Hungry African nations resist ‘Frankenstein’ foods from US

Date: 17/10/02

By Karen Carstens

AFRICAN and European consumers appear to have one thing in common: a fear of 'Frankenstein foods'.

Resistance to food aid from the United States has been strong in a number of hungry southern African countries concerned about letting their farmers grow (and their people eat) GM products. Another fear is that EU citizens - 70 of whom are anti-GMO - would boycott GM food imports coming from Africa.

The Union, meanwhile, has kept fairly quiet about the whole affair.

'You can't really say they (the EU) took a strong position on this,' said Geert Ritsema, of Friends of the Earth Europe. 'They want to stay out of the conflict. It would have been better from our perspective if they had given some support to these countries, because the EU is obviously better at being the countervailing power vis-à-vis the US than these African countries.'

Moreover, said Ritsema, there is more than enough GM-free food to go around. 'Every year about 50 million tonnes of grain goes to waste in India, it just sits there and rots,' he said, adding that more effective redistribution methods could easily bring this food to the mouths that need it most.

The trouble began when the US corporation Monsanto launched its 'Let the Harvest Begin' campaign in 1998, claiming that strong GM crops can help feed the world by increasing production, he said.

But Simon Barber, director of the plant biotechnology unit at the European Association for Bioindustries, said many African governments and consumers really may just be suffering from a fear of the unknown.

'For me having worked for years in plant breeding and regulations, it's [the African response] a little extreme,' he said. 'There are many hundreds of millions of people eating these products all over the world.'

Some 50 million hectares of GM crops are currently being cultivated globally by nearly six million farmers, Barber said. Most commercial GM crops are cultivated in Canada, the United States and Argentina, and South Africa has just approved them as well, he added.

The European Commission has given information to South African agriculture and health ministers that helped them make their own qualified decision on whether or not to let the crops be cultivated in their country. 'So they've [the EU] been responsible in that respect,' Barber said. 'You have to give them credit for that.'

Barber, who has worked in Zambia, said that GMO maize crops can help African farmers feed more people because they have 'a better yield and less damage'.

But, he added, 'if the president of Zambia is truly terrified that this stuff will harm his citizens, he certainly has a right to his own opinion.'

Resistance to food aid from the United States has been strong in a number of hungry southern African countries concerned about letting their farmers grow (and their people eat) GM products. Article is part of a European Voice survey 'Feeding the World'.