African Famine, Made in Europe

Date Published:

Abstract:

Southern Africa is suffering its worst drought in a decade. The U.N. World Food Program estimates some 13 million people in six countries will need 1.2 million tons of food aid till March 2003 to avoid famine. Yet two countries, Zimbabwe and Zambia, have spent most of the summer rejecting food aid shipments of corn from the U.S. because some varieties of U.S. corn are "genetically modified" (GM). Incredibly, African leaders facing famine are rejecting perfectly safe food. What is going on here?

Regulatory Authorities

Farmers in the U.S. have been planting (and Americans have been consuming) genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton since 1995. Regulatory authorities in the EU and Japan have also approved such GM crops, but in Europe food safety regulators have been mistrusted by consumers ever since the unrelated but traumatizing mad cow disease crisis of 1996. EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Affairs David Byrne repeatedly states there is no scientific evidence of added risk to human health or the environment from any of the GM products approved for the market so far, and he can point to 81 separate scientific studies, all EU-funded, that bolster this conclusion.

But greens and GM critics in Europe say this absence of expected or known risks is no longer a sufficient regulatory standard. Touting the "precautionary principle," they argue that powerful new technologies should be kept under wraps until tested for unexpected or unknown risks as well. Never mind that testing for something unknown is logically impossible (the only way to avoid a completely unknown risk is never to do anything for the first time).

Europeans can perhaps afford hyper-caution regarding new crop technologies. Even without planting any GM seeds, European farmers will continue to prosper—thanks to lavish subsidies—and consumers will remain well fed. The same is not true in the developing world, especially in Africa, where hunger is worsening in part because farmers are not yet productive.

Two-thirds of all Africans are farmers, most are women, and they are poor and hungry in part because they lack improved crop technologies to battle against drought, poor soil fertility, crop disease, weeds and endemic insect problems. The productivity of African agriculture, per farm worker, has actually declined by 9% over the past two decades, which helps explain why one-third of all Africans are malnourished.

This ought to change the calculus of precaution. If GM-improved crops are kept out of the hands of African farmers, pending tests for the "nth" hypothetical risk, or the "nth" year of exposure to that risk, the misery of millions will be needlessly prolonged.

But now we are seeing an even less justified application of regulatory caution toward GM foods. Governments in Africa that are facing an actual famine have been rejecting some food aid shipments because they contain GM seeds. In May 2002, the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe rejected 10,000 tons of corn shipped from the U.S. because it was not certified as GM-free. This at a time when four to six million Zimbabweans approached a risk of starvation.

Next, the government of Zambia banned all imports of GM corn, including food-aid imports, even though some 2.3 million people in the country were at risk. On Aug. 16, Zambian Information Minister Newstead Zimba announced on state TV that the government had decided, in light of the uncertainties surrounding GM foods, that it would be best to "take the precautionary principle on this matter" and not accept or distribute GM food aid. Silumelume Mubukwanu, Zambia`s High Commissioner to London, explained that food aid was being rejected because "too much is unknown about GM foods yet."

Precautionary European policies toward the environment are also keeping Africans from growing their own food. The EU has been insisting that governments in Africa treat GM crops as a potentially serious threat to rural "biological safety." This helps explain why there are no GM crops yet being planted commercially anywhere on the continent, except in the nation of South Africa. Instead of helping Africa`s hungry to grow more food, European donors are helping them grow more regulations.

African governments also must worry that accepting GM food aid will cost them commercial export sales to Europe. The EU has not been importing any U.S. corn since 1998, because U.S. shipments can contain some GM varieties not yet approved in Europe. African governments now worry that any illicit planting of U.S. corn by farmers could jeopardize their own exports to Europe. Trying to remain GM-free for commercial export reasons is a policy that does not help poor subsistence farmers, but it may soon become the norm in Africa, once the EU moves next year toward much tighter labeling and traceability regulations on all imported GM foods and animal feeds.

Documentary Records

Even while professing that GM foods are safe, EU officials will soon require that they be traced individually through the marketing chain, with legal documentary records to be saved by all producers and handlers for five years. African countries won't have the institutional capacity to implement this traceability regulation, so they will have to remain GM-free to retain their access to the EU market. Meat products raised with GM feed are not yet covered by this new EU regulation, but Zambia's initial rejection of GM corn in food aid shipments was partly based on a fear that if the country lost its GM-free animal feed status, poultry and dairy exports to the UK would slump.

By inducing African governments to embrace excessively cautious biosafety regulations and by requiring stigmatizing labels and costly traceability certificates for all imported GM foods and feeds, wealthy and comfortable officials in Europe have made it harder for drought-stricken societies in Africa to accept food aid from the U.S. European critics of GM foods did not foresee this potentially deadly misapplication of their precautionary principle. Yet here it is.

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