Why is Africa being pushed to adopt technology that it can't afford? Especially when a perfectly good (and cheap) alternative already exists. Enter he International Atomic Energy Agency, with a mission to 'promote nuclear power, when it can, where it can, however it can.' FRED PEARCE follows an atomic preacher round Zambia.
The booming voice rang out across the village meeting ground. A former Mennonite lay preacher from Canada was on the stump. And he had words of hope for the hundreds of farmers and their families assembled under the warka tree in the village of Lante, deep in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley.
‘We realise you have a big problem with this cattle disease here,’ announced the Canadian slowly – waiting for the translation to be completed. ‘But there is a solution coming soon. Scientists from your government and the world are going to help you. Very soon you will have healthy cattle and children. And good crops and a happy life.’
The message was a popular one. The farmers applauded, hands were shaken and everybody left.
Arnold Dyck, the speaker at Nante that day, is a missionary with a difference. He gave up preaching the New Testament for science, and now works for the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. He and his bosses have a plan to rid Lante and tens of thousands of other villages across Africa of an ancient scourge. Dyck promises to banish the tsetse fly and the trypanosome parasite it carries. Trypanosome causes sleeping sickness in humans and the lethal disease nagana in cattle. The latter makes livestock farming all but impossible across much of the African continent.
I travelled with Dyck on his three-nation tour of the lands of the tsetse, and he explained to me his mission to use atoms for peace and prosperity. His agency wants to spray the bush in 40 countries with tens of billions of specially reared male tsetse flies made sterile by a quick blast of radiation. The aim is to crowd out the wild, fertile males and cause tsetse populations to crash. Dyck says this Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) could eradicate the tsetse fly from Africa for ever.
There is a cost, however, of tens of billions of dollars spent on rearing and irradiating the flies and releasing them on tens of thousands of aircraft sorties. And both Dyck and the IAEA admit to knowing next to nothing about animal or human health – or how to manage large logistical operations in Africa. Moreover, the numerous experts I have spoken to say the IAEA plan is plain nuts.
Hans Herren, director of Nairobi’s World Bank-backed International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology, says: ‘We think it is a crazy idea. There are so many tsetse that you are bound to miss a few. The populations will regenerate and you are back to square one – only a lot poorer.’ And David Rogers, a zoology professor at Oxford University, agrees. ‘It cannot be done,’ Rogers says. ‘The IAEA’s attempts to persuade people otherwise are a deeply cynical manipulation of the hopes of many Africans.’
But the IAEA has managed to persuade the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and many individual African governments. The OAU has appointed Ugandan scientist John Kabayo to run its Pan-African Tsetse and Trypanosomosis Eradication Programme (PATTEC). Kabayo says: ‘It is not acceptable that we Africans suffer from a disease that can be stopped. If it takes 100 years, we are going to do it.’ In reality, however, PATTEC is a shadow organisation with only two staff. Kabayo’s salary is paid by the IAEA itself.
GROWING PROBLEM The tsetse problem is huge and growing. The current rate of infection for human sleeping sickness is estimated at 300,000 new cases a year. That is more than at any time since the 1930s. In Uganda I met 12-year-old Taneba Joseph. He was lying in a tiny hut at Namungawe sleeping sickness clinic on the shores of Lake Victoria. Taneba’s father had brought him to the clinic after his son became ‘dull and sleepy’. He will be given drugs developed 50 years ago and which contain large amounts of arsenic. These drugs kill up to 10 per cent of patients who are prescribed them. But most victims never see a doctor at all. Faustin Maiso, of the Ugandan health ministry, says: ‘For every reported case of sleeping sickness in Uganda we believe there are three more unreported out in the villages.’
Meanwhile, nagana kills some three million cattle a year in a continent where cattle provide meat, milk and the power to pull a plough. The disease – which mostly infests humid, low-lying valleys – costs Africa’s farmers an estimated $4.5 billion a year. Lante farmer Berza Bassa told me he lost 40 cattle, almost his entire herd, when the tsetse invaded the local bush a decade ago. ‘Since then I have no milk for sale and no oxen to plough my fields,’ Berza said. ‘I can no longer afford to send my children to school.’
To halt the current epidemic most countries have adopted a containment strategy: installing simple traps, baited with animal odour, which kill the flies. The traps work well, but as fly numbers fall both villagers and officials lose interest, the traps are abandoned and the flies eventually return. Dyck insists that trapping is not sustainable. ‘It is,’ he says ‘a stopgap’. The Ethiopian government agrees and wants to become the first African country to eradicate the tsetse fly by using sterile insects.
At Kaliti, south of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, the foundations were already being dug this summer for what will become the continent’s largest insect-rearing centre. Here 10 million female flies, all fed on blood from a local abattoir, will soon be producing two million offspring a week. The males will be exposed to a cobalt-60 radiation source and then sprayed from aircraft across the Rift Valley tsetse region in weekly flights that will go on for at least two years. Before the releases, conventional traps will cut the number of flies by 95 per cent – leaving the remaining five per cent to be zapped with sterile insects. The first releases could begin as early as this winter.
UNIMAGINABLE SCALE SIT has been used before, mostly in the Americas to fight the Mediterranean fruit fly and the screw worm. But Africa’s tsetse is a much tougher target. There are 22 different species. Ethiopia alone has five. Each must be targeted individually with its own breeding and spraying programme. And the work must be co-ordinated, since each species is ready to move into the ecological niche vacated by another.
Dyck envisages building three regional African fly-breeding centres to supply national irradiation units across the continent. The bush would be blasted with sterile flies, area by area, over many years. Nothing on anything like such a scale has ever been attempted in Africa before. The biggest and probably fatal problem will be re-invasions of flies from neighbouring bush into cleared areas. Zanzibar, the site of the only successful eradication so far, is an island archipelago bordered by sea. The mainland has few such natural barriers. So artificial barriers will be needed.
And here the IAEA thinking gets decidedly fuzzy. Tsetse flies are masters at invasions. They crossed from Kenyan into the Ethiopian Rift Valley in 1992 and advanced 800 kilometres in three years – probably aboard nomadic cattle herds. Dyck hopes dense thickets of traps, chemical spraying and limits on cattle movements will stop re-invasions. But when pressed, he admits: ‘There isn’t an example of artificial barriers being used successfully. The best thing is a moving front.’ By this he means that active zones of eradication would themselves form the prophylactic. That, he says, requires ‘continuous long-term funding’. ‘If you stop,’ he adds, ‘it will go back. You’ll be no better off than under the old system.’
Leaving aside the funding question, nothing happens like that in Africa. The continent is full of impediments to such a smooth operation. Tsetse flies are no respecters of borders, and they won’t wait for civil wars to end. Indeed, civil wars and other administrative breakdowns caused the upsurge in the parasite in the first place. Surely, critics say, a strategy that relies on these crises’ disappearance is doomed to fail.
Ethiopia’s 10-year eradication plan can’t succeed while civil war continues in southern Sudan. In Uganda they can’t eradicate till neighbouring Congo clears its border regions of tsetse. Some chance. No wonder Britain’s overseas aid minister Clare Short told Parliament earlier this year that the IAEA ‘will not be able to eradicate the flies from Africa’.
Short backs ‘methods for controlling the tsetse fly that can be readily implemented by poor people themselves’. That means developing new and better traps for communities to use. Such controls do not provide a ‘final solution’, of course. But they do bring real and immediate benefits, as well as community control.
Confronted by such opposition, Dyck and his collaborators offer the Zanzibar experience as proof of the merits of their strategy. Dyck spent the mid-1990s using sterile insects to eliminate every last tsetse on the Tanzanian islands. It worked and the benefits to farmers, as I saw for myself, are genuine. But the programme was fraught with deceit and secrecy. And it is a most unlikely model for success on the mainland of Africa.
Zanzibar was chosen because it was an easy target. The flies were of only one species, were not densely populated, were confined to the small area of the Jozani Forest and – many believe – were on the verge of dying out anyway. Nonetheless, Dyck mounted a vast operation to eliminate them. He sprayed around eight million sterile male flies to eradicate a tsetse population of around 10,000. With a final bill of more than $5 million, the cost per fly killed works out at $500.
NAGANA COVER-UP Further, Dyck’s team hushed up an epidemic of a strain of nagana never before seen in Zanzibar after an experiment in releasing female flies went wrong. Unlike males, the females lived long enough to transmit a parasite they picked up in the breeding programme. In a panic, Dyck’s team treated thousands of cattle with drugs and the parasite disappeared. But it was a close call. ‘We never told the Zanzibarians at the time,’ Dyck confides. ‘They never knew why we were treating their cattle.’
There has never been an independent review of the Zanzibar operation or its success. A planned environmental impact assessment was mysteriously cancelled. Dyck admits few records were kept. ‘Yet,’ as David Rogers says, ‘Zanzibar is the basis on which the IAEA seeks to commit all African countries to a mountain of external debt.’
Dyck admits that the pressure on him to succeed in Zanzibar was intense. ‘It had to work,’ he says. Past efforts at using sterile insects to eradicate tsetse flies had failed in Nigeria, Burkina Faso and on the Tanzanian mainland – in each case because of re-invasions. ‘We knew that if we failed again there would never be another project,’ Dyck adds. The IAEA – an organisation seeking a new role in the post-cold-war era – was pinning high hopes on masterminding a long-term tsetse eradication programme. And there may be other forces at work. Professor Malcolm Molyneux, director of the Wellcome Trust Tropical Centre at the University of Liverpool, has a more conspiratorial theory about the IAEA’s activities.
‘Initially it was a CIA operation, I have no doubt,’ he says. Certainly, it was the US, under the banner of USAID (the federal government international aid agency), that ran the first, failed attempt at eradication in mainland Tanzania. And USAID is still heavily involved. When earlier this year I wrote a short newspaper item on the criticisms of the IAEA project, the paper that printed the piece received a long and angry letter of denunciation from USAID.
When its political and institutional agenda is confronted with a wall of opposition from professionals, the IAEA falls back on rhetoric. ‘We don’t deny it’s ambitious,’ says Dyck. ‘To some extent it is hope as well as science. But we shouldn’t deny Africans the technology.’ He accuses sceptics of being ‘fatalistic, resigned to the inevitability of hunger and poverty’.
For Rogers this is moral blackmail, verging on character assassination. ‘It is sometimes suggested that we are racists, determined to keep Africa in its present state of underdevelopment.’ Nothing could be further from the truth, he says. ‘If the IAEA scheme succeeds, there is no doubt the benefits would be enormous. But there can be no partial success. It either succeeds or fails with no benefits at all. And the chances of success are vanishingly small.’
Fred Pearce is the Environment Editor of the New Scientist.
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