GM-free Scotland

A glance at the recent agricultural history of Zambia reveals an interesting mini-lesson about a lot of things going on at the global level.

The staple food in Zambia comes from just one crop: maize. Eighty percent of the food there is produced by small-scale farmers.

For 10 years, 1991 until 2001, the Zambian government abandoned all subsidies on agriculture, leaving everything to be shaped by the market.

The wake-up call about the realities of market forces came in the form of a series of droughts which by 2002 threatened over 2 million of the population with starvation. The government had by this time just re-introduced agricultural subsidies, but after 10 years of neglect, the farming infrastructure was severely run down, and a plea had to go out for international aid.

America's response to this request is memorable. Finding itself with a glut of subsidised GM maize which many of its normal trading partners didn't want and which was driving grain prices down, the US tried to unload 12,000 tonnes of it onto Zambia.

The fact of the GM nature of the aid was not disclosed to the Zambian government.

Sensing their country was being used, quietly and deliberately, as a dumping ground for reject food, the government refused to use it.

What happened next was that, with the help of generous cash donations, a diversity of food was purchased from surpluses in the region and elsewhere. The Zambian Red Cross, who played a huge part in the emergency food distribution effort, said “We didn't record a single death arising out of hunger”.

Just at this time, the biotech industry PR machine was pushing GM as the answer to Third World food problems, and trying to label the anti-GM brigade as either picky, privileged and well-healed enough to afford niche-market organic produce, or hippy anarchists. The rejection of GM aid by starving Africans was therefore doubly embarrassing to the GM-support lobby. They rescued the situation by announcing to the press that 3 million Zambians had starved to death while millions of tonnes of food lay sealed in government warehouses. This claim is repeated to this day by pro-GM bodies (see GLOBAL PR MACHINE LEADS US UP THE GM GARDEN PATH – News, July 2008)

What Zambia has achieved in the years since the crisis of 2002, and its rejection of GM crops plus the guiding hand of government subsidies, is exciting. Their agriculture has been re-shaped with technical innovations, such as mixed farming and conservation farming. A diversification programme has been introduced which has moved the country away from dependence on maize as the single staple crop to the production of pulses, legumes such as cassava, millet and sweet potato. This year has seen a bumper crop in Zambia, the second such year in a row, so much so that for the first time, food export is a real possibility.

OUR COMMENT

The alternative history which might have unfolded, had Zambia accepted GM maize aid in 2002, can only be a matter of conjecture. However, the Zambian government was well aware that if maize seed were given out to a nation of small farmers, some would be planted and its maize crops would have been tainted forever. This, in turn, would have impacted negatively on future exports and the value of any bumper harvests would be reduced. The presence of endemic GM contamination could well have been used as leverage to introduce more GM seed, along with all the chemical paraphernalia and dependency on foreign interests which go with them. The narrow diet of maize and narrow skill range of farmers would not now be broadening out to encompass new techniques and new crops. The alternative trade routes forged with nearby countries during the famine would not be in place. How much of this did the US second-guess when it tried to slip 12 million tonnes of GM maize quietly into Zambian mouths and soil?

What Zambia needs now is the cash to build up its infrastructure to handle the increased food supply. It needs:

• storage silos and sheds to replace the ones built in the 1980s and left to rot when government subsidies were withdrawn
• economic and efficient transportation for the many remote farms whose bumper crops will spoil before they can be taken to market.
  

What Zambia does not need now is to be chained to chemical-dependent, GM monocultures developed by foreigners.

That's the end of the mini-lesson.

Now, think global.

Where is our own food supply going? We have fostered a dependence on a few globally-traded oil-hungry crops, our controlling agents don't seem wise to the spin of the biotech industry nor to the dangers of genetic contamination, our knowledge of non-chemical farming has been neglected, our use of local food supply has been actively discouraged. It's high time we started working on an alternative future.

SOURCES

• Zarina Geloo, DEVELOPMENT ZAMBIA: From Famine to Feast, Interpress Service News Agency, 26.06.08
• Looking a Gift-horse in the mouth, Television Trust for the Environment, www.tve.org
• Genes as the solution, The Financial Express, 26.04.08