Agricultural Biotechnology: African Doctor Says Biotechnology Could Help Feed the Hungry
Council for Biotechnology Information
Excerpt…
Pediatrician says "there is something insane about food aid rotting while people starve."
In September, starving people in the village of Monze, Zambia, looted storage sheds filled with thousands of tons of U.S. corn donated to help ease southern Africa’s worst food crisis in years.
Why were people who are literally starving denied access to food that could save their lives?
Because Zambia’s president considers the corn — some of which has been grown from biotech seeds — unsafe. He and other African leaders say anti-biotech activists told them the corn contains “poisons” that could harm people and “contaminate” native crops.
With more than 14 million people starving in Zambia and other African countries, the controversy over whether to accept food that is eaten everyday in the United States, Canada and other parts of the world has raised the ire of people like Dr. Michael Mbwille, a pediatrician from Tanzania and African editor of the Food Safety Network. The network is a nonprofit coalition based in Washington, D.C., that seeks ways to improve global food security.
“There is something insane about food aid rotting while people starve due to disinformation campaigns,” says Mbwille. “Death by starvation and the long-term costs of malnutrition have been deemed less offensive than hypothetical, unsubstantiated food safety ills.”
Zambia, which made its decision not to allow its citizens to eat U.S. corn final on October 29, is the only African country to reject food aid outright. So despite the fact that more than 2 million Zambians are starving after two years of drought, tons of donated grain are locked away in sheds like those in Monze.
Many biotech opponents who initially lobbied for Zambia’s decision now say they’ve changed their minds and would allow the U.S. grain into these countries to help alleviate the famine. But many still oppose giving African farmers access to biotechnology and argue that years of additional testing is needed to ensure the safety of biotech crops and foods.
A growing number of African farmers and African scientists disagree. They say the continent needs more than food aid to ease a famine; it needs tools like biotechnology to improve agricultural productivity so that fast-growing populations can see the same benefits realized by farmers and consumers elsewhere.
“Biotechnology is an essential tool, along with other methods, if Africa is to achieve food security,” says Mbwille.
In Zambia, the need is even more immediate. “Zambians are not asking for fancy things like wheat flour or apples, but mere maize to fill their stomachs,” says Petronella Chisanga, a Zambian civic leader and chair of the country’s Non-Governmental Organization’s Coordinating Committee. “Can somebody tell us what is wrong with eating the modified food?”
Full article at Council for Biotechnology Information.
