want to improve training for farmers and they want to ban the distribution of infected plants between districts.
Some eight varieties of the crop are under development by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture which show some level of resistance to CBSD - It is hoped that these varieties could be made widely available within two years.
Source: BBC
The African Hacker
With home-brewed code and a little help from Microsoft, a programmer in Ghana launches Africa's first software empire
The first time I meet Hermann
Chinery-Hesse, he is pouring diesel fuel from a plastic jug into an electric
generator. I am in the West African country of Ghana, visiting his software
company, Soft Tribe Ltd.
Chinery-Hesse is chief of the Tribe.
He's made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and
selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country of 21 million
people. He drives a Mercedes. He wears imported Birkenstock sandals. He hails
from a prominent family, was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United
States. He could be working anywhere on the strength of his Irish passport, yet
he's spent the past dozen years in Accra, Ghana's coastal capital and one-time
slave-trade hub.
This steamy December morning, with
deadlines looming, his electricity is out, his programmers are idle, and he's
feeding fuel to a balky 50-kilovolt-ampere generator--one of the three he keeps
at the ready.Having emptied his container and thus delivered power to his 18 programmers--about one-tenth of all full-time code writers in Ghana--Chinery-Hesse relaxes and, for the first time, acknowledges my presence. Stroking his beard, he quips, "If we Africans are to develop, we must want to get our hands dirty."
Chinery-Hesse thinks a lot about how
Africans can better their lives. And he's not alone in his conviction that his
people can thrive by harnessing innovations in computing, electronics, and
telecommunications. "Technology," he declares, "is on our
side."
What sets him apart, other than a
knack for adapting code to Africa's distinctive conditions, is his willingness
to embody his beliefs in a business enterprise. With 65 employees, his company,
popularly known as "Soft," is a testimony to the idea that
information technology can be a great equalizer for his people.
The company's software--written in
C++, Visual Basic, and even the ancient Clipper development language for
DOS--is everywhere in Accra. Chinery-Hesse, now 41 years old, started out
pursuing a "shotgun business strategy," as he puts it, offering
between 15 and 30 programs at any given time, including his best seller, a
payroll program called Akatua. In contrast, mighty Adobe Systems Inc., in San
Jose, Calif., with nearly 4000 employees, offers about 45 software products.
With Soft's abundance of offerings, the company has grown at an impressive clip
over the past decade, doubling in revenue and staff year after year.
Old, cheap PCs are the backbone of
African offices and increasingly popular cybercafes, where ordinary sub-Saharan
Africans, most of whom subsist on less than US $1 per day, access the Internet.
The people of Ghana, particularly those in Accra, a sprawling city of 2
million, are a little better off than their sub-Saharan neighbors, earning on
average about $2 per day in an economy based primarily on exports of gold,
timber, and cocoa.
Slightly smaller in area than the
state of Oregon and sandwiched between Togo and Ivory Coast on the Atlantic
Ocean, Ghana won independence from Britain in 1957, the first black African
nation to do so. In 1992, following a series of military coups and dictatorships,
Ghana adopted a new constitution that provided for a democratic political
system. Lt. Jerry Rawlings, who had ruled the country as a dictator from 1981
to 1992 won the first two elections in 1992 and 1996. Rawlings peacefully
transferred power to the current president, John Kufuor, in 2000.
Political power struggles, civil
war, corruption, disease, and wasted potential usually spring to mind when the
subject is Africa. But I know a different Africa, from many visits in recent
years, and my different Africa springs in part from my contact with
Chinery-Hesse. Much of his success reflects his shrewd realization that
Africans can't simply import American or European software programs but need to
tailor them to their own surroundings.
Chinery-Hesse's ability to build a
thriving software business in an economic climate where the need for
information technology is just beginning to grow has tested his ingenuity and
made him a celebrity in Ghana [see photo, "Making a Splash"]. While hardly in the
global technical vanguard, Chinery-Hesse is counted as one of "a handful
of the most important software developers in Africa," says Eric Osiakwan,
an IT specialist in Accra who consults for the World Bank. "Hermann is our
Bill Gates, and Soft is our national software champion."
Chinery-Hesse is thus a valuable
role model. "Many young code writers get their start at Soft, learn the
ropes, and then hone their skills," says Guido Sohne--himself an example
of Chinery-Hesse's influence: a former employee of Soft, he now runs his own
business as an independent programmer in Ghana. "To us, at least, Hermann
is a savior," Sohne says.
"Saviors" are common in
Africa, and they usually come in the form of demagogues or rebel leaders,
missionaries or medical doctors, peacekeepers or refugee-camp managers. Rarely
are they Birkenstock-wearing engineers or software programmers. That's why
Chinery-Hesse is worth getting to know. Because if Africa has a sunny future,
Chinery-Hesse will be a part of it. He is emblematic of the little-known world
of African code writers, hackers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have chosen
to live and work in their homelands, persevering against great odds and on the
margins of global technological change.
These people, often self-taught and
sometimes surprisingly well paid, are the beneficiaries of the accelerating
spread of the Internet, the increasing power of cheap computers, and the
burgeoning global community of programmers. The African hackers are quiet
heroes, however, because they embody a side of the region that is entirely
missed by the world's media: they represent an Africa where blacks are using
their brains to try to build a better future against a backdrop of spotty
electricity, unfettered piracy, inferior computers, and mediocre universities.
Nowadays, Soft is focusing on
document management software for government agencies and large multinationals
doing business in Ghana. It also supplies accounting software for small and
medium-size businesses, such as stores and restaurants. Its cash register
program, for instance, tallies the bill at Accra's largest grocery store. And
one of the most popular dining spots in Accra, Frankie's Hotel and Restaurant,
uses Soft's code to manage inventory, process payroll, and pay taxes [see
photo, "Would You Like Code With That?"].
Hotels, gold-mining companies, and Internet cafes do, too. Even a few cocoa
plantations calculate their piecework pay with Soft's code.
Here's why Soft's programs are
essential: programs from the United States and Europe are usually too expensive
and require lots of memory and the latest machines. By contrast, those that
Soft offers are small enough to work with the Intel 486- and even 386-based PCs
that are readily available in Ghana for as little as $100.
Chinery-Hesse calls his Africanized
code "tropically tolerant."
Besides being compact, his programs also write frequently to disk, reducing the
chances of losing data if power is lost, as it often is. Because Internet
connectivity remains relatively expensive, his programs also work offline as
much as possible. And to combat the rampant piracy, beta versions of software
rarely leave Soft's premises, finished products don't have an autoinstall
function (you need a Soft technician to launch them), and batches of bug fixes
are often delivered individually to customers rather than generally released.
Why doesn't Soft write everything in
Linux, the open-source language available for little or no cost? It would seem
a no-brainer for a software entrepreneur in a desperately poor region of the
world. Not so, and the reasons show why Chinery-Hesse is no ordinary
third-world software tycoon. Linux is simply impractical for his purposes.
"It can't be used for serious business," he says, because it would be
too easy for employees of a business to learn to use--and abuse--the source
code of essential programs.
"In Accra, an IT manager earns
$100 a month," Chinery-Hesse explains. "He has access to all of a
company's data, including backups. With open-source, he can learn to generate
bogus reports. He'll delete charges and pay himself or others money."
Besides, "if we went for open-source, we would be relegated to basically
doing installation and training," he adds. "Do I want a country of
software developers or a country of installers?"
Chinery-Hesse's answer can be
deduced from watching him ride along one of Accra's traffic-clogged roads on a
motorbike, a risky form of travel he undertakes because, as a driver in a
hurry, he can more easily dodge potholes and lines of cars. The trip leaves him
blanketed with dust from the harmattan, the winds that carry sand from the
Sahara, thousands of miles away, into Accra.
His willingness to brave both the
harmattan winds and Accra's notorious traffic jams underscores Chinery-Hesse's
ambition. Despite the disadvantages of his country's geography and infrastructure,
he wants Ghana--and Africa generally--to achieve a kind of greatness in
software, an indigenous engineering success that has perpetually eluded
Africans.
The challenge is both technical and
social, because in Africa the business of writing code is tightly coupled with
the economics of underdevelopment. Soft's local market is tiny by international
standards, worth only millions of dollars annually, and the public appetite for
innovations is limited. "The big problem in Ghana is that Soft can do
really cool, complex stuff, but there's not a whole lot of people who want that
stuff," says former Soft programmer Sohne. "They might need it, but
they don't know they need it."
"Hermann is our Bill Gates, and
Soft is our national software champion"
For instance, Sohne could design an
automatic bill payment system for the electric company, whose customers must
still go to an office to pay their bills. But because the company is a
state-owned monopoly, it has no incentive to make payment more convenient.
The lack of daring among African IT
customers forces code writers in the region to look elsewhere for ideas and
energy. To expand the company's business both within and beyond Ghana's
borders, this past April Chinery-Hesse struck a deal with Microsoft Corp.,
Redmond, Wash., that for the first time has him selling software made by
another company. He's agreed to peddle a suite of applications, called
Navision, aimed at medium-size businesses. It coordinates a company's
financials, supply chain, customer information, and Web-based transactions
through a single database.
The deal gives Chinery-Hesse rights
to the source code, so his programmers can produce add-on programs, including
ones that manage payroll and microfinancial transactions, such as small loans
to people too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. The agreement lets
Soft sell its add-on software--and also allows Microsoft to market Soft's
add-ons throughout the world. "We deliver the building blocks, and Soft
brings local knowledge," says Microsoft's Andreas Peterson, a Navision
product manager based in Nairobi, Kenya. "Hermann can take what we've
done, customize it, and sell it internationally."
Microsoft has 1500 developers
working on Navision worldwide but only a handful in tropical Africa, including
those in Kenya as well as in Nigeria. "The recognition of Soft Tribe by
Microsoft is a source of great pride to the whole country," the Ghanaian
president, Kufuor, said at the announcement of the deal in April.
Software Vendors doing business in Africa constantly battle technological
ignorance. Take Soft's latest large assignment, for example. It's a $200 000
contract to create a software program to manage all case documents for the
government of Ghana's human rights commission, which investigates violations
against individual citizens. When Chinery-Hesse bid on the contract, which is
being funded by a Danish aid agency, he based his proposal on the belief that
the rights commission had an existing computer network linking its dozen field
offices to its headquarters in the capital. Only after Soft won the contract
did Chinery-Hesse realize that there was no such network.
Such misunderstandings happen often.
Sometimes, Soft misjudges the client's capacities, but this time the client
misjudged its own needs. Because all of the rights documents are currently done
on paper, there wasn't anyone at the commission who knew enough about computing
to realize that the commission needed not only a program for creating and
managing documents but also a network for sharing them. Says Chinery-Hesse,
"Customers often can't see the difference between a program and a
network."
So Soft is building both, applying
the tropically tolerant mind-set to the design. This being Ghana, a country
whose fully democratic government is only five years old, Chinery-Hesse is
designing a Microsoft Windows program that will safeguard rights information in
the event of, say, a military coup or a physical attack on the commission's
offices. Relying on a "store and forward" technique, Soft's program
calls for every case file to be stored in a central server, most likely to be
located in London.
Nor will the program depend on
constant Web access. Instead, it will store files locally on a computer,
shipping them across the network automatically whenever a connection is made.
"This way, if the Web connection goes down, as it surely will, work
continues," Chinery-Hesse explains. In the same way, if the computers in a
commission office are stolen or broken, the server can send copies of the
office's entire files as soon as the computers are replaced.Understanding local conditions and designing software to suit them are what Chinery-Hesse does best. Consider his experience with Internet cafes. In Ghana, as in most of the developing world, Internet service remains expensive. Because there are very few landlines, dial-up service from the home or office is virtually nonexistent. The next best option, a very-small-aperture terminal satellite (VSAT) connection, starts at about $5000 for the dish antenna, modem, router, and cabling, prohibitively expensive for the average Ghanaian.
So most people pay $1 per hour to connect to the Web from one of the hundreds of cafes outfitted with satellite dishes and low-end PCs that have sprung up in the country over just the last five years. Each cafe needs software to manage its operations and, most important, to clock the time a customer spends surfing the Web. Losing track of time means losing money. Because the large U.S. and European software companies don't specialize in such software, Chinery-Hesse seized the opportunity to satisfy a large local need.
What happened next, however, reveals the vagaries of writing software in one of the world's poorest places. Chinery-Hesse won a contract with the largest Web cafe in Ghana to develop a basic program, called Lumumbashi (after a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo). Lumumbashi's chief feature was to track usage while preventing wrongdoers from turning off the feature and surfing for free.
Whenever possible, Chinery-Hesse takes his custom-made programs and converts them into generic ones for other jobs. Following this model, he developed a general piece of software for Web cafes based on Lumumbashi. Anticipating threats from software pirates, he sold test versions to a first batch of customers and then offered a $50 prize to users who crashed his system and could explain to him how they did it.
The feedback helped make Lumumbashi essentially immune to tampering. But Soft failed to sell many copies for a reason Chinery-Hesse never anticipated: there were so many pirated copies of other cafe programs that few managers needed to purchase Soft's.
Besides providing Ghana with tropically tolerant code, Soft is the premier training ground for the country's growing population of full-time programmers, who today number around 200. Their life isn't easy. On a humid January morning, Rudolf Akrong is one of seven male programmers crammed into a tiny windowless room. Ancient PCs line three walls; along the fourth, an administrator sits at a desk elevated on a small platform [see photo, ].
Akrong is scrambling to make a change in an accounting program used by Frankie's, which happens to be one of Soft's most important customers. Frankie's owner wants a new feature in its customer receipts, a line that separately lists the sales tax imposed on each transaction; currently only the total amount is given.
Chinery-Hesse asked for the change to be made in a single day, a demand Akrong is finding impossible to meet. He slept at the office last night on a small foam pad, and this morning, with the electricity out, he is working on his laptop while other programmers, who have only desktop PCs, lounge about, cursing and joking about the electric company and waiting for Chinery-Hesse to fire up the backup generator. The laptop displays a photo, in the background, of Akrong's girlfriend, who is attending the government university in Accra. By midmorning, Akrong still hasn't fixed the bug. He fears igniting Chinery-Hesse's wrath, but his concentration is interrupted by a friend's arrival.
The friend is showing off a new PDA from Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Texas. It's no small event: the chance to handle the latest electronic gear from the United States or Japan is rare. The programmers gather around, chatting excitedly in Twi, the local language. Akrong gamely tries to keep working, but after a half hour, he pushes away from his desk and presses his hands against the sides of his head. A colleague suggests lunch, and he agrees. The programmers pile into Akrong's 13-year-old Peugeot 405. Alone among the programmers, he owns a car, a bonus from Chinery-Hesse. Fortunately, it starts without a push (it doesn't always).
On the drive to a nearby restaurant, the programmers joke about girls, music, and the PDA. At the restaurant, they are treated with respect. Though they rank on the bottom rung of the software pecking order globally, in Ghana their salaries put them squarely in the middle class, and without families, they freely spend their cash.
The waitresses jump to attention on their arrival at the restaurant. The programmers order a special local dish called waakye, a hefty plate of rice and beans drenched in a spicy, oily sauce. As a side dish, a local bony fish, tilapia, is served. The feast costs $4 a person, a dear price in Ghana, but no sweat for programmers like Akrong. He earns about $400 a month at Soft--about five times as much as an experienced Ghanaian nurse earns and 10 times as much as a policeman earns.
Back at Soft's office, Akrong returns to his bug fix. He plays jazz on his laptop and soon dozes off. Sleeping in the office the night before--or maybe the heavy lunch--is catching up with him.
Akrong, 23, has worked at Soft for the past four years. After high school, he attended a one-year course on basic science, then was hired by Chinery-Hesse. Accra is home to the country's flagship public university, but Chinery-Hesse doesn't recruit its graduates, finding the university's computer science program woefully out of date.
Assembly languages from the 1960s are still taught religiously at the university, for instance, but courses on such contemporary languages as C++ are offered only sporadically. The computer science department's dozen working PCs are not generally connected to the Internet. Some students write their programming exercises with pencil and paper, while others work in Internet cafes.
The department has only three permanent faculty members to serve 400 students. The department chair, who has a master's degree, earns about $300 a month. Academic salaries are so low that students are advised to leave the classroom whenever their teacher is 10 minutes late; odds are the professor is consulting somewhere and won't show up at all.
Because of the spotty quality of
formal computer training available in the country, Chinery-Hesse prefers to
hire what he calls "uncorrupted" minds that he can mold.
"Ghana's educational system is exceedingly theoretical and designed to
train people to manage, say, a Mercedes dealership rather than to build a
Mercedes," Chinery-Hesse says. "What we require is more practical
education."
Chinery-Hesse offers such an
education for those persistent enough to stick it out. Akrong, for instance,
began as an unpaid intern. "Then, the simplest thing I couldn't
handle," he says. "They were hard on me. There was a culture of
certain people feeling superior, who sought to put you down. I got
dissed."The trial by fire was worth it. Today he is one of Soft's most important product tweakers and bug fixers. He writes applications for Windows programs in C++ and Visual Basic, and he even has a growing entourage of junior programmers who are learning at his knee. The day he finishes the code for the restaurant program, Chinery-Hesse tells him he'll be training a new Soft employee, whom he'll help choose. He is told to evaluate the C++ skills of the various candidates and to quiz them on their business know-how.
Training new staff is a constant at Soft, where programmer turnover is astonishingly high. Some can't hack the regimen, while others strike out on their own, seeking higher pay and more autonomy. Chinery-Hesse reserves his special pique for those who leave to seek programming jobs in the United States or Europe. "We should fix what we've got in Ghana," he says.
Akrong wants to remain in Ghana, but he realizes his code writing may suffer if he does. There are few places for him to study formally, so he learns on the fly. He tries to stay sharp by browsing the Web and rapping with his father, who years ago worked as a programmer at Soft. Chinery-Hesse offered to teach Akrong the ropes as a favor to his dad.
Family ties mean a lot in Africa. Chinery-Hesse's mother was once the highest-ranking African woman in the United Nations system, rising to the post of deputy director of the International Labor Organization before retiring in 1999. His father, whose ancestors include a German colonist who bequeathed the Hesse name, is a lawyer who advises the government of Uganda. After spending his early years outside of Ghana, Chinery-Hesse attended high school in the country and then enrolled at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas, where he lived with a relative.
His experience in the United States transformed him. "I could suddenly see opportunities more clearly in Ghana after being in America," he says. Before his U.S. stretch, he dreamed of becoming a civil servant, following his mother's path, and he blames Ghana's educational system for such personal conservatism. "We aren't trained to be creative," he says. America taught him the value of improvisation, and that talent is "not a matter of qualifications but of skills." He also discovered an ability to bounce back from rejection. "America taught me to accept 'no' and to move on."
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in industrial technology, Chinery-Hesse moved to London, working for a couple of years in business before coming to Accra in a fit of idealism in 1990. The country, once one of Africa's richest, had seen its economy collapse under the stress of repeated military coups.
Unfazed, Chinery-Hesse quickly persuaded the leading travel agent in Accra to let him computerize his back office by creating a program to keep track of expenses paid and of clients who owed him money. Chinery-Hesse aced the job and then recruited a mate from secondary school, Joe Jackson, who brought important management skills and market knowledge to the venture.
"My parents' financial comfort allowed me to gamble," Chinery-Hesse says. His bet paid off. Ghana was starting to computerize, and even many of the country's largest businesses found importing European computer consultants to be too expensive. Chinery-Hesse positioned Soft to fill the void.
At first, locals who doubted his knowledge of computing dismissed Chinery-Hesse. But over time, he wore down his skeptics. Heineken, Nestle, and Unilever--three European brands with major operations in Ghana--became large customers of business applications, choosing Soft for the same reasons local companies would: its programs were cheaper, they were more suited to the old computers in use in Ghana, and they were customized to local business conditions.
Success convinced Chinery-Hesse that "growing his own" code was essential to building both a business and a better society. But skepticism remains. Multinational corporations, while among his best customers, constantly question whether they should be buying African-made software even for use in Africa. Meanwhile, the few large, lucrative government software projects that come up are routinely shipped abroad, handled by expensive European or U.S. programmers.
Even so, Soft has inspired imitators in recent years. For example, a former Oracle manager, a native of Ghana, has launched a firm. So have other engineers educated in the United States. Talented programmers from other African countries also have trickled into Ghana, drawn by the country's tranquility, ease, and low cost of living. "We are all doing the same thing and chasing the same 10 customers," says Mauli Tse, a Ghanaian graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, who runs an IT business in Accra.
A few coding shops in Ghana are chasing outsourcing jobs from the developed world as well, but not Chinery-Hesse's. He prefers to pursue customers in neighboring African countries, where his philosophy of tropically tolerant code matches local conditions. Lately, Chinery-Hesse is reducing the number of products the company offers to focus on its strengths in accounting and document management software and to concentrate his programmers on making add-on products for Navision.
Chinery-Hesse and his backers know the Microsoft deal is Soft's chance to succeed internationally with a made-in-Ghana software program that piggybacks on Microsoft's marketing muscle. Committed to self-reliance, Chinery-Hesse thinks that his fellow Africans must accept that, while homegrown information technology may save them, the wider world won't. His dream remains "to expand software in Ghana, to make more money, and to show the world" that, despite the often depressing headlines about poverty and mayhem in Africa, "there are opportunities here for technical talent."
He has personally reaped the
benefits from these opportunities. The question in his mind is: how many more
Africans will, and how soon?
With additional reporting by Daniel
Morris
About
the Author
G. Pascal Zachary is the author of
The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy
(2003). His research on information technology in Africa was supported in part
by the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, in
Tempe.
No comments:
Post a Comment