Banjul — The Gambia is poised to receive several metric tons of food shipment from the United States to help avert what could well be an acute food shortage, resulting from the paucity of rain last year. Good news! The food according to the American government is enough to feed 300, 000 people for a month. Impressive. What is more, the United States has affirmed that they are firmly behind us as we brace ourselves for a dearth in food. Wonderful. We are sure Gambians don't have problems with this latest American gesture. Who can contest that? The Americans have a large heart, which is in the right place. It suggests more to their kindness that half of the charity sent to third world countries emanate from the United States.

Gestures in themselves are self-explanatory but behind every veil, there is a face, and in every face an expression. In this world where we have been brought up to believe that there is no free lunch anywhere, we should not be so hungry that we become blind to the kind of charity food we accept for our hungry bellies. We cannot find a more relevant truth in these precarious times when a passionate debate is going on in the international scene about genetically modified food, which some food scientists have described as unfit for human consumption. Their bone of contention is that GM foods were the products of an unnatural process, which contain unnatural compositions "even rats" have found inedible. Of late Africa has been at the centre of such a debate as the West flood it with such food. The continent of famine and drought is living up to her nickname as the world's dumping ground, where her poor and hungry people are waiting to accept anything without the will to scrutinise them. It's a pity because of Africa's hopeless helplessness and paralysing inability to refuse gifts which even animals do not find useful and acceptable. Must we always believe that anything that comes from the West is good and therefore of indubitable quality? Are we in such helpless hopelessness? It's a shame because those who know the truth would sit on it and make us suffer the debilitating consequences of avoidable actions. It's sad. It is disheartening and unsettling.

What should make us think that The Gambia is not being treated like Zambia where several tons of wheat donated by the Americans to drought-stricken people there have been discovered as GM food and unfit for human consumption. What is queer about the American gesture is switching from cajoling to arm-twisting the Zambian government into accepting the "gift" with threats of financial aid cuts. As if a polite no-thank-you response was an irritant for the donors. Which leaves us wondering whether the real intention was humanitarian in the first place. We all know that right across the United States, vast food storage facilities are stacked with GM foods for animals and may be "sub-humans" if they accept it. There they stay and there they rot.

Nobody eats them in America. Why send them to Africa and to humans and not animals?

There is nothing like a forced gift on the reluctant lap of an unwilling beneficiary. Rightly or wrongly, the Zambians had furrowed their brows in suspicion, obdurately refusing to swallow a gift still being forced on their throat. Can anyone blame them?

We do not expect nor do we want a repeat of the Zambian experience in The Gambia. In fact no one seems to care whether the type of grain we eat here is not GM food. More than anything else we should be fussy about the dietary regimes we entertain and whether they do not have any long-term harm.

What we are asking of the government is caution. The Americans should explain what type of a food aid they are sending us. Hungry though we may be, we have not reached a point in our food shortage where we will eat anything - just anything.