Editor,

Another barely disguised GMO Trojan horse masquerading as a philanthropy project for poor Africans. The most dangerous forked tongue marketing piece for the biochemical industry I have read in a long while. Articles like these, falsely claiming that the industry is bringing "food security” to Africa when the opposite is true (control our seed supply through their Frankenstein single-use seeds), should only be allowed with appropriate warnings.

The number of recent articles pushing GMOs, in The New Times, using all kinds of euphemisms in order to avoid mentioning that these are GMOs they are pushing is very worrying indeed. It seems there is a concerted public relations push to get GMOs accepted as an essential "solution” to manufactured hunger on the African continent, the most fertile, least-pesticide poisoned swath of agriculture land remaining on planet earth.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We should be demanding at least a kernel of truth from this kind of barefaced advertorial masquerading as a news article.

Those pushing this so-called new "food technology” (when did food become technology?) are not interested in the welfare of the African people, or that of any other people for that matter. What interests them first and foremost is fattening their bottom lines. And they couldn’t care less if they destroyed our food supply by replacing it with their patented GMO single use high pesticide-dependent environment-destroying "seeds”.

It really reminds me of that American Cree Indian saying about the uncontrolled greed for money: "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, you will realise that you cannot eat money”.

Mwene Kalinda

Reaction to the story, "Initiative to help smallholder farmers acquire improved seeds unveiled” (The New Times, March 16)