Frankencorn Threatens Mexico’s Ancient Maize Stocks

By Ronnie Cummins, Organic ConsumersAssociation

“Genetic diversity stands between us and catastrophicstarvation on a scale we cannot imagine.”

Jack Harlan, botanist

“For people who want to buy corn, there really isn’t much choicebut to come to us.”

Bob Kohlmeyer, Cargill Corporation

(Des Moines Register Nov 15, 2000)

On September 4, 2001 Mexican officials admitted that an alarmingnumber of genetically engineered (GE) corn plants had been detectedgrowing alongside traditional corn varieties over a widespread area inthe state of Oaxaca.

For millennia corn has been sacred to the Maya and other native peopleof Mexico. Over centuries small farmers have carefully bred andpreserved thousands of different traditional varieties of corn, calledland-races, which are specific to each geographical region, soil type,and micro-climate of the country. Corn, or maize as it is calledtraditionally, remains today the most important crop for a quarter ofthe nation’s 10 million indigenous and small farmers. Corn tortillasplay a major role in the diet of Mexico’s 100 million people.

Critics have warned that GE corn should never be imported into Mexico,the most important world center of biodiversity for corn, since thegene pool of the nation’s 20,000 corn varieties and plant relatives,including the progenitor species of corn, called teosinte, could beirreversibly damaged by “genetic pollution” from the geneticallyengineered (herbicide-resistant or biotech-spliced) maize beingaggressively marketed by Monsanto, Syngenta (formerly calledNovartis), and other agbiotech transnationals.

Under pressure to protect the nation’s corn biodiversity, Mexicanauthorities have proclaimed a moratorium on domestic cultivation of GEcorn. Meanwhile, they have ignored the massive dumping of millions oftons of cheap (US taxpayer-subsidized) GE corn by corporations such asArcher Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill. Agronomists andenvironmentalists fear that Mexican farmers have now, perhapsunknowingly, spread this imported Frankencorn into most of thecorn-growing regions of the country, by planting GE corn from the USwhich was supposed to be sold for human food consumption only. Sinceimpoverished Mexican farmers are looking for the cheapest corn seedpossible to plant, they are increasingly choosing to buy the importedGE-tainted corn from the US, since it is considerably cheaper thannon-subsidized Mexican varieties.

Compounding Mexico’s genetic pollution problem is the fact that majoroverseas buyers of corn (Europe, Japan, Korea) are refusing to buygene-altered corn. Consequently North American exporters are findingit necessary to dump increasing amounts of GE-tainted maize on captivemarkets such as Mexico, China, Egypt, Colombia, Malaysia, and Brazil.Nineteen percent of the US corn, 14 million acres, is now geneticallyengineered, although GE acreage is down 30 percent from two years ago,mainly due to global resistance against Frankenfoods.

Corn dumping in Mexico has accelerated since the advent of the 1994North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under the relentlesspressure of globalization, Mexico has been transformed from being amajor producer of corn (producing 98 percent of its needs for examplein 1994) to a major importer, ranking third in the world (after Japanand Korea) in terms of imports from the US and Canada. The reason forthis is simple. Corn costs about $3.40 a bushel for family-sizedfarmers in the US and Canada to produce, and even more for a smallfarmer in Mexico. Yet Cargill and ADM, due to their monopoly controlof the market, pay US farmers less than $2 a bushel, with the UStaxpayer picking up the remainder of the tab. This enormous subsidy inturn gets reimbursed to farmers, although large corporate farms getthe lion’s share of the US’s annual $20-30 billion in farm pricesupport payments. Even with enormous taxpayer subsidies, most years USfarmers have trouble even recuperating their costs of corn production,leading to demands by family farmers for a breakup of Cargill andADM’s grain monopoly.

Only organic corn farmers, operating outside ADM and Cargill’s cartel,are receiving a fair price for their harvest. And of course NorthAmerican organic corn growers are increasingly alarmed over the factthat “genetic pollution” or gene flow from GE corn fields are startingto contaminate their valuable crops.

Longstanding Mexican government regulation of corn supply and prices,support for small corn growers, and price subsidies for corn tortillasfor Mexican consumers have been eliminated, all at the behest ofCargill, ADM, and ADM’s powerful Mexican partner, Gruma/Maseca. Theend result of this globalization process is that small andmedium-sized farmers, both north and south of the border, can’t make aliving, while ADM and Cargill (and their preferred customers such asMcDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Tyson, Smithfield) make a killing. Meanwhile,consumers, who have been promised that Free Trade would result inlower prices, are paying more for food every year. Corn tortillas, themain staple of the Mexican diet, have risen in price 300 percent sinceNAFTA went into effect.

Botanists and plant breeders warn that contaminating Mexico’sirreplaceable corn land-races and germplasm pool could be “catastrophic” for farmers and consumers. For example in 1970,millions of acres of the US corn crop were devastated by a SouthernCorn Leaf Blight which destroyed 15 percent of the total US harvest(50 percent of all corn in some areas), leading to over $1 billion inlosses, not to mention marketplace shortages. By going to the“germplasm” bank of thousands of traditional varieties cultivated inMexico, and withdrawing several varieties which were resistant to theblight, plant breeders were able to use conventional cross-breedingand come up with a single blight-resistant hybrid variety which wasplanted in 1971, thereby saving billions of dollars in losses andmaintaining global food security.

Underlining the central importance of corn biodiversity and preservingtraditional land-races, researchers have also found that a perennialvariety of corn’s original parent, teosinte, found in Mexico, containsgenes that can protect plants from seven of the nine principle virusesthat infect corn crops in the US. Of course if herbicide-resistant andbiotech corn had already been polluting Mexico’s centers of cornbiodiversity before 1970, no one knows if the traditional varietyresistant to Southern Corn Leaf Blight would still have been around tosave the day. Likewise no one can predict the impact of Frankencornpollution on virus-resistant teosinte varieties and other corn plantrelatives. But one thing is certain, if globalization continues todrive several million Mexican farmers from the land, and forcestraditional growers to shift to growing non-corn export crops, most ofthe nation’s heirloom land-races will be lost forever, sincecentralized seed banks (which typically store rather than cultivatetheir thousands of different varieties) cannot properly preserveland-races which are no longer being cultivated in their native areas.Analysts estimate that almost a million small farmers, the primarybreeders and stewards of thousands of corn and other crop land-races,already have been driven from their cornfields and communal lands(ejidos) since Mexico, under pressure from the US, essentially turnedover control of its agricultural sector to Cargill, ADM, and otherNorth American food giants.

Even US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists have warnedthat genetically engineered crops should not be grown where wildrelatives exist (prohibiting for example GE cotton from being grown inparts of southern Florida, where wild relatives of cotton exist), muchless in biological centers of diversity such as the maize-growingareas of Mexico.

Of course this concern over genetic pollution didn’t prevent the EPAin October 2001 from giving the green light to allow biotech corn tocontinue to be grown for seven more years in the US, ignoringenvironmental and public health concerns voiced by scientists andconsumer groups. And the EPA knows full well that millions of tons ofGE-tainted corn continue to be exported by US corporations to centersof corn biodiversity such as Mexico, Central America, South America,and the Caribbean.

Genetic engineering and corn dumping pose a serious threat not only toCentral American corn biodiversity, but also to continental peace andstability. Since NAFTA went into effect, local and regional marketsfor indigenous and small farmers in the region have been underminedand destroyed. Farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to selltheir corn, beans, coffee, or other crops. Rural poverty and hungerhave increased, forcing millions of campesinos to migrate to the US.Mounting desperation has also spawned widespread and at times violentagrarian conflicts in Mexican states such as Chiapas, Oaxaca, andGuerrero and threatens to reignite armed struggle across CentralAmerica.

For more information go to www.organicconsumers.org.