World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 2, Summer 2003

Hunger and the Biotech Wars
Peter Pringle ^*

 

Across southern Africa in 2002 the harvest failed, leaving more than 15 million people facing starvation, according to United Nations relief agencies. Drought one month, floods the next destroyed crops across the continent; AIDs and local political turmoil also exacted their toll. As the bore holes went dry and plants withered, the world saw the all too familiar pictures of women and children lining up for the daily handful of grain from nations with plenty. This African famine had a new, unexpected dimension, however. Three countries--Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Zambia--made the astonishing decision to refuse food aid if it came from the United States and contained genetically modified seeds. All three African countries worried that these seeds might be planted as well as eaten by their hungry citizens and then "contaminate" their own local varieties of corn. In addition, Zambia worried that the new seeds might be unsafe to eat.

How did the fear of genetically modified (GM) foods reach this extreme level? A decade after Americans had eaten their first GM food--a tomato with an altered gene that made the fruit ripen more slowly--farmers had planted genetically modified seeds with built-in resistance to pests and herbicides on more than 130 million acres worldwide. But the biotech companies who produced the seeds had failed to convince many countries outside America--even those in Africa whose people were on the brink of starvation--that the novel crops were safe for humans and the environment.

Under pressure from U.N. relief agencies, Zimbabwe and Mozambique agreed to take the U.S. corn, providing that it was milled and there were no seeds to plant. The Zambian government stubbornly refused the aid altogether. "Simply because my people are hungry is not a justification to give them poison," declared Zambia's president, Levy Mwanawasa.

*Peter Pringle, a veteran foreign correspondemt for the (London) Sunday Times, The Observer, and The Independent, is the author, most recently, of Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice . He lives in New York City.