The Des Moines Register’s Philip Brasher is in Africa reporting on the potential for GMO crops to help alleviate hunger in the developing world. The current focus is on drought-tolerant crops for obvious reasons:

 I grew up in western Texas and covered the Midwest’s devastating drought of 1988. I know what a drought looks like, but I’ve never seen anything like the devastation to a portion of the Rift Valley near the Tanzania border.

 The savanna, where locals said the grass should be as much as 2 feet high, is barren except for scattered acacia trees and cattle carcasses baking in the sun. Maasai tribesmen, distinctive for their long poles and colorful wraps, were herding along a road a few emaciated cattle that were barely recognizable as dairy cows. There, the cattle, ribs showing and udders shrunken, could forage in small patches of grass, barely an inch tall, that have grown where what rain that has fallen has pooled. It’s the only green in sight.

 … Farmers said they haven’t had a good year of rainfall since 2005.

Now, you could ask yourself why these African farmers continue to plant water-intensive crops like corn. But let’s leave that issue aside for the moment (though Brasher says it’s because “it’s what they want to eat”). The important issue is that the big biotech companies have now targeted Africa:

 [S]cientists plan next year to try a plot of corn lines that are being genetically engineered to yield better than conventional hybrids when rainfall is insufficient. That’s a common problem throughout east Africa with corn, a staple food crop that isn’t particularly well suited to the region because of the lack of reliable precipitation. The corn will contain a gene that U.S. biotech giant Monsanto Co. developed and contributed to the project. Monsanto would like to see the African version available to poor farmers when the company rolls out more sophisticated drought-tolerant corn seeds in the United States over the next decade.