Paulus Jona
African nations and in particular Namibia, which I care much about, have been laggard in terms of accepting new technologies.
In many instances, we have refused outright to accept and apply new valuable technologies under the auspices of preserving biodiversity, norms, culture or whatever the reason could be.
But to be quite honest, those conservative beliefs and the seemingly unbroken traditions have brought us nothing but hundreds of years of acute poverty. Look, we have a vast amount of natural resources, and well over 30 years of political freedom.
This is self-evident that it’s not by God’s design that we are still among the poorest countries in the world.
We are poor collectively as a country, by our very own design. We have, among other things, refused to accord to the very basic principles of life: Growth. Life is dynamic – not static. It is ever moving forward – not standing still.
The one unpardonable sin of nature is to stand still, to stagnate. Let us for instance look at real-life experiences.
Look at the Giganotosaurus which was a hundred feet long and as big as a house; the Tyrannosaurus which had the strength of a locomotive; The Flying Dragon – all giant monsters of prehistoric Ages – are gone.
They are gone because they cease to serve a useful purpose. They did not know how to meet the changing conditions. They stood still -stagnated- while the life around them passed them by. But maybe we should look even at more recent history.
Look at Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome -all great empires of antiquity are gone when they cease to grow. In all nature, to cease to grow is to perish. Our country will cease to exist too if we, out of pure ignorance, refuse to grow, if we refuse to accept new technologies and innovation. I need not remind you that Namibia is a hot and dry country with very low rainfall year in and year out, and mind you, it will only get worse.
At the present moment, it is already hard to raise beef cattle, and I do not even want to think about 10 years from today. We have for many years relied upon meat, both for local consumption and export.
That will soon come to a terrible end. It will be unsustainable to raise beef cattle in a drought-stricken land like Namibia. We must find new ways to grow meat.
Bio-engineering technology presents a unique opportunity to create meat in the laboratory instead of a farm or feedlot, and without much use of water and feeds.
But the question is: will we embrace and adopt this technology, or will we stand still, stagnate and let life pass us by again?
I say again because not so long ago, most African nations, including Namibia of course, refused the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in livestock, all because they feared it will somehow kill them/us, even given the lack of scientific evidence that such was the case.
Our leaders, if you may, stood for hours speculating and aimlessly arguing with each other and in the end decided, authoritatively, to ban the use of GMOs.
Other countries, mostly the Western countries, have made the best use of this technology, produced meat more efficiently, and oddly enough are selling the very same GMO meat to us; making billions of dollars and becoming even more wealthier than us.
I am pretty sure that there are a great number of people in Namibia who consumed inorganic meat/foods, as they call it, with or without their knowledge. And as for our leaders who travel extensively and spend vacations in Western countries, they certainly consume GMO meat, while here at home they ban its use. There have been of course many other misconceptions about meat, red meat in particular, but I do not have the time and luxury to dwell upon Hersey.
However, I want to make one particular thing clear. For years, we have been taught to foreswear meat.
For years, we have been told that it causes rheumatism, gout, hardening of arteries and a dozen more ailments. Nothing could be further from the truth.
All these silly prejudices against meat, that it heated the blood (whatever that means) and produce uric acid, harden arteries, inflame kidneys, etc. have now been proved to be fairytales, utterly without foundation in scientific fact. Red meat has nothing whatsoever to do with causing gout and rheumatism, because neither of these diseases is due to foods or drinks of any sort, but solely to what we call local infections: little pockets of pus full of robber germs – mostly streptococcus around the roots of our teeth, in the pouches of our tonsils, in the nasal passage and sinuses of our forehead.
Our belief now (the food science community) is that foods of any kind had absolutely nothing to do with the case. On the contrary, the very worst cases on record in all medical history of hardening and calcification of arteries all over the body have been found especially among certain orders of oriental monks who live almost exclusively upon starch and pulse, and abstain from meat entirely.
I brought this to your attention to revive your confidence in meat as the best source of protein there is. Consumed moderately, meat is good for you.
But we will soon run out of meat in Namibia. We won’t be able to sustainably produce meat enough for ourselves, let alone for export, unless and until we adopt new technologies such as cultured meat (lab-grown meat).
This technology, while it may require large investments, is not complicated at all, and certainly not controversial. To be brief, cultured meat is grown from animal cells, and is structurally identical to meat. From a genetic and structural profile, it is meat.
You just do not have that slaughter component as a step in the whole process, which is good since we do not have enough livestock to slaughter.
Elsewhere, there are already a dozen food technology companies which embark upon this technology. In 2020, Eat Just Company began selling lab-grown chicken nuggets in Singapore. That company generated about US$267 million in 2021, and was planning to build a bio-engineering meat facility in Qatar. The industry is still at its infant stage and is projected to be worth US$25 billion by 2030, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The question thus remains: will the Namibian government and private institutions as well as individual investors jump onto this ship of opportunities, or will they just stand by and watch as life passes us by again? Only time will tell.
*Paulus Jona is a former Fulbright scholar and has studied BSc in Agriculture (Animal Science) and Master of Science in Meat Science at Iowa State University, USA. Email jonapaulus15@gmail.com