Better Dead than GM Fed? Zambia and the Politics of Starvation.

On August 16, 2002, the Zambian government, then in the midst of a growing regional food crisis, joined Zimbabwe and a handful of other Southern African countries by announcing that it would no longer accept food aid that contained genetically modified (GM) grains. At the time, prolonged drought and other factors meant that some 2 million Zambians required food assistance, and the World Food Programme had been distributing donated food (including GM grains) in Zambia for a number of months. Zimbabwe and most of the other affected nations eventually reached compromise agreements with international agencies. The compromise typically involved the milling of suspected GM grains, to ensure that no seed could be replanted and cross with local crop variants. Yet Zambia stood firm against GM products. The Zambian position was maintained despite the evident need of its population, despite the United States? firm refusal to substitute non-GM foodstuffs or cash for its original aid package, and despite the fact that GM food aid had been distributed in Southern Africa since the early 1990s. How, given the forces arrayed against it, can this position be explained? My paper will strive to unknot the tangle of ideational and material factors that went into the Zambian decision. I will examine how the diffusion of environmental and risk assessment norms associated with Northern environmentalism (encapsulated in the ?precautionary principle?) affected political decision-making in Zambia. At the same time, I will use the Zambian case to show how Northern norms to do with ?safety? and ?food purity? impact Southern countries in other, more material ways, by looking at the structure of market access for Southern agricultural products, and the expansion of US agricultural hegemony. In short, my goal is to investigate how the food and trade politics of the North are played out through the politics of starvation in the South. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]