GM crops into Africa?

It appears that the continent of Africa likely will be the next area in which GM food companies will try to make inroads.

A delegation of pro-GM policymakers and researchers from a number of European countries, including Germany, Italy and Sweden, traveled to Ethiopia last week to “meet Ethiopian, Kenyan, Ghanaian and Nigerian farm ministers as well as officials from the African Union” in an attempt to “help EU and African scientists collaborate to allow the [GM] crops to be grown more easily on the continent,” according to the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

Critics of the move decried the meeting as “a thinly disguised attempt to promote GM farming at a governmental level, whether or not it was good for local farmers.”

G8 countries (which include the U.S. and Great Britain) have been pushing African countries to “liberalize their farming as part of the New Alliance for Food Security & Nutrition initiative,” the article noted, adding that African farmers have widely criticized the pressure as “a new form of colonialism.”