Zambia to check safety of GM foods
2002-09-03 13:18
Johannesburg - Zambia is to send a team of scientists to the United States to assess the safety of genetically modified food, Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa announced in Johannesburg on Tuesday.
His statement came amid controversy over his government's decision to reject food aid containing genetically modified organisms, despite reports that 13-million people in the region are threatened by famine.
"I don't know if the food is safe or not safe," he told a media briefing at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. "But just because my people are hungry is no justification to give them poison, food which I consider intrinsically dangerous to their health."
Last week, in a statement also issued at the summit, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation urged southern African countries to think carefully before rejecting donations of genetically modified food.
"We should make sure before we reject it that there are scientifically valid arguments on which to base that decision," FAO director Jacques Diouf said.
FAO believed on the basis of current scientific knowledge that the food being offered to southern Africa was not likely to present a human health risk.
Mwanawasa said on Tuesday that FAO and the World Health
Organisation had acknowledged that they had not undertaken any formal safety assessment of GM foods.
However, donors to the World Food Programme had themselves certified these foods as safe. Zambia could not understand this contradiction.
"Because of our incapacity to do our own scientific analysis of these GMOs, the Zambian government has accepted the offer by the director-general of the Unites States Agency for International Development to sponsor a visit to the US by a Zambian team of scientists to go and study these GMOs," he said.
"There is a worldwide uncertainty on the use of GMOs in food, we are merely taking precautionary measures and remain open to conclusive scientific evidence that GMOs are indeed safe."
Mwanawasa said there had been too many plagues on the African continent and in the world.
"We don't know how the plagues came about, we don't know how HIV/Aids came about except that it came from Africa. Aids might be the result of an experiment that went sour."
It was not fair to experiment on African people with GMOs, he said.
Mwanawasa said Zambia's 2001-02 maize harvest had been some 600 000 metric tons, half the total requirement for the country.
It had encouraged winter maize production under irrigation in the Zambesi valley, and 15 000 tons from this crop would be harvested next month.
There was currently enough maize in the country to last until at least December.
Government agencies and the private sector were also being encouraged to import commercial maize.
"Yes, there is expected hardship, you might call it hunger, but I refuse to accept this hunger is the same thing as famine," he said.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, members of the African civil society grouping at the summit said they refused to be used as a "dumping ground for contaminated food".
The starvation period was anticipated to begin early in 2003, so there was enough time to source uncontaminated food.
- SAPA