The continuing GMO quagmire.

• Author: Halweil, Brian
• Position: Editorial

Fourteen million southern Africans are on the verge of starvation, but Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe recently refused a shipment of American food aid because it contained genetically modified corn. The often abstract biotech debate now has life-and-death implications, as African officials have been forced to weigh the long-term integrity of their national food supplies against the short-term imperative to prevent people from dying.

These nations have argued that the engineered corn could contaminate their domestic corn diversity through cross-pollination, as hungry farmers who have already eaten their seed supply would likely use some of the aid grain for planting. Such contamination would disrupt corn export markets to European and other nations that ban genetically modified crops (GMOs).

There are two obvious ways out of this stalemate, and officials were working towards resolution as this issue went to press:

* The United States could mill the grain to prevent planting.

* The United States could--like most other donor nations--purchase and distribute food produced in Africa (even in a famine year, several African countries will have exportable surpluses). Instead, U.S. food aid dumps American crops, which does little to bolster struggling agricultural economies.

U.S. refusal on both fronts is not surprising. Acknowledgement of the African nations' concerns would call into question the integrity of American technology, American regulatory agencies, and the products of American agriculture. Since virtually all of the grain and beans harvested in the United States are commingled with engineered varieties, if other regions of the planet join Europe in rejecting these...