Bob Schaffer, September 27, 2002

Years ago, playwright George Bernard Shaw and his friend, Lady Astor, had a rare visit with Josef Stalin. "When are you going to stop killing people?" Lady Astor brazenly asked Comrade Stalin. "When it is no longer necessary," he tersely replied.

Stalin's favorite killing tool was mass starvation, a tactic he used ruthlessly against his own people. "The collectivization program in Ukraine resulted in a famine which cost not less than 3,000,000 lives in 1932. It was a Stalin-made famine," reported Time magazine in its January 1, 1940, issue.

Today, nearly 13 million people in Southern Africa face a similar starvation. As in Ukraine 70 years ago, Southern Africa's famine has less to do with drought and everything to do with pure politics.

"We're staring catastrophe in the face &150; unless we get food aid fast to millions of people whose lives are in the balance because they are starving," said James Morris, the UN's special envoy to the region.

Officials blame environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace that have pressured African countries like Zambia to halt shipments of food aid from the United States and other nations willing and able to relieve the famine and save precious lives. The groups oppose so-called genetically modified (GM) foods. Extremist groups have put their ideology &150; opposing the importation of all such hybrid agricultural products &150; ahead of the lives of starving people.

"It's very disturbing to me that some groups have chosen a famine to make a political point," says Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). "The lives of 13 million people are at risk."

Natsios said the U.S. is ready to supply more than 75 percent of all the food coming into starving Southern Africa. "If they don't get food from us they're not going to get it," he said.

This year, for example, Zimbabwe has refused to accept U.S. corn, convinced by radical groups that GM grain might somehow "contaminate" native crops. Some of this life-saving corn was grown right here in Colorado. Adding more disinformation, Friends of the Earth claimed "the U.S. is disposing of its rejected food on Africa," in a news release last month.

Truth has seldom been an ally of the Left.

Natsios, who says the U.S. has been supplying GM foods to the region for the past seven years, also says it is the same food sold and consumed in the United States. "I've never seen, in my 30 years of public service, such disinformation and intellectual dishonesty," he said.

As for problems with modified crops, there are none. Concerned about the lives of millions of people desperately in need, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report at the end of the summer assuring GM foods are perfectly safe. "Southern African countries should consider accepting GM food aid in the face of the humanitarian crisis facing the region," urged WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland.

Like the notorious 1932-1933 mass starvation in Ukraine, famine is not always borne of a natural disaster. However, famine can become an effective ideological weapon.

Stalin himself would have been proud of the sordid partnership forged by environmentalists and African tyrants. What are a few million lives worth to this axis of hunger when there are political statements to be made?

Congressman Bob Schaffer represents Colorado's Fourth Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.