[A-List] US imperialism: GM food to Africa

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

US 'dumping unsold GM food on Africa'

John Vidal
Monday October 7, 2002
The Guardian

Two leading international environment and development groups accused the US
yesterday of manipulating the southern African food crisis to benefit their
GM food interests and of using the UN to distribute domestic food surpluses
which could not otherwise find a market.

In response to criticism by senior US officials that they have been playing
with people's lives by encouraging countries to resist GM food sent as aid,
Greenpeace and Actionaid also accused the US government's overseas aid body
of offering only GM food when conventional foods were available.

The US, the largest donor to the crisis affecting more than 14 million
people in six countries, has offered more than $266m (£180m) of GM maize to
southern Africa through the UN World Food Programme.

But while the EU and other countries have mostly given money for countries
to buy food on the open market, US food aid to southern Africa has been tied
to heavily subsidised GM food grown only in the US.

Greenpeace accused the US government and the biotech industry of using the
aid system as a covert subsidy for US farmers. Swaziland, Lesotho and
Mozambique have accepted the GM food but Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe are
reluctant to import it in seed form. They fear that farmers may plant some
of the seeds, and that it may affect both their environment and future food
exports.

Yesterday Andrew Natsios, the head of the US agency for international
development (USAid), rejected the accusations and said that it was bound by
Congress to offer food and not money.

"There is no way that any responsible country can deal with this drought
with cash for work," he said. "The food deficit in southern Africa is so big
that there's no way people can buy it on the local market. It has to come
from outside.

"We offered non-GM foods but they all declined to accept it. We would have
preferred to send non-GM wheat, or rice but they only wanted maize. We tried
to source non-GM maize but the industry said they could not guarantee that
it was GM-free."

Mr Natsios denied that the US was profiting from the crisis. "They [the
critics] may know about the environment, but they don't know about famine
relief," he said. "Starving people do not plant seeds. They eat them. These
groups are putting millions of lives at risk in a despicable way."

But he was not supported by the latest UN figures on food availability in
the region, which showed that 1,160,000 tonnes of cereals are available in
Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. More than double that amount is
available on the world market, according to the UN's global information and
early warning system.

"This shows that the alternative to rejecting GM food aid is not
starvation," Alice Wynne Wilson, of Actionaid, said. "Good practice in
emergency aid is to provide cash support to the UN's World Food Programme,
so that it can buy grain from the most cost-effective sources.

"Bringing large volumes of food into a region that has areas of surplus can
lead to a situation where there are food shortages in one part of a country,
and locally produced food rotting in other parts."

Yesterday both the Zambian and Malawian governments said that they could
easily source non-GM food locally if they had the resources.

SK Mubukwanu, the Zambian high commissioner in London, said: "We can get
more than 200,000 tonnes from South Africa and our neighbours. All we need
is help with the logistics. We have sent our scientists to Europe, the US,
to find out more and they should be reporting back soon."