[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 111 (Thursday, September 5, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H6072-H6073]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  GROWING HUBRIS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

  (Mr. BEREUTER asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include therein 
extraneous material.)
  Mr. BEREUTER. Mr. Speaker, the European Union is threatening to 
refuse food and livestock exports from African countries now facing 
famine which also accept any food assistance from the United States 
that might include genetically modified grains. This is economic 
blackmail, and many people in Africa will be forced to pay with their 
lives because of starvation.
  In EU countries, where healthful food is plentiful and is subsidized 
to a degree that is unmatched elsewhere in the world, it is easy to 
spread harsh, emotional rhetoric on genetically modified organisms, or 
GMOs. However, EU countries must examine the issue of GMOs from the 
perspective of Third World countries which face debilitating famines. 
Third World countries desperately need enriched, disease-resistant, 
drought-tolerant GMO seed to provide a steady, nutritional food source 
to feed their people.
  We Americans have too passively watched the Luddites in the EU use 
their emotion-driven fears to stop American GMO exports, but it is 
absolutely intolerable that they are blackmailing African leaders to 
reject American food aid in the face of famine in that continent.
  European Union countries certainly have a moral obligation to 
investigate GMOs through sound science techniques, not simply passing 
regulations on the basis of opinions of the European mass media and 
popular culture.

              [From the Omaha World-Herald, Sept. 4, 2002]

                        U.S. Conscience Is Clear

       Some African nations choose ignorance and death.
       What a wrenching picture starving Zambians standing outside 
     a bulging grain distribution warehouse, grain sacks empty. 
     ``Please give us the food,'' an elderly blind man pleads with 
     aid workers. ``We don't care if it is poisonous because we 
     are dying anyway.''
       Ironically--if that word is strong enough to cover 
     impending death--the food isn't ``poisonous'' at all. It is 
     the same food that Americans, Canadians and people from many 
     other countries eat daily. It contains some grain that is 
     genetically modified, but the major safety concern is the 
     remote possibility of allergic reactions in some people.
       Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has told the United 
     Nations and the United States that his nation would ``rather 
     starve'' than feed biotech corn to its people. He personally, 
     of course, is not starving.
       The country has turned down more than 50,000 tons of corn 
     from the United States. About 2.5 million Zambians are in 
     danger of dying if help doesn't come quickly. In rural areas 
     of the country, where drought and government mismanagement 
     have devastated the fields, many people are reduced to eating 
     leaves and twigs.
       Estimates indicate that 13 million people in six southern 
     African nations, including Zambia, are facing famine. 
     Zimbabwe and Mozambique have also refused American help. 
     Malawi, Leostho and Swazliand have taken U.S. food aid.
       As usual, it is the United States that stepped up to help 
     these countries, not the well-fed European nations that are 
     leading

[[Page H6073]]

     the mob against biotech crops. When that aid is refused by a 
     president who would rather let his people die than believe 
     the sweeping evidence that biotech grains are safe for the 
     vast majority of people--well, the ignorance and callousness 
     are just staggering.
       The United States can only offer. It should continue to do 
     so. Sad as all of this is, the innocent victims of famine and 
     ignorance are not on America's conscience.
                                  ____


                     African Famine, Made In Europe

                        (By Robert L. Paarlberg)

       Southern Africa is suffering its worst drought in a decade. 
     The U.N. World Food Program estimates some 13 million people 
     in six countries will need 1.2 million tons of food aid till 
     March 2003 to avoid famine. Yet two countries, Zimbabwe and 
     Zambia, have spent most of the summer rejecting food aid 
     shipments of corn from the U.S. because some varieties of 
     U.S. corn are ``genetically modified'' (GM). Incredibly, 
     African leaders facing famine are rejecting perfectly safe 
     food. What is going on here?


                         Regulatory Authorities

       Farmers in the U.S. have been planting (and Americans have 
     been consuming) genetically engineered corn, soybeans and 
     cotton since 1995. Regulatory authorities in the EU and Japan 
     have also approved such GM crops, but in Europe food safety 
     regulators have been mistrusted by consumers ever since the 
     unrelated but traumatizing mad cow disease crisis of 1996. EU 
     Commissioner for Health and Consumer Affairs David Byrne 
     repeatedly states there is no scientific evidence of added 
     risk to human health or the environment from any of the GM 
     products approved for the market so far, and he can point to 
     81 separate scientific studies, all EU-funded, that bolster 
     this conclusion.
       But greens and GM critics in Europe say this absence of 
     expected or known risks is no longer a sufficient regulatory 
     standard. Touting the ``precautionary principle,'' they argue 
     that powerful new technologies should be kept under wraps 
     until tested for unexpected or unknown risks as well. Never 
     mind that testing for something unknown is logically 
     impossible (the only way to avoid a completely unknown risk 
     is never to do anything for the first time).
       Europeans can perhaps afford hyper-caution regarding new 
     crop technologies. Even without planting any GM seeds, 
     European farmers will continue to prosper--thanks to lavish 
     subsidies--and consumers will remain well fed. The same is 
     not true in the developing world, especially in Africa, where 
     hunger is worsening in part because farmers are not yet 
     productive.
       Two-thirds of all Africans are farmers, most are women, and 
     they are poor and hungry in part because they lack improved 
     crop technologies to battle against drought, poor soil 
     fertility, crop disease, weeds and endemic insect problems. 
     The productivity of African agriculture, per farm worker, has 
     actually declined by 9% over the past two decades, which 
     helps explain why one-third of all Africans are malnourished.
       This ought to change the calculus of precaution. If GM-
     improved crops are kept out of the hands of African farmers, 
     pending tests for the ``nth'' hypothetical risk, or the 
     ``nth'' year of exposure to that risk, the misery of millions 
     will be needlessly prolonged.
       But now we are seeing an even less justified application of 
     regulatory caution toward GM foods. Governments in Africa 
     that are facing an actual famine have been rejecting some 
     food aid shipments because they contain GM seeds. In May 
     2002, the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe rejected 
     10,000 tons of corn shipped from the U.S. because it was not 
     certified as GM-free. This at a time when four to six 
     million Zimbabweans approached a risk of starvation

                           *   *   *   *   *

       Precautionary European policies toward the environment are 
     also keeping Africans from growing their own food. The EU has 
     been insisting that governments in Africa treat GM crops as a 
     potentially serious threat to rural ``biological safety.'' 
     This helps explain why there are no GM crops yet being 
     planted commercially anywhere on the continent, except in the 
     nation of South Africa. Instead of helping Africa's hungry to 
     grow more food, European donors are helping them grow more 
     regulations.
       African governments also must worry that accepting GM food 
     aid will cost them commercial export sales to Europe. The EU 
     has not been importing any U.S. corn since 1988, because U.S. 
     shipments can contain one GM varieties not yet approved in 
     Europe. African governments now worry that any illicit 
     planting of U.S. corn by farmers could jeopardize their own 
     exports to Europe. Trying to remain GM-free for commercial 
     export reasons is a policy that does not help poor 
     subsistence farmers, but it may soon become the norm in 
     Africa, once the EU moves next year toward much tighter 
     labeling and traceability regulations on all imported GM 
     foods and animal feeds.


                          documentary records

       Even while professing that GM foods are safe, EU officials 
     will soon require that they be traced individually through 
     the marketing chain, with legal documentary records to be 
     saved by all producers and handlers for five years. African 
     countries won't have the institutional capacity to implement 
     this traceability regulation, so they will have to remain GM-
     free to retain their access to the EU market. Meat products 
     raised with GM feed are not yet covered by this new EU 
     regulation, but Zambia's initial rejection of GM corn in food 
     aid shipments was partly based on a fear that if the country 
     lost its GM-free animal feed status, poultry and diary 
     exports to the UK would slump.
       By inducing African governments to embrace excessively 
     cautious biosafety, regulations and by requiring stigmatizing 
     labels and costly traceability certificates for all imported 
     GM foods and feeds, wealthy and comfortable officials in 
     Europe have made it harder for drought-stricken societies in 
     Africa to accept food aid from the U.S. European critics of 
     GM foods did not foresee this potentially deadly 
     misapplication of their precautionary principle. Yet here it 
     is.
                                  ____


              [From the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2002]

                     The ``Pure'' and Starving Poor


     environmentalists stifle modern agriculture in the Third World

                        (By James P. Pinkerton)

       JOHANNESBURG, South Africa.--The apartheid system is gone, 
     but many here at the World Summit on Sustainable Development 
     seem to want to bring back a form of ``separate and 
     unequal''--for South Africa and for the rest of the Third 
     World--in the form of environmental regulation that would 
     stifle economic development.
       Politically correct greens, of course, recoil at the 
     thought of any kind of racism, but actions speak louder than 
     words. So if ecological activists from the developed 
     countries of the north push policies that would retard 
     agriculture in the developing south, consigning billions to 
     permanent poverty, maybe they deserve to be labeled ``neo-
     apartheidists.''

                           *   *   *   *   *

       Today, greens still seem intent on keeping Third Worlders 
     innocent of advanced civilization--even if that means keeping 
     them poor. One flashpoint issue is genetically engineered 
     food. In the last two decades, this food has become a part of 
     our lives. Indeed, genetically engineered-derived vaccines 
     and medicines--targeted on diabetes, meningitis, hepatitis, 
     cancer--are lifesaving. Maybe that's why I never hear about 
     American environmentalists protesting the advance of 
     genetically engineered techniques; the greens of the U.S. 
     don't dare block American health therapies, which they 
     themselves may depend on.

                           *   *   *   *   *

       The greens of the north want pure food, and they also want 
     the people of the south to stay pure. For their part, poor 
     southerners want more food, period, and if they think genetic 
     engineering will help them, they will fight for it.

                          ____________________