Scramble for non-GM stock to feed refugees

A government ban on genetically-modified (GM) foods has resulted in a scramble to source stock to feed the thousands of refugees camped in Zambia. The World Food Programme (WFP) was forced to distribute US-donated milled GM maize to refugees in the first week of November, as the government ban was announced on 29 October, giving the agency little time to source non-GM food. The Zambian government banned GM grain due to concerns over the health and environmental impacts of GM organisms. "From now on only non-GM food will be distributed in camps, we have sent trucks with non-GM food to all six [refugee] camps already," WFP spokesman Richard Lee told IRIN on Tuesday. WFP was feeding 110,000 refugees from Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Zambia. "Basically what we've done is, we did have some non-GM coming in for the camps so we have now moved that to the camps and during the course of the month we will divert some non-GM food from the Zambian emergency operation to the camps," he said. The feeding programme in the refugee camps was separate from the overall Zambian emergency operation, Lee explained. "In Zambia as a whole, as we've said before, it will be difficult for us to fill the gap this month with non-GM stock. The last distributions we did [of GM food] were in the first week of November. "The government's final decision [on GM] was on 29 October, so there was not enough time [to source] alternative stocks, so we agreed to do one more distribution in the camps," Lee added. He said the GM maize that was distributed in the camps was milled beforehand "under very, very strict supervision". This was "obviously done in consultation with the authorities". WFP still had some 3,000 mt of GM maize prepositioned in the camps. "Now we are consulting with government and donors as to where to move that, we'll be discussing where we reallocate it in the region," Lee said.