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LUSAKA: It is little surprise the transatlantic battle over genetically modified (GM) food has come to be fought on the scorched fields of Africa's peasant farmers.

Here, the ability of a field of maize to resist pests and drought is a matter of life and death.

Yet, while millions of its people faced food shortages last year, Zambia's government told aid agencies to take back thousands of tons of GM maize, preferring to wait for unmodified aid than feed GM food to its hungry people.

The continent's leaders have become pawns in a wider mesh of conflicting trade and economic interests, bombarded by a confusing array of information blurring into propaganda.

"We are not going to accept GMO food until there is world consensus on its safety for human consumption," Zambia's Commerce, Trade and Industry Minister Dipak Patel said on Tuesday, after US President George W. Bush told Europe its opposition to GM crops was contributing to famine in Africa.

"Europe is saying no to GMOs (genetically modified organisms) while the United States is saying GMOs are safe. So we don't know whether GMOs are safe, as we are a developing country with limited technology capacity to do our own tests... We shall therefore wait until there is consensus by the developed world," Patel said.

Any such consensus appears some way off.

Wynand van der Walt of the South Africa-based pro-GM research body AfricaBio, said: "It's a complex issue because it deals with communication - which is very often inadequate - and it deals with trade." He said there is no evidence that transgenic foods are dangerous for humans.

"We're dealing with facts on the one hand and perceptions on the other," van der Walt said.

While Zambia stuck to its guns in refusing GM crops due to the perceived risks, nearby countries faced with the hard fact of millions going hungry relented and allowed milled maize in, while preventing the whole modified grains being used for seed.

In one, Zimbabwe, the row over GM food aid became tangled with Western allegations of vote-rigging by President Robert Mugabe. The key issues were blurred - such as the integrity of future grain exports from the region's former breadbasket if GM strains were grown.

Van der Walt played down the risks to trade of adopting GMOs, saying industry regulations need to be realistic and that productivity in hungry countries can be raised by introducing crops resistant to pests and drought.

South Africa - the region's dominant political, economic and agricultural power - has licensed GM strains of cotton and soya as well as white and yellow maize.

But opponents said this is setting a dangerous precedent on a continent where so much food comes from subsistence farming.

Elfrieda Pschorn-Strauss, of the anti-GM pressure group Biowatch South Africa, said: "It's about ownership of the food chain. We feel it (GM technology) is a much greater threat to food security."

She said switching to GM crops would compel farmers to buy seeds year after year through contracts with the multinational firms that make them, rather than saving seed from one year to the next, thus undermining traditional farming practices.

GM opponents also reject Bush's contention that new technology will feed the starving masses of Africa. They say lowering North American and European agricultural subsidies would do far more for Africa's food supply.

Zambia's trade minister Patel said: "We shall only have enough food for ourselves once they remove subsidies. Production of food in Africa remains expensive because of these subsidies."

Agencies via Xinhua

(China Daily 06/26/2003 page4)