Africa: GMOs And New Opium War In Africa

Opium wars fought between Britain and China in the 19th century, are among the best-known and most studied conflicts in history. The first Opium War was between 1839-42. The second one lasted from 1856 to 1860.

For those whose memories need jogging, opium wars were about trade in bhang. British forces fought to force China to legalise opium trade, to expand coolie trade, to open all of China to British merchants, and to exempt foreign imports from internal transit duties.

I am afraid, the push for genetically modified foods in Africa exhibits all the characteristics of the opium wars.

China had then enacted and strictly enforced laws to protect her citizens from abuse of the drug and outlaw its trade. The British accused Beijing (the called Peking) of being anti-trade.

They fought for the liberalisation of opium trade at the Port of Canton (now Guangzhou). By 1838, the British were selling roughly 1,400 tonnes of opium per year to China.

Legalisation of the opium trade was the subject of ongoing debate within the Chinese administration, but it was repeatedly rejected, and as of 1838, the government sentenced native drug traffickers to death.

In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor appointed scholar-official Lin Zexu to the post of Special Imperial Commissioner, with the task of eradicating the opium trade.

Lin sent an open letter to Queen Victoria questioning the moral reasoning of the British government. Citing what he understood to be a strict prohibition of the trade within Great Britain, Lin questioned how it could then profit from the drug in China.

He wrote: "Your Majesty has not before been thus officially notified, and you may plead ignorance of the severity of our laws, but I now give my assurance that we mean to cut this harmful drug forever." The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

The new opium wars are being waged in the fields of Africa, where many farmers are being coerced into accepting genetically engineered seed.

GM crops, as farmers in the US and Canada have found, are harder to sell. There is also evidence that some varieties yield less while requiring more herbicide.

But farmers are swiftly coming to see that the costs of not planting GM seed can greatly outweigh the costs of planting it.

Recently, lawyers warned a farming family in Indiana that the only way they could avoid being sued by the biotech company, Monsanto, was to sow their entire farm with the company's seeds.

In 2000, the Troy Roush and his family planted just over a quarter of their fields with the company's herbicide-resistant soya.

Though they recorded precisely what they planted where, and though an independent crop scientist confirmed their account, Monsanto refused to accept that the Roushes did not deploy its crops more widely.

It demanded punitive damages for the use of seeds they swear they never sowed.

The Roushes maintained that they are, in effect, being sued for not buying the company's products.

So the following year, like hundreds of other frightened farmers, they had to plant their fields only with Monsanto's GM seeds.

Like the opium forced upon a reluctant China by Brit- ish gunboats, once you've started using GM, you're stuck with it.

With GM onslaught, you are culpable even if you avoid them. A non-GM farmer whose crops are contaminated by GM pollination is equally at risk of being sued to pay for the patent.

In April 2004, a Canadian farmer called Percy Schmeiser was forced to pay Monsanto some $85,000, after a court ruled that he had stolen Monsanto's genetic material.

Schmeiser maintained that the thinly-spread GM rape plants on his farm were the result of pollen contamination from his neighbour's fields, and he had done all he could to get rid of them.

But Monsanto's proprietary genes had been found on his land whether he wanted them or not.

Following the time-honoured convention that the polluted pays, Mr Schmeiser was forced to compensate the company for what he insists was invasion by its vegetable vermin.

Where the courts won't enforce compliance, governments will. We have been told by the Deputy President that the Government of the Republic of Kenya will lift the GMO ban in two months' time. He has the support of the Kenya Medical Association.

Even giants like the European Union are being intimidated in this new opium war. Bio-tech companies have been pressing to raise Europe's legal limit for the contamination of conventional crops with modified genes.

In time, they hope, genetic pollution will ensure little difference between GM and "non-GM" food that consumers will give up and accept their products.

The US government is pressing for a world-wide ban on the labelling of GM food, to ensure that consumers have no means of knowing what they're eating.