Most of the world’s genetically modified crops are planted in the US, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. But citizens in Europe, Africa and Asia have with varying degrees of success mobilized to force their governments to resist the importation of American “Frankenfood” or the planting of genetically modified crops. Transgenic pollution has already occurred in Mexico, where ancestral varieties of corn already been contaminated by the pollen of corporate genetically modified corn grown in open fields hundreds of miles north in the US. When Zambia and Zimbabwe refused food “aid” shipments of American corn in 2002, it was because authorities knew thrifty farmers would save and plant some of the genetically modified corn, and its pollen would inevitably be carried by wind and insects to pollute crops in the entire region, with unpredictable results.
“The State Department, the Department of Agriculture, and USAID” claims Dorsey, “have caused or allowed genetically modified foodstuffs to comprise a very large proportion of US food aid… The US also uses bilateral trade negotiations to bully weaker countries into accepting this Trojan Horse food aid along with a smorgasboard of other deleterious stuff. Private US charities and corporations like Monsanto have gotten themselves into the act too, giving away US genetically modified food to depress local prices in foreign markets and insert themselves….”
The greed and hubris of the “life science” corporations knows no bounds. Monsanto recently sued a Canadian farmer all the way up to Canada’s Supreme Court for non-payment of royalties after his crop was polluted by transgenic Monsanto pollen, and international agribusiness concerns are doing the same in Argentina.