New Delhi

A Delhi-based environmentalist group has accused the United States of ‘dumping’ genetically modified (GM) soya and corn on India in the form of food aid “in a bid to create an artificial market and keep the tottering genetic-engineering giants afloat”.

The United States began sending food to Orissa in November 1999. The US Agency for International Development does not deny that it supplies GM food in aid packages, saying that it does not distinguish between GM and non-GM food.

Vandana Shiva, president of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), says that the $4.2 million US food aid sent to cyclone victims in the state of Orissa last October contained genetically modified forms of soy beans and corn rejected by traditional markets in Europe and Japan.

The discovery was revealed by test reports from Genetic ID, an American company that tests for GM organisms in food. The company tested samples of food that had been collected from Orissa and sent for analysis by RFSTE, and concluded that “significant levels of genetically modified DNA were detected in the samples”.

India has no policy on GM foods at present. The secretary of the Department of Biotechnology, Manju Sharma, says that the department is still “in the process of finalizing” the policy in consultation with the ministries of health, the environment, food and agriculture.

Shiva complains that, in the absence of policy and test facilities, India has become an illegal dumping ground for unwanted GM foods. She claims that the US government “used the money intended for relief to the poor to subsidize the biotech industry, in order to create market entry for GM products”.