Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 2:35 pm

But how can that be? Food retailers in the US and Europe, and their friends, assure everyone that organic farming produces just as much food as doing it the modern way, and sells for more money, too! The picture is different in Zimbabwe. When you're really, really poor, organic farming is the only method within your means. And it doesn't produce as much as modern methods. When a neighboring country starts using modern techniques, and you can't, you're worse than poor.

Writing for the Financial Gazette (Harare), Tafadzwa Musarara explains the situation in Zimbabwe:

The prevalent raging debate on whether the milling industry must have unfettered access to GMO grains just like their South African counterparts was sparked by these cheap imports competing with the local industry, which is only allowed to used organic maize. This development creates unfair competition as the raw materials used are different.

For the record, South Africa is expecting this season a yield of 13 million tonnes of white maize of which, 800 000 tonnes of that will be organic, thus less than 10 percent of their production and the rest is GMO. Eventually, the price gap is widening.

At present, organic maize now cost +47 percent more than GMO maize. In simple terms, the producer of GMO maize meal in South Africa will have a 50 percent price advantage over the local miller. On the same matter, internationally organic stocks are fast depleting and our insistence on organic grains must be quickly revisited.

The status quo that allows for the importation of finished GMO basic commodities and bars millers to import GMO maize leaves millers on the cliff edge. To date, the milling industry is yet to get satisfactory answers from the National Biotechnology Authority of Zimbabwe on this anomaly.