LONDON: Two leading international environment and development groups have accused the United States of manipulating the southern African food crisis to benefit their GM food interests and of using the United Nations to distribute domestic food surpluses which could not find a market elsewhere.

In response to criticism from senior US officials that they have been playing with people’s lives by encouraging countries to resist GM food sent as aid, Greenpeace and Actionaid also accused the American government’s overseas aid body of offering only GM food when conventional foods were available.

The US, by far the largest donor to the crisis now affecting more than 14 million people in six countries, has offered more than $266 million of GM maize to southern Africa through the UN World Food Programme. But while the EU and other countries have mostly given money for countries to buy food on the open market, American food aid to southern Africa has been tied to heavily subsidized GM food grown only in the US.

Greenpeace accused the US government and the biotech industry of using the aid system as a covert subsidy for US farmers.

“This aid system effectively works as a huge covert subsidy for US farmers,” Ben Ayliffe of Greenpeace said.

Swaziland, Lesotho and Mozambique have accepted the GM food, but Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe are reluctant to import it in seed form. They fear that farmers may plant some of the seeds, and that it may affect both their environment and future food exports.

Andrew Natsio, the head of the US Agency for International Development (USaid), angrily rejected the accusations and told the Guardian that it was bound by Congress to offer food and not money. “There is no way that any responsible country can deal with this drought with cash for work. The food deficit in southern Africa is so big that there’s no way people can buy it on the local market. It has to come from outside,” he said.

“We offered non-GM foods but they all declined to accept it. We would have preferred to send non-GM wheat, or rice, but they only wanted maize. We tried to source non-GM maize but the industry said they could not guarantee that it was GM-free. We could mill it, but we have been told that it would delay the arrival of the food by three months and would cost so much it would halve the amount available.”

He denied that the US was profiting from the crisis and accused groups criticizing US food aid policies of using scare tactics. “They may know about the environment, but they don’t know about famine relief. People who are starving do not plant seeds. They eat them. These groups are putting millions of lives at risk in a despicable way.”

However, Natsio was not supported by the latest UN figures on food availability in the region, which showed there is a total of 1,160,000 tons of cereals available in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. More than double that amount is available on the world market, according to the UN’s global information and early warning system (Giews).

“This shows that the alternative to rejecting GM food aid is not starvation,” Alice Wynne Wilson of Actionaid said. “Good practice in emergency aid is to provide cash support to the UN’s World Food Programme, so that it can buy grain from the most cost-effective sources. Bringing large volumes of food into a region that has areas of surplus can lead to a situation where there are food shortages in one part of a country, and locally produced food rotting in other parts.”

The other day both the Zambian and Malawian governments said they could easily source non GM-food locally if they had the resources. “We can get more than 200,000 tons from South Africa and our neighbours. All we need is help with the logistics. We have sent our scientists to Europe and the US to find out more. They should be reporting back soon.”, said SK Mubukwanu, the Zambian high commissioner in London.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.