Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left
homeless when a cyclone slammed into India's eastern coastal
state of Orissa in October 1999. In the aftermath, CARE and the
Catholic Relief Society distributed a high-nutrition mixture of
corn and soy meal provided by the U.S. Agency for International
Development to thousands of hungry storm victims. Oddly, this
humanitarian act elicited cries of outrage. "We call on the
government of India and the state government of Orissa to
immediately withdraw the corn-soya blend from distribution,"
said Vandana Shiva, director of the New Delhi-based Research
Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. "The U.S. has
been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs for GM [genetically
modified] products which have been rejected by consumers in the
North, especially Europe." Shiva's organization had sent a
sample of the food to a lab in the U.S. for testing to see if it
contained any of the genetically improved corn and soy bean
varieties grown by tens of thousand