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03/2003
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Genetically modified food aid for Africa?
"Should we then not offer needy Africans what we ourselves eat?" Thomas Engle, Counsellor in the Economic Section of the US Embassy in Berlin, asked angrily. He was speaking at a meeting of the Social Democratic Parliamentary party's Africa discussion group in the Reichstag building on February 13. In talks covering emergency relief for Africa's famine regions, Engle emphatically rejected African objections to the import of genetically modified maize from the USA. He said one-third of the planted acreage of maize in the USA was now genetically modified and increasingly was an integral part of the food US citizens ate. Americans could not understand why the food aid for which they paid was refused by the Africans.
Earlier, Major Epyrious Knight Mulenga, Counsellor at the Zambian Embassy, had said his country did not have the money to carry out research on the health and environmental risks which could arise from importing the maize. Unlike Zambia, which has decided to impose a strict import ban, Zimbabwe plans to import a total of 100,000 tons of GM maize. But it has stipulated that the maize must be quarantined, ground in South Africa, and distributed under government control. Zambian Ambassador Lucia Muvingi said this would prevent contamination of the soil and local seed.
For some participants the debate missed the decisive issue. They said the real problem of the food aid was that the maize and grain exports threatened to make Africa completely dependent upon the subsidised western agro-industry. To prevent that, food for emergency relief programmes must be bought more on African markets. Hans-Joachim Preuss, secretary-general of the NGO German Agro Action, and Horst Müller, head of BMZ Division 303, whose responsibilities include food aid and emergency relief, argued for linking the action plan against the current famine in Southern Africa with structural reform. They said the goal must be to strengthen indigenous farming and local agricultural markets (see also the report 'Roads to combat hunger'.
Johannes Wendt
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