On the 29th October 2002 the Government of Zambia announced that it had decided not to reverse its earlier  rejection of GM food aid "in view of the current scientific uncertainty surrounding the issue".

Agence France Presse HEADLINE: US denounces Zambia's refusal to accept genetically modified food aid DATELINE: WASHINGTON, October 30th, 2002

The US at once made it clear that it would only provide aid to Zambia if its decision on GM food aid was reversed. More astonishingly, it also became clear that UN agencies dominated by the US had made no move to remedy the situation since the Zambian Government first formally announced its rejection of GM food aid back in June. 

The reason for the dangerous delay? According to a report in Afrol News:

"Only now, further supplies of food aid had been ordered, "expected to arrive in Zambia in December." UN agencies had been expecting a change in government mind until the last moment. The decision not to order non-GM food aid until now has been observed as direct pressure against the Zambian government." ("Continued pressure against Zambia on GM food", 30th October 2002)

By December 2002 US frustration with Zambia had reached such a point that the US Ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Agencies was quoted by Reuters as calling for African leaders who rejected genetically engineered food aid from the U.S. to be tried "for the highest crimes against humanity in the highest courts of the world."' (Reuters News Service, December 9) http://ngin.tripod.com/180103a.htm

In January 2003 US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick claimed the European Union (EU) was to blame and that it had threatened Zambia with sanctions if it accepted the GM grain. This claim appeared in a series of articles in the U.S. press. According to Knight Ridder columnist Paul Driessen in the Sun Herald, for instance,  "environmental radicals and the European Union are screaming "genetic pollution" and threatening to withdraw aid and ban agricultural exports from any countries that plant or distribute the [GM] grains."  

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, denying that either the EU or member states had ever made their aid for African countries contingent on those nations banning GM crops, EU Trade Commissioner Lamy stated, "We very much regret that US officials are peddling this rumor". Lamy also accused the US of using its foreign aid programme as a means to "dispose of its genetically modified crop surpluses. The simple solution is for the US to behave as a real aid donor," he said.  http://ngin.tripod.com/220103e.htm

The EU Trade Commissioner was also quoted by Dow Jones International News: "The fact that (the US) made this link is very simply immoral" and he once again accused the US of using its foreign aid programme as a means to "dispose of its genetically modified crop surpluses."  http://www.just-food.com/news_detail.asp?art=52895

European Development Commissioner Poul Nielson waded in with, "This very negative lie has been circulated and repeated recently by [US Trade Representative] Robert Zoellick." Nielson told reporters he wanted to propose a deal to the Americans which would create a more normal situation.  "The deal would be this: if the Americans would stop lying about us, we would stop telling the truth about them."  http://ngin.tripod.com/200103d.htm

EU trade commissioner Lamy also hit out in an interview with Newsweek: "Zambia is a sovereign country and makes its own decisions. Zambians do not need to be heroic to assert their sovereignty... GM-free supplies are
available in surplus in southern Africa. Europe's policy is to provide food aid procured in the region, rather than as a means of disposing of domestic stocks."  http://www.msnbc.com/news/861362.asp

Between now and March, southern Africa will need up to 2m tonnes of emergency food aid grain.  The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation says there are 1.16m tonnes of exportable non-GM maize in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa.  Europe, Brazil, India and China have surpluses running into many tens of millions of tonnes. Even in the US, more than 50% of the harvest has been kept GM-free. As Guardian columnist George Monbiot has commented, "All the starving people in southern Africa, Ethiopia and the world's other hungry regions could be fed without the use of a single genetically modified grain."
http://ngin.tripod.com/191102a.htm

The US is a signatory of the 1999 Food Aid Convention, which recognises that food aid should be bought from the most cost effective source, be culturally acceptable and if possible purchased locally so that regional markets do not suffer. Despite this...

• The US is refusing southern African governments loans that are not tied to the purchase of GM contaminated grain from the US.

• The US says it is impossible for it to provide anything other than GM contaminated grain in spite of the fact that 50% of US elevators can and do segregate GM and non-GM grains

• The US refuses to mill the GM grain even though African countries facing famine have requested this

• The US boasts that "The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States"

• The US introduced Public Law 480 to ensure that food aid never interfered with "domestic production or marketing" 

• USAID also states one of its roles is to "integrate GM into local food systems." 

• George Bush has increased the US aid budget specifically for the purpose of encouraging the uptake of biotechnology. Earlier this year, USAID launched a $100m programme for bringing biotechnology to developing countries. USAID's "training" and "awareness raising programmes" will, its website reveals, provide companies such as "Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto" with opportunities for "technology transfer". Monsanto, in turn, provides financial support for USAID. 

The New Scientist has revealed that food aid has been GM contaminated for years - a fact kept secret from recipient nations until now. James Morris of the US-dominated World Food Programme has admitted the agency has been responsible for shipping GM Food Aid without consent. "The World Food Program has been distributing food with some biotech content in Africa and around the world for seven years, " he said in an article in the International Herald Tribune clearly intended to counter the impact of the New Scientist revelations.

In addition, test results in a series of countries have shown that not only have GM foods unapproved in recipient countries been turning up in food aid, but so too have GMOs that have not been approved even in donor countries like the US. http://www.foe.org/foodaid/

Oxfam is among the aid agencies that have called for food aid to be kept GM free 

"Oxfam stresses the need to guarantee human health and biodiversity, and respect the social and cultural context of food aid recipient countries, and urges governments and FAO to develop and implement food aid standards that prevent the distribution of GMOs in food aid.

Oxfam supports the concerns expressed by a number of its partners who demand a moratorium on GMOs and the improved enforcement of monitoring systems to stop GMOs from entering vulnerable populations through food aid." 

Oxfam International has also noted:

- Food aid programmes have historically been used inappropriately with industrialised countries using them to dispose of surpluses and create food dependencies. Such abuse continues today.

- Genetically modified food aid may have negative effects for human health and livelihoods, and therefore it is counterproductive to its declared objectives. 

- Introducing GMO’s through food aid may have adverse effects on biodiversity, since part of it is used as seeds, contaminating local species. 

- As such, food aid containing GMOs is in contradiction with the precautionary principle, secured in the Carthagena Biosafety Protocol. 

See: Oxfam condemns the distribution of food aid contaminated with GMOs

For some the situation in southern Africa is not just a tragedy, it's an opportunity - an opportunity to dump otherwise unmarketable GM crop surpluses, an opportunity to create future food dependencies, and above all an opportunity to introduce GMOs to countries that would otherwise be resistant to them and which are ill prepared to deal with the consequences. 

The resistance to such opportunism in turn provides the biotech industry and its supporters, in the US administration and beyond, with an additional opportunity - the opportunity to pressurise international bodies - from the European Union to the World Health Organisation to the Vatican - to endorse GMOs and join its arm-twisting of reluctant nations. 

"We have been pushed around by the way the Americans have put pressure on this issue."
EU development commissioner, Poul Nielson on the US food aid strategy

Another target has been the biotech industry's critics, both in Africa and elsewhere, who have been portrayed as the merchants of death for having raised concerns over GM food. 

At the "Earth Summit" in Johannesburg in September 2002, African delegates expressed their anger at "the emotional blackmail of vulnerable people" that was going on.

"We, African Civil Society groups, participants to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, composed of more than 45 African countries, join hands with the Zambian and Zimbabwean governments and their people in rejecting GE contaminated food for our starving brothers and sisters: We refuse to be used as the dumping ground for contaminated food, rejected by the Northern countries; and we are enraged by the emotional blackmail of vulnerable people in need, being used in this way. 
Steering Committee of the African Civil Society Group - download their statement

But African civil society and governmental protests were countered by an attack on the Zambian government by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell who was booed by official delegates when he referred to the need to accept GM maize. 

But it wasn't only Powell who was on the attack at the "Earth Summit". According to Roger Bate (a pro-GM lobbyist who has been shown to draw financial support from the tobacco industry):

"One of the more interesting aspects of the debate was that the most fervent pro-GM attack on the Zambian President did not come from the biotech industry but from the head of the aid agency that sent the food. Andrew Natsios is the Director of the US Agency for International Development [USAID]. And he was easily the most effective proponent of the technology at, and after, the WSSD."
'From Jo'burg to Des Moines', Tech Central Station

USAID's fervently pro-GM stance was no accident. Promoting GM is an official part of the role assigned to an agency which publicly boasts of how its activities create major markets for America's agricultural exports. (Download the Greenpeace report on USAID and GM food aid)

Aid agencies outside the US generally take a very different view:

"The UN confirms there is enough non-GM food in southern Africa and on world markets... The US should [untie its aid] and stop putting a GM gun to the head of hungry Zambians." 
Alex Wijeratna, ActionAid, Food aid, The Guardian (London) October 21, 2002

But it's not just been resistance in Africa that the GM lobby has been gunning for.

"[Bernd Halling, of the biotech industry's umbrella group EuropaBio] says that the green lobby has 'built up this GMO issue to the point that it is illogical. [The famine in Africa] is the first issue that has the ability to destroy their credibility… I want to know if they are going to accept responsibility for the people that will die as a result of the refusal of GM aid', said Halling." 
'Of Famine and Food Aid: GM Food Internationally', Agbiotechbuzz

Juan Lopez, of Friends of the Earth International who attended the Earth Summit dismisses such claims, "Clearly African leaders are looking at the information available and deciding for themselves what action to take. The idea that advocacy groups critical of biotechnology are leading African officials to reject genetically engineered crops is ridiculous. The biotech industry has 50 lobbyists for every environmental advocate."
http://www.foe.org/foodaid/gefoodaidfoei.html

In the forefront of the lobbyists' attacks has been the AgBioWorld Foundation headed by Prof CS Prakash of Tuskegee University, USA. AgBioWorld has worked flat out to label the industry's critics as 'killers' of the hungry. Unmentioned is the fact that as well as being a GM lobbyist, Prakash is also an advisor to USAID while his university enjoys multi-million dollar contracts with the agency. Prakash also, according to a series of newspaper articles in The Guardian and elsewhere, works hand in glove with Monsanto's PR operatives who use his listserv to initiate attacks on the company's critics. https://members.tripod.com/ngin/deceit7.html
https://members.tripod.com/ngin/deceit3.html

AgBioWorld's co-founder is Gregory Conko, Director of Food Safety Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute - an organisation described by PR Watch as "a well funded corporate front". GM firm Dow Chemicals is amongst its corporate donors, as is the US tobacco and food giant, Philip Morris. Needless to say, the CEI opposes restrictions on smoking just as vociferously as it does those on GM foods.
http://www.prwatch.org/improp/cei.html

But AgBioWorld presents its campaigning as that of a group of disinterested scientists. Thus, as part of its attack on a Zambian Catholic group with concerns about GM food aid, AgBioWorld issued a report said to be authored by "a group of scholars". As well as Prakash and Conko, the "scholars" included Andrew Apel, the editor of a biotech industry newsletter, who has called on the US to bomb Zambia with its GM grain if it continues to reject it. On a discussion list Apel wrote of the crisis, "I can almost picture the darkies laying down their lives for the vacuous ideals... their death throes, how picturesque, among the baobab trees and the lions!" http://ngin.tripod.com/161002b.htm

October 30, 2002 Academics Say Africans Going Hungry Because of Activist Scare Tactics  A new report by European and American scholars challenges the Jesuit Centre for Theological    Reflection's support for Zambia's refusal of food aid containing genetically modified corn.

AgBioWorld also issued a press release calling on "activist organizations to formally endorse food aid shipments and to not repeat the mistakes of Orissa." The press release implied that thousands had died in the Indian state of Orissa as a result of resistance to GM contaminated food aid. Such claims are a fabrication, as Indian food and trade policy analyst, Devinder Sharma has pointed out. The deaths in Orissa were caused by a super-cyclone and were totally unconnected with the controversy over US food aid . (For more on AgBioWorld's PR work during the crisis in Southern Africa: http://ngin.tripod.com/161002b.htm)

The deceit and lies of the GM lobby serve only to distract attention from the urgent need to resolve the problems in Southern Africa and get some of the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of non-GM grain that's available to where it's most needed. 

"The tragedy is that while these well monied types try to filibuster the democratic process in Zambia, people are starving. And there's safe food in the region which USAID will not buy, because it doesn't support U.S. business, and doesn't involve loans from the World Bank"
Dr. Raj Patel, author of Another Poisoned Chalice in Africa

If people do die because of the US/USAID stance, no one should be in any doubt as to how the GM lobby will try and exploit it. The AgBioWorld spin over "Orissa" makes that all too plain. As does Monsanto's spin of the AgBioworld attack on Catholic groups in Zambia which it headlined as, "Academics Say Africans Going Hungry Because of Activist Scare Tactics".

Similarly, EuropaBio's assessment of the food aid crisis as "the first issue that has the ability to destroy their (the critics) credibility", provides the rationale for the demand that the industry's critics "accept responsibility for the people that will die as a result of the refusal of GM aid".  And the same unsavoury sense of anticipation seems present in AgBioWorld supporter, Andrew Apel's comments about "darkies laying down their lives" and "picturesque" death throes". 

"There are 800 million hungry people in the world; 34,000 children starve to death every day. There are those who consider this a tragedy, and then there are the biotech companies and their countless PR firms, who seem to consider it a flawless hook for product branding... the companies who make [GE foods], and the flacks who hawk their falsehoods, offer us a new definition of depravity, a new standard to plunge for in our race to care least, want more, and divest ourselves of all shame."
Michael Manville - Welcome to the Spin Machine