Helping Hand or Big Fat Fist?

Why countries are saying no thanks to U.S. food aid 

BILL McKIBBEN / Orion 1jul04

THE SALIENT FACT In this story is as follows: Zambians eat corn as their staple food, usually their only source of carbohydrates. They eat it three meals a day, and if they snack between meals it's likely to be on corn.

Americans have more and more occasion to wonder why we are disliked around the world—why the polling data routinely shows citizens of other nations listing us as the greatest threat to world peace, for instance, or why so many of the citizens of Iraq say they think our occupation is worse than Saddam's rule. The Bush administration insists that our critics "hate freedom," and hence us; many others suspect that they envy our prosperity. I think they mostly resent the toxic (and unnecessary) combination of arrogance and cluelessness with which we treat them. The trouble with being the unchallenged top dog is that you get to win without having to try very hard to persuade, and since you rarely lose you rarely learn. We're like the pointy-haired boss in the Dilbert cartoons—because we have all the power, we always talk, never listen. We do as we please.

Consider Zambia and corn. Gene Traders, a new book of essays edited by Brian Tokar, takes a close look at, among other topics, our attempt to send genetically modified food as aid to African nations hit by drought. Zambia is a typical case. Dry weather in the 2001—02 crop year cut yields, especially in the south of the country. The World Food Programme of the United Nations offered food aid in the form of American corn, informing the country once the food had arrived that some of it was genetically engineered.

This triggered a debate in Zambia about whether to distribute the corn—a more robust debate, it should be noted, than we ever had in this country about whether to plant GM crops in the first place. The National Science and Technology Council, the National Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research, and the Soils and Crop Research Branch all advised their government to refuse the aid, and after parliamentarians, tribal leaders, and a wide variety of others weighed in, the government indeed decided to say no thanks.

This, in turn, led to outrage among American officials. Colin Powell, speaking in Johannesburg, said that if GM corn was good enough for Americans it was good enough for Africans; Agriculture Secretary Anne Veneman said environmentalists were scaring Zambians into thinking that GM corn would harm them; the U.S. representative to the Food and Agriculture Organization was reported to have said that the Zambians who made the decision to say no should be tried for crimes against humanity. All of which probably made sense to Americans glancing at the headlines—here must be another case of irrational people in some bush-league country just acting stupidly. I mean, come on—you're starving and you're going to worry about genetic engineering? We're just trying to be helpful.

But as the Zambian biochemist Mwananyanda Mbikusita Lewanika [now director or the National Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research] points out in a fascinating essay in Tokar's collection, locals were not responding out of some absurd superstition. For one thing, they "were well aware of the contamination of Mexican native corn due to gene flow from U.S. corn varieties, as reported in the journal Nature." [Nature letter] Doubtless some of the aid corn would be planted, not eaten; as it crossed itself with native varieties, the Zambians would lose the chance to export corn in the future to places like Europe that want little to do with GM food.

Not only that, but it wasn't as if American corn were the only alternative—Zambia itself had a surplus in the northern part of the country, and lacked only the resources to transport it to the famine zone. We could have sent money, as many nations do when famine strikes. But we've always refused to do that, since food aid is one of the ways we use up our agricultural surplus. So it was biotech corn or nothing.

And finally, as I noted at the start, Zambians had some real reason to be nervous. Something like 2 percent of American calories come from corn, and most of that is processed in cornflakes or taco chips. Colin Powell may be fond of corn on the cob, but it probably doesn't dominate his diet. Zambians, by contrast, eat enormous amounts of corn. If it turned out that the aid corn carried some surprise—an allergen, perhaps—they'd get to be the guinea pigs. And so they said no, suffered our scorn, did their best to weather the drought. Happily the rains returned. This year Zambia will export fifty thousand metric tons of (GM-free) corn to neighboring nations.

There's plenty more backstory here, as other contributors to Gene Traders make clear. For one thing, the whole history of U.S. "food aid" to poor countries has been considerably less noble than the words would imply. Not only has food been used as a political bargaining chip on countless occasions, it has also played a key role in wrecking the agricultural infrastructure of one country after another. As our subsidized cheap corn and wheat flood in, local farmers can't compete. Meanwhile, we've used agencies like the World Bank to stop other countries from subsidizing their own farming. One of the reasons Zambia found itself short of food was a so-called structural adjustment program mandated by the World Bank that ended the practice of the government providing farmers with seed and fertilizer.

And with the advent of genetic engineering, our biotech corporations have started using that same kind of power to force GM crops onto poor countries and hence into the world foodstream. The Europeans won't buy our corn, but perhaps it can be rammed down African throats, and into their fields, and hence make its spread a fait accompli. "The idea, quite simply, is to pollute faster than countries can legislate," writes activist Naomi Klein. "And then change the laws to fit the contamination." Which sounds a little, you know, conspiratorial—but then this is an industry that, with the backing of American agricultural officials, has stoutly resisted even labeling its GM products and that has sued farmers whose fields were contaminated. And on and on.

Now virtually none of this history made its way into the American coverage of the biotech food aid. The story of what happened in Zambia—but also in Zimbabwe, the Sudan, Malawi, and elsewhere—was framed as a kind attempt to lend a hand, only to have it slapped away. In much the same way, we spent the bet-ter part of the last year telling ourselves that we were just in Iraq to help, that "the people" of Iraq were happy for our assistance, that anyone who opposed our occupation was a "terrorist," either a "remnant" of the Baath regime or a foreign Islamic radical. And then it turned out, during the battle for Fallujah, that a great many Iraqis hated our guts. How could this be? We were just trying to help.

Forget, if you want to, all the obvious backstories here—our not-very-well-concealed desire for control of Iraqi oil, our plans for military bases across the country, the obscene profiteering of companies like Halliburton. You don't even need that kind of deviousness to explain why we are disliked. A simple answer lies in the clumsiness that comes from having unassailable power. A Bradley fighting vehicle means never having to say you're sorry, and hence never learning any of the lessons that come from being sorry.

Another way to say it is: If you really want to help someone, sit down to dinner with them and listen to what it is they say they need, instead of telling them what you know they need. Oh, and pay attention to what they're eating. Things like that matter.

Bill McKibben's most recent book is Enough. He is finishing a book about a walk through Vermont and the Adirondacks.