Mexico addresses GMOs as badly as the US does fentanyl
Posturing and government ineptitude are exacerbating issues surrounding genetically modified maize.
Disappointingly for some, Monsanto and other companies specialised in creating genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not the main villains in this story.
One wouldn’t think so from listening to the Mexican government and the country’s anti-GMO activists who oppose both GMOs and the additional accouterments associated with these crops. They especially hate glyphosate, the world’s most widely used pesticide, invented by Monsanto in 1974.
The Mexican government has tried and failed to ban glyphosate, not because it is particularly dangerous, but because “when used as a pesticide, it always goes hand in hand with genetically modified organisms,” Xavier Balaguer Rasillo told The Mexico Political Economist. “It does not affect mammals, but, if you spray it on a plant that hasn’t been designed to resist glyphosate, you’ll end up killing it.”
Given that farming of genetically modified, glyphosate-resistant maize is banned in Mexico, one might be forgiven for wondering why the Mexican government has made such a fuss around this particular chemical.
“Glyphosate has become a symbol of Yankee interference in Mexican agriculture,” believes Balaguer. As a senior scientist at the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich, a leading centre for research around agricultural pesticides, he is no fan of glyphosate, but Balaguer worries that the government’s politicised obsession with this one particular chemical has blinded it to other non-GMO-based issues surrounding Mexico’s corn-growing industry.
In this, Mexico’s mismanagement of the situation is reminiscent of the failed policies surrounding the war on drugs in the United States. The Mexican government’s GMO stance has resulted in a lot of moralising and a poor understanding of the science and economics behind the real issues faced by farmers, leading to counterproductive and potentially lethal results.
Posturing with poison
There are many arguments against the use of genetically modified corn. The Mexican government has gone about focusing on two in the least effective way possible.
The first is its defence of maize as a part of Mexico's heritage, which though worthy (and valuable in its own way, as we’ll see below) is an abstraction for most except for the keenest activists. The second is its advocacy for public health, which is being conducted in a singularly bad way.
It is generally agreed upon that the genetic modifications in GMO produce are not what’s inherently bad. It is the GMO business that wreaks havoc on people and the environment.
For instance, modern GMO industrial monocultures cannot function without an accompanying “chemical assemblage”—herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and fertilisers. It’s expensive stuff which slowly kills the soil. There’s a reason why “farmers in Iowa look like astronauts,” said Balaguer. They must suit up in hazmat suits as they spray their crops with substances so toxic that only GMOs can survive them.
Of these, glyphosate is perhaps the least worst. According to the independent Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network, there are 203 highly dangerous pesticides in use in Mexico today. The list does not include glyphosate but it does include Mexico’s second most used pesticide, paraquat. Despite being incredibly carcinogenic it is, as of yet, unregulated.
The government has instead focused on waging war against glyphosate.
That is not to say that it is wrong for it to worry about its effects, especially given that Mexicans consume 10 times more corn than the average person in the US. Yet, to go all out on a substance of still debated harmfulness, without regulating all the other far more toxic chemicals, is a recipe for Mexico to quickly poison itself to death.
Why this has not happened yet is because glyphosate is Mexican farmers’ preferred pesticide. It is extremely cheap since Monsanto’s patent expired in 2000 and is used for a variety of agricultural uses, from desiccation to weed-killing.
But the way it is being used has raised eyebrows:
From soil tests, today we know that “about 35% of the glyphosate used in Mexico is used on maize,” said Balaguer, which means the corn must be genetically modified. “If it weren’t GMO, it would die. So, it’s an open secret that genetically modified corn is already being grown in Mexico.”
This reveals a terrible truth about Mexico’s posturing; it is only just that. Despite a lot of talk about public health, not only do dangerous chemicals go unregulated while the government obsesses over glyphosate, it cannot even enforce the few rules it has created.
“It’s not enough to have laws prohibiting this stuff, you need agencies to enforce them—soil and water analyses; punishments when these chemicals are detected,” Balaguer said.
The brutal logic of corn
Politics has taken precedence over the two most important factors to consider in the Mexican corn supply debate: Scientific fact and economics.
No better was this illustrated than late last year when Mexico lost a trade dispute that opened it up to North American genetically modified corn after it was decided that its prohibition of white maize—the one for human consumption—violated USMCA rules.
The arguments against the use of genetically modified crops were there, said observers, the only problem was that the government once again failed to focus on the correct ones, with the Mexican delegation at one point undermining its own position by citing studies that hadn’t been peer reviewed.
The science took a back seat and the negotiation failed, because the USMCA only accepts the banning of food imports on the basis of sound scientific argument. Yet there are both economic and scientific arguments for Mexico, as the land that domesticated corn, to push back against the use of genetically modified maize.
Consider first the arguments in favour of GMOs:
Modified crops in industrial farming are indeed incredibly productive. Mexico’s traditional planting methods produce about a tonne per hectare; in the US, the most prolific GMO fields produce 14 times more.
Companies will claim that these benefits, coupled with the enormous investments in R&D—“it takes around 13 years and costs $136 million dollars to bring a new GM crop to market”—make their litigiousness and high prices a fair deal.
This would be a great argument if there weren’t another cheaper and faster way of producing larger yields with far fewer downstream secondary effects. It isn’t a return to some ancestral method. It is agro-ecology, and it makes economic and environmental sense.
The third way: Hard-headed meets touchy-feely
Mexican agriculture could use a boost.
Only 17% of its farms grow commercially—990,000 producers out of 5.9 million nationally. Meanwhile, about 80% of farmers in Mexico are small producers, most of whom grow crops for themselves. But, as the climate changes, those same plants are less and less able to thrive, and the need for some sort of modified crop grows.
Climate change might seem like fertile ground for GMO companies. Hold on.
Grain yield, plant height, ear size, kernel weight, flowering time, time to maturity, and stalk strength in corn are all polygenic traits—features determined by many genes. To alter these, it isn’t a case of just tweaking a few. A scientist will often need to “rebuild” the entire edifice of the plant's genome to express these seemingly simple traits. Thus, the enormous expense in time and treasure to make a GM crop.
Regardless of years of advances, genetic modification in the lab is still a blunt tool when faced with the incredibly varied and complex Swiss Army knife that is cross-breeding.
To access this tool, organizations like CIMMYT have come into existence. Based in Texcoco, east of Mexico City, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center has, since the 1960’s, worked on compiling a genetic bank of Mexico’s 64 ancestral maizes and then combining them through conventional breeding practices to draw out traits from drought and heat resistance to immunity to pests.
The term “conventional breeding practices” isn’t synonymous to “ancestral,” “healthy,” “wholesome,” or any other new age buzzwords. CIMMYT’s approach is one that is cheaper, more efficient and sustainable, yet no less scientific or technical than the ones used in GMOs.
CIMMYT prioritises alliances with small and medium-sized farms in tropical and subtropical regions to increase their productivity and gain access to markets without resorting to industrial farming. But this NGO also works with large-scale agriculture in Mexico’s north and centre, helping to make their industrial methods more sustainable by avoiding local soil degradation and becoming resilient to global climate change.
Results have been encouraging, even when compared to GMO’s competitive offerings.
For instance, within just five years and at a fraction of the cost needed by GMO companies, CIMMYT identified and worked with farmers in Chiapas, in southern Mexico, to develop and introduce an improved strain of maize that was resistant to a local fungal infection called chamuzco or tar spot disease. Their research consisted mostly of fieldwork to understand how the pest interacted with the crops in that environment, said Felix San Vicente, the maize breeding coordinator for Latin America and principal scientist at CIMMYT.
Whereas GMO corporations often provide a one size fits all product that demands that farmers bend the environment to their needs (by buying the company’s kit and chemicals, of course), agroecology does it the other way around, producing strains adapted to local conditions.
By doing things this way, San Vicente told The Mexico Political Economist, CIMMYT’s scientists could then head to the lab where they recreated the target environment and crossed local breeds with more resistant strains from other parts of Mexico to produce an ideal version for Chiapas. A farmer couldn’t have just transplanted a resistant version from another region because it would not have thrived in the local conditions; the complex task of controlled cross-breeding was irreplaceable.
At its height, CIMMYT worked with over half a million agricultural workers during a 10 year government-funded programme launched in 2011. That year the market share controlled by small and medium-sized (SME) seed merchants that supplied farmers with improved hybrid crops of the sort CIMMYT provided stood at around 15%, with the rest being large agro-industrial outfits. By 2021, SME seed merchants held 30% of the market.
The funding has since dried out. Under president Claudia Sheinbaum’s austerity budget, the wind has been taken out of the sails of one of the few projects that seriously provided alternatives to low-yield agriculture and environment-killing agro-industry. Despite her constant refrain that “No Country Without Maize” (Sin maíz no hay país), Shienbaum has not put her money where her mouth is.
Just as with the misregulation of pesticides or the slip up during the USMCA corn dispute, the main obstacle for sustainable, non-GMO agroecology isn’t Monsanto; it’s government ineptitude.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-wizard-and-the-prophet