It sounded like a sick April Fool’s joke when I first heard the news. A few weeks ago, the government of Angola refused to accept humanitarian assistance in the form of biotech food. A shipment of 19,000 tons of corn from the United States was cancelled, even though their people are starting to go hungry. The reason----some of it might have been genetically enhanced.
When a country finds itself caught in a food-shortage crisis, it seems to me they don’t always have the luxury of picking what’s on the menu.
But in truth, I was more disappointed than surprised. Two years ago, as millions of people in southern Africa faced a terrible drought, political leaders in several of the most affected nations announced that they would have nothing to do with donations of biotech food. Zambia president Levy Mwanawasa infamously declared, “We’d rather starve than get something toxic.”
This was sheer nonsense: Biotech crops are perfectly safe, and as healthy as any other food. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t eat them here in the United States every day – as we have for many years.
What isn’t healthy, however, is Europe’s ban on the importation of genetically enhanced crops. African leaders in Angola and elsewhere do admit it’s the real reason why they won’t accept biotech food, even when it comes to feed the hungry. They want to leave open the possibility of one day, down the road, exporting crops to Europe. So they’ve made an unconscionable decision: Better dead than fed.
Experts say few people in Angola are likely to starve, thank goodness. But they’ll spend much more time looking for food, rather than improving a country that has endured nearly three decades of civil war. “Clearly, this will make it more difficult for them to start rebuilding their lives,” says Richard Lee of the World Food Program, which provides much of the aid to Angola.
The immediate result of Angola’s decision is that food aid has been cut drastically. The government in Luanda now says it won’t accept biotech corn unless it has been milled. This can be done, of course, but it’s an expensive and time-consuming process that will have the effect of reducing the level of assistance. We should be removing the barriers to feeding hungry refugees, not constructing new ones.
Despite Angola’s problems, the overall situation in Africa is not entirely bleak. South Africa is making the most of what the 21st century has to offer farmers, even as many of its neighbors in the region turn their backs on biotech. Within five years, about half of South Africa’s corn crop is expected to be genetically modified. This is not because anybody is imposing GM corn on growers, but because individual growers themselves want the advantages of biotech.
What’s more, biotechnology is on the verge of making advances that the rest of the continent simply won’t be able to ignore. “There’s a whole new generation of bright, young Africans in plant breeding and in biotechnology that are showing the way,” says Rockefeller Foundation president Gordon Conway. He is particularly impressed with laboratories in Uganda that are trying to create better bananas through gene transfer.
Some of the biggest beneficiaries, he insists, will be Africa’s small-acreage farmers. Because many of them cannot afford fertilizer and other modern tools of agriculture, their yields are effectively cut in half. This is one of the main contributors to Africa’s brutal cycle of malnutrition and famine.
It’s also the reason why we are more often hearing biotechnology called “scale neutral.” There’s a misperception fostered by the anti-biotech groups that only big, bad biotech corporations benefit from these important scientific innovations. But that’s hogwash: Small, medium and large acreage farmers in the United States, South Africa, and elsewhere have embraced biotech crops because they make sense. Everybody wins, from the researchers who try to solve agricultural problems to the companies that distribute the seeds to the people like me who plant them.
The ultimate winners, of course, are consumers, even if they aren’t fully aware of the massive efforts undertaken on their behalf. In that, most consumers are alike - whether they’re grocery-store shoppers in the suburbs, African subsistence farmers who consume much of what they produce or desperate refugees in Angola.
News 
It sounded like a sick April Fool’s joke when I first heard the news. A few weeks ago, the government of Angola refused to accept humanitarian assistance in the form of biotech food. A shipment of 19,000 tons of corn from the United States was cancelled, even though their people are starting to go hungry. The reason----some of it might have been genetically enhanced. 
