Thursday, May 8, 2008

The Politics of Hunger and Food Aid—Part Two

Food aid is not exactly charity.

By: Nnimmo Bassey, Environment Action International

The current food crisis in the world must have jolted scenario planners who see Africa as a huge market for food aid business. Admittedly, food aid has its place in meeting deficits and emergencies and will continue to do so. At a charity dinner attended by food aid players in the USA, an executive of a major food aid shipping company made a revealing statement when he said: "I thought this was a charity...It's not. It's a business." The dinner was reported by Celia Dugger under the title “U.S. Rethinks Foreign Food Aid”. According to the report, “Public Law 480 and the Food for Peace program, adopted in 1954, provided a way to dispose of surplus grain, which was costly to store, and at the same time feed the world's hungry people. The law mandated that food for the program be grown domestically.” The report also noted that the amount of food shipped falls as the costs of shipping rises.

Africa is a great market for this business. With variable rainfall and reliance on rain-fed farming, productivity has been precarious at times. The players in the food aid business are more or less assured of profit. The cost of shipping food aid over huge distances could sometimes be sufficient to meet financial requirements needed to source the food regionally where deficits occur. Where the USA is shipping food aid, the ship has to fly a USA flag.

The use of food aid as a means of control and diminishing of national sovereignties has been markedly demonstrated in Africa. Externally driven economic policies based on expert advice of international financial institutions led to one of the worst food crises’ in Malawi in 2002 and resulted in several hundred hunger-related deaths. This horrible famine, one of the worst in living memory, was mainly due to the decision to sell the country’s Strategic Grain Reserve thereby reducing the stock from 165,000 MT to 60,000 MT, based on the advice of the IMF.

Food items have sometimes been virtually forced on countries. This has for instance happened where genetically modified grains have been sent as food aid. Some of the recipient countries demanded that the grains should be milled before being sent. Such requests were rejected on the grounds that the process would delay efforts to meet emergency situations. The countries rejected whole grains because these were certain to be planted by the agriculturally distressed people and that would obviously result in GMO contamination of their environments. The most dramatic case was that of Zambia in 2002.

2002 was a year of food crises in many countries in Southern Africa, namely Angola, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland. However, new heights were reached in the politics of hunger when Zambia rejected food aid in the form of GMOs. While some countries were willing to accept milled GMO food aid, Zambia rejected them both as whole grains and in milled form, placing the government under intense pressure. But as the government noted, the food shortage, which was mainly in the southern part of the country, could be offset with tubers from the northern region. The idea of meeting food shortages from local supplies obtained in the region is a method of food aid or food deficit offsetting that ought to be promoted. That way the food would be culturally relevant, would not be GMO and would also have the added advantage of boosting national production and local incomes. The heavy footprint of food aid through food miles would also be eliminated. It is significant that Zambia eventually overcame that food crisis, and still has a policy of not accepting GMOs in food aid.

It was Angola and Sudan that had to face the heat in 2004. Angola had just emerged from a violent conflict while Sudan was still grappling with her smouldering conflict situation. Thus, both countries had special difficulties because of the conflict situations there. Yet both countries refused GMO grains except they were milled. As a part of the struggle to keep food aid free of contamination in Africa, FoE Nigeria and FoE affiliates, Earthlife in South Africa, cooperated with many African groups such as the African Center for Biosafety to stop the countries being forced to accept GM food aid against their will. The positive outcome of these struggles for dignity in food aid is that since then the promoters of GMO purveyors have not openly pressured sovereign nations to accept food aid in forms that they find objectionable.

However, the current food crisis has emboldened promoters of GMOs to openly advocate the widespread use of GMOs to solve the situation. The idea is that when people are shocked by calamitous events, they are less able to defend themselves and are open to allowing obnoxious policies and actions. This position can be seen in the telling heading of a recent report in the New York Times, In Lean Times, Biotech Grains Are Less Taboo. Food aid channels have been used to sneak GMOs into unsuspecting countries. For this reason, we have looked at food aid in the context of contaminations and as a tool for political manipulation.

Contamination scandals through food aid are common. The first major case of GMO contamination in food aid broke out in Latin America. It was found through testing by civil society groups that of StarLink maize in food aid in Ecuador in 2001. Starlink is a genetically modified maize variety which was approved only for animal feed and not for human consumption. One year after the Ecuadorian scandal other contaminations were found in Nicaragua and Bolivia. India equally denounced and rejected GMOs in food aid at about the same time. Contaminated soya was also found in food aid to Colombia.

The string of contamination is ongoing. In 2006, unapproved Liberty Link Rice 601 (genetically engineered by Bayer CropScience to withstand application of the herbicide glufosinate) was found in food aid sent to Sierra Leone through USAID. This contamination was uncovered through a monitoring and testing programme conducted by Friends of the Earth Africa groups. The contamination was also found in commercial imports in Ghana. The fact that such contaminations are still existing in food aid and in commercial imports clearly show that we do not know what we are consuming and profit inclined tycoons do not care about exposing humanity to unexamined risks. And, who knows what kids are being fed in the increasingly popular school feeding programmes? It is expected that further testing will reveal a wider spread.

Whether arable lands are taken out of cultivation by agrofuels crops or by climatic changes, the result is that emerging deficits must be filled. Will this shortage be met through food aid and will food aid halt hunger? This is as good a time as the world can find to engage in honest interrogations of the real means and reasons for the business of food aid. We need to also pause to think if we want to grow crops to feed ourselves or cars and machines.

U.S. Rethinks Foreign Food Aid