The US is using the dire humanitarian disaster in southern Africa as a way of forcing
 GMOs and Genetic Engineering on the world. It sees the World Summit on
 Sustainable Development (WSSD) as its platform to get moral approval of
 biotechnology, backed by three US-inspired pro-biotechnology reports from the World
 Trade Organisation / World Health Organisation, World Food Programme and UN
 Economic Commission for Africa, released in the past few days, in time for WSSD. 

 The USA has several hundreds of thousands of tonnes of GM crops stockpiled for lack
 of markets that even at grossly subsidised prices they seem unable shift. Food Aid is
 a desirable option for them and the famine in southern Africa provides the opportunity.
 They are also keen to ensure that the genetic engineering technologies used to create
 GM crops, for which their corporations hold most of the patents, become dominant in
 world agriculture. The poor performance of African agriculture, for many structural,
 economic and political reasons, is seized on as a reason to promote biotechnology.

 Despite huge pressures, on Thursday the European Union (EU) rejected calls from
 Washington for it to reassure African countries that genetically modified (GM) food aid
 from the United States is safe, saying that they would not get drawn into this
 discussion between some of the countries of southern Africa and the U.S.. 

 On Friday the US launched a trade war against the EU over its refusal to accept GM
 foods and seeds: US trade representative, Robert Zoellick, is puttting in a complaint to
 the World Trade Organisation claiming that the EU moratorium on GM imports is a
 restraint of trade. 

 This is a state-sponsored public relations and opinion forming onslaught on behalf of
 biotech transnational biotechnology corporations.

 As an organisation working closely with smallholder farmers in southern and East
 Africa, ITDG welcomes the European Union's continued efforts to keep Europe GM
 free. This resistance to the use of GMOs in food and farming should not be interpreted,
 however, as in any way furthering the crisis in the southern Africa, nor as a rejection of
 the overwhelming needs of the 14 million people in the region who are on the brink of
 starvation. 

 The answer is not GM Food Aid nor biotechnology. Dr Diouf, Director General of the
 Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), said at the World Food
 Summit: five years later in June that "The position of FAO is that in the short-term,
 biotechnology is not the priority to achieve the goals of the World Food
 Summit for 2015 [to have the number of undernourished people in the world]." Indeed,
 FAO at the WSSD is promoting ecological approaches to agriculture as the
 sustainable option. 

 The solutions lie elsewhere, as identified in ITDG's background paper "Preserving the
 Web of Life", released today in Johannesburg (copies available at the People's Earth
 Summit in St Stithians and on the Internet at < www.ukabc.org/itdg_weboflife.htm >).

 If Governments at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg could agree and adopt three
 actions, it would go some way to reversing the economic decline in the Region, provide
 lasting solutions to food shortages and set African agriculture back on the right track:


      Food aid can and should be provided as requested by recipient governments
      from non GM crops. There are substantial supplies that the World Food
      Programme and food aid donors could make full use of non-GM supplies that
      are acceptable, at a price. For example, Kenya and Tanzania have offered white
      maize to Zambia and GM-free maize could even be sourced in South Africa,
      thereby stimulating regional production and trade. Further afield, Indian supplies
      could be tapped - encouraging production in the South rather than the
      subsidised North. 

      Increased support to local sustainable agricultural production using
      agroecological methods, which maximise the use of agricultural biodiversity and
      are known to provide reliable sources of food, should be endorsed as part of the
      WSSD's implementation of Chapter 14 of the Rio Agenda 21, the Convention of
      Biological Diversity and the Summit's Plan of Implementation (see
      www.ukabc.org/accessgenres.pdf);

      Publicly-funded national and international agricultural research should be
      increased and should redirect its efforts from mimicking the work of the
      biotechnology companies to finding sustainable, proven and productive
      agroecological solutions can serve the needs of poor farmers and improve the
      environment. 




 In June, the World Food Summit: five years later was used by the US to promote
 biotechnology. We predicted then that they would attempt the same in South Africa
 using Food Aid needs as the moral hammer with which to batter its opponents (see
 www.ukabc.org/wfs5 report.htm).

 Governments should not allow a similar hijack of the Earth Summit by US and
 biotechnology company pressures.