Chiral symmetry and diffractive neutral pion photo- and electroproduction

We show that diffractive production of a single neutral pion in photon-induced reactions at high energy is dynamically suppressed due to the approximate chiral symmetry of QCD. These reactions have been proposed as a test of the odderon-exchange mechanism. We show that the odderon contribution to the amplitude for such reactions vanishes exactly in the chiral limit. This result is obtained in a nonperturbative framework and by using PCAC relations between the amplitudes for neutral pion and axial vector current production.