Here's the url for the article about the total failure of the Monsanto/Wambugu project which has turned out to do the very opposite of what was claimed. http://www.nationaudio.com/News/DailyNation/Supplements/horizon/current/story290120041.htm

And here's the HYPE exposed! Our article concludes, "Florence Wambugu's reinvention of the future via genetic engineering exists only at the level of myth. Unfortunately, the Wambugu myth is helping to inhibit change for some of the world's poorest farmers."
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EXCERPTED from: http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=131

In June 2003 Canada's National Post reported, 'Genetically modified crops are the key to eradicating poverty and hunger in the Third World, says a leading African biotechnology expert.'

That expert is Dr Florence Wambugu and such comments are far from an embarrassment to companies like Monsanto. In fact, Val Giddings, a vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, has said, 'I wish we could clone her.'

The industry has certainly done everything it can to help her project her unambiguous message. 'In Africa GM food could almost literally weed out poverty', she told New Scientist. In the journal Nature she wrote that biotechnology was urgently needed to counter 'famine, environmental degradation and poverty'. Resistance to GM, she put down to a 'strong anti-biotechnology lobby that actively promotes misinformation'. 'Africa must enthusiastically join the biotechnology revolution,' she says. Such a revolution, she told a  Canadian newspaper in 2003, could pull 'the African continent out of decades of economic and social despair'.

Whatever the limitations of her prescription for Africa's 'economic and social despair', Florence Wambugu is a rising star. As well as writing for Nature, she has written for The New York Times, appeared on CNN and on several American TV shows. In an issue of Forbes magazine in December 2001, she was named one of fifteen people from around the globe who will 'reinvent the future.' In 2002 she was appointed to the Science Board of the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative. She is also a DuPont Biotech Advisory Panelist, a two-times Monsanto Company Outstanding Performance Award winner, and author and publisher of the book Modifying Africa: How Biotechnology Can Benefit the Poor and Hungry: A Case Study from Kenya.

 Florence Wambugu began her career studying zoology and botany at the University of Nairobi. She continued her education in the United States, graduating with a master's degree at North Dakota State University before obtaining a doctorate at the University of Bath in England (1991). She was then picked and trained by Monsanto for its GM virus-resistant sweet potato project. It is around this project that Wambugu has built her reputation, capturing massive positive publicity for GM crops in the process.

The cornerstone of Florence Wambugu's career has been the GM sweet potato project. She has presented the sweet potato as a crop grown in her childhood by her mother. 'The sweet potato is a woman's crop,' she says. Wambugu also presents the project, which in recent years has moved out of Monsanto's labs into the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, as very much her own and essentially a Kenyan affair. Some newspaper accounts of the project do not even mention Monsanto.

But the project was not Wambugu's brain child. It was that of three American men: Robert Horsch and another colleague at Monsanto in consort with Joel Cohen from USAID. It was the three Americans who recruited Wambugu, who had just completed her doctoral thesis, for their project using USAID money to pay for a three-year post-doctoral position(1991-1994) for her with Monsanto.

Robert Horsch has said his role at Monsanto is to 'create goodwill and help open future markets'. Wambugu reinforces the point: 'it [the GM sweet potato] has no commercial value to Monsanto, except as PR.' Over the years Wambugu has more than repaid Monsanto's PR investment, working hard to publicize the project and securing a career as an influential advocate for GM crops in the process.

To grasp the extraordinary character and scale of the media coverage Wambugu has generated in her role as biotech advocate, it is useful to do a Google search on Wambugu + "sweet potato" . It throws up hundreds of articles, mostly in the Western press.

Following a visit by Wambugu to Australia, one commentator asked, 'is it too cynical to suggest that having a black African as the face of a multinational chemical company is a spin doctor's dream? This seems to have lobotomised some journalists who have treated her views like the tablets from the Mount. Even the normally rigorous Jon Faine interviewed her in a way that was almost fawning.' ( GM science can be blinding , Rankin McKay, Herald Sun, July 30, 2003)

Uncritical media coverage of a lobbying trip by Wambugu to Canada also drew critical coment , 'A black African woman in colourful traditional dress delivering a sermon on feeding the hungry of Africa is a real show stopper. And the right-wing press love it. They don’t bother to ask about the sources of the sensational numbers she throws about, they don’t ask to see the research studies to back up her claims for biotechnology or the world of African farmers that she paints in  simplistic terms. They don’t ask who is paying her way around the world. Perhaps they just don’t want to appear impolite, even if truth is the victim.'

So what is the truth? When it comes to the showcase project Wambugu has built her career around, it seems to be elastic. According to a  piece in the Toronto Globe & Mail in July 2003, 'Dr. Wambugu’s modified sweet potato... can increase yields from four tonnes per hectare to 10 tonnes.' A piece in Canada's National Post repeats the same figures, 'Dr. Wambugu, who continues to act as an advisor on the project, said the modified sweet potato seeds should be able to produce 10 tonnes of vegetables per hectare compared with a natural Kenyan crop that yields four tonnes per hectare.'  (GM crops touted to fight poverty )

 However, back in 1999 in an article in Nature Wambugu wrote, 'the production of sweet potato [in Kenya], a staple crop, is 6 tonnes per hectare', (Why Africa Needs Agricultural Biotech, Nature 400, July 1, 1999 ) Then again, according to the article about Wambugu in Forbes magazine, 'In Africa the sweet potato harvest averages two and a half tons an acre'. (MILLIONS SERVED; FLORENCE WAMBUGU FEEDS HER COUNTRY WITH FOOD OTHERS HAVE THE LUXURY TO AVOID, December 23, 2002, Forbes Magazine, Lynn J. Cook)

It might not appear to matter whether the average yield of the conventional swee