President Robert Mugabe and his cronies have decided that genetically modified (GM) corn is a bad thing for Zimbabwe, even if the country is in the middle of a two-year famine. Instead of allowing the United States and the World Food Programme to donate thousands of tons of corn to the nearly three million people starving to death under his watch, Mugabe has outlawed all GM food imports. His actions have effectively sealed the fate for more than half his countrymen, many of whom will be dead by late December if aid doesn’t arrive.
It’s easy to chalk this up as another classic Mugabe manoeuvre. Most people expect nothing less from the head of a repressive regime so fearful of losing power it must rig elections and imprison foreign journalists.
Just last May, for example, Mugabe rejected a 10 000-ton relief package from the US because it couldn’t be certified as non-GM. Meanwhile, Mugabe, inspired by his Marxist leanings, continued to confiscate white-owned farmlands and dismantle Zimbabwe’s agricultural infrastructure. His ”land reform” policies left thousands of blacks (and whites) unemployed and unfed, while a prolonged drought guaranteed few crops would survive elsewhere in the country.
Though most analysts have written off Mugabe’s latest refusal to accept aid as yet another ploy to consolidate power and disparage the US (they are probably correct), it also reveals a growing suspicion of GM food among Southern African nations. Fearing GM corn will contaminate meat products or change the genetic make-up of future crops, leaders of Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia have sided with Mugabe, despite facing the worst food crisis their nations have seen in more than a decade and assurances from the US that the corn is safe for consumption.
The result? Needless deaths of millions of Africans who simply wish to eat, not to debate the morality of altering the plant genome.
Mugabe’s attitude of ”better to starve than eat GM corn” reflects a luxury until now reserved for picky Europeans and radical US academics. An obvious problem is that neither Mugabe nor the others will suffer much for their highfalutin idealism (none of them will likely go to bed hungry tonight, for example) while the rest of Southern Africa must face the harsh aftermath of regional policies more concerned with lofty principles than practical reality.
The real problem, however, has more to do with the conduct of the biotechnology debate than any of Africa’s misguided statesmen.
Critics of GM food have long enjoyed the safety of pointing fingers from afar, removed from the pragmatic consequences of their rhetoric. They’ve summarily dismissed claims that GM food will help feed the world one day, and have relied on disinformation and scare tactics to instill fear and mistrust among the general public. Instead of promoting cautious policies that recognise concerns and benefits, they have painted a bleak picture of society ruined by Frankenstein science gone awry.
But now these same critics must confront the monster they’ve created, a swarm of Southern African despots ready to sacrifice the innocent in the name of the ”safe” — ”safe” seeds, ”safe” crops and a ”safe” environment.
But what safety, beyond reinforcing Mugabe’s corrupt influence, lies in widespread famine bred by ignorance and pseudo-science?
None. And that is the tragedy of Zimbabwe and the rest. Echoing claims of knee-jerk environmentalists more concerned with ideology than biology, Mugabe has legitimised his own Stalin-esque version of state-sponsored famine and may convince his neighbours to do the same. All while anti-GM Americans and Europeans sip their organically grown coffee and ponder the nature of political strife, oceans away from the product of their propaganda.
We should push for more reasoned public debate over GM food if only to prevent future tyrants from exploiting the unfounded claims of marginalised intellectuals and fanatics. It’s hard enough to wrestle power away from corrupt governments like that of Mugabe’s. It is even harder to do on an empty stomach. Better to keep Southern Africa’s peoples informed with the real science of GM food than with science fiction horror stories. They’ll undoubtedly find the corn easier to swallow.
Jason Lott is a Marshall Scholar and analyst in the division of bioethics at the University of the Witwatersrand