Frankencorn Threatens Mexico�s Ancient Maize Stocks

By Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

�Genetic diversity stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine.�

Jack Harlan, botanist

�For people who want to buy corn, there really isn�t much choice but to come to us.�

Bob Kohlmeyer, Cargill Corporation

(Des Moines Register Nov 15, 2000)

On September 4, 2001 Mexican officials admitted that an alarming number of genetically engineered (GE) corn plants had been detected growing alongside traditional corn varieties over a widespread area in the state of Oaxaca.

For millennia corn has been sacred to the Maya and other native people of Mexico. Over centuries small farmers have carefully bred and preserved thousands of different traditional varieties of corn, called land-races, which are specific to each geographical region, soil type, and micro-climate of the country. Corn, or maize as it is called traditionally, remains today the most important crop for a quarter of the nation�s 10 million indigenous and small farmers. Corn tortillas play 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 the gene pool of the nation�s 20,000 corn varieties and plant relatives, including the progenitor species of corn, called teosinte, could be irreversibly damaged by �genetic pollution� from the genetically engineered (herbicide-resistant or biotech-spliced) maize being aggressively marketed by Monsanto, Syngenta (formerly called Novartis), and other agbiotech transnationals.

Under pressure to protect the nation�s corn biodiversity, Mexican authorities have proclaimed a moratorium on domestic cultivation of GE corn. Meanwhile, they have ignored the massive dumping of millions of tons of cheap (US taxpayer-subsidized) GE corn by corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill. Agronomists and environmentalists fear that Mexican farmers have now, perhaps unknowingly, spread this imported Frankencorn into most of the corn-growing regions of the country, by planting GE corn from the US which was supposed to be sold for human food consumption only. Since impoverished Mexican farmers are looking for the cheapest corn seed possible to plant, they are increasingly choosing to buy the imported GE-tainted corn from the US, since it is considerably cheaper than non-subsidized Mexican varieties.

Compounding Mexico�s genetic pollution problem is the fact that major overseas buyers of corn (Europe, Japan, Korea) are refusing to buy gene-altered corn. Consequently North American exporters are finding it necessary to dump increasing amounts of GE-tainted maize on captive markets such as Mexico, China, Egypt, Colombia, Malaysia, and Brazil. Nineteen percent of the US corn, 14 million acres, is now genetically engineered, 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 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under the relentless pressure of globalization, Mexico has been transformed from being a major producer of corn (producing 98 percent of its needs for example in 1994) to a major importer, ranking third in the world (after Japan and Korea) in terms of imports from the US and Canada. The reason for this is simple. Corn costs about $3.40 a bushel for family-sized farmers in the US and Canada to produce, and even more for a small farmer in Mexico. Yet Cargill and ADM, due to their monopoly control of the market, pay US farmers less than $2 a bushel, with the US taxpayer picking up the remainder of the tab. This enormous subsidy in turn gets reimbursed to farmers, although large corporate farms get the lion�s share of the US�s annual $20-30 billion in farm price support payments. Even with enormous taxpayer subsidies, most years US farmers have trouble even recuperating their costs of corn production, leading to demands by family farmers for a breakup of Cargill and ADM�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 North American organic corn growers are increasingly alarmed over the fact that �genetic pollution� or gene flow from GE corn fields are starting to contaminate their valuable crops.

Longstanding Mexican government regulation of corn supply and prices, support for small corn growers, and price subsidies for corn tortillas for Mexican consumers have been eliminated, all at the behest of Cargill, ADM, and ADM�s powerful Mexican partner, Gruma/Maseca. The end result of this globalization process is that small and medium-sized farmers, both north and south of the border, can�t make a living, while ADM and Cargill (and their preferred customers such as McDonald�s, Wal-Mart, Tyson, Smithfield) make a killing. Meanwhile, consumers, who have been promised that Free Trade would result in lower prices, are paying more for food every year. Corn tortillas, the main staple of the Mexican diet, have risen in price 300 percent since NAFTA went into effect.

Botanists and plant breeders warn that contaminating Mexico�s irreplaceable 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 Southern Corn Leaf Blight which destroyed 15 percent of the total US harvest (50 percent of all corn in some areas), leading to over $1 billion in losses, not to mention marketplace shortages. By going to the �germplasm� bank of thousands of traditional varieties cultivated in Mexico, and withdrawing several varieties which were resistant to the blight, plant breeders were able to use conventional cross-breeding and come up with a single blight-resistant hybrid variety which was planted in 1971, thereby saving billions of dollars in losses and maintaining global food security.

Underlining the central importance of corn biodiversity and preserving traditional land-races, researchers have also found that a perennial variety of corn�s original parent, teosinte, found in Mexico, contains genes that can protect plants from seven of the nine principle viruses that infect corn crops in the US. Of course if herbicide-resistant and biotech corn had already been polluting Mexico�s centers of corn biodiversity before 1970, no one knows if the traditional variety resistant to Southern Corn Leaf Blight would still have been around to save the day. Likewise no one can predict the impact of Frankencorn pollution on virus-resistant teosinte varieties and other corn plant relatives. But one thing is certain, if globalization continues to drive several million Mexican farmers from the land, and forces traditional growers to shift to growing non-corn export crops, most of the nation�s heirloom land-races will be lost forever, since centralized seed banks (which typically store rather than cultivate their thousands of different varieties) cannot properly preserve land-races which are no longer being cultivated in their native areas. Analysts estimate that almost a million small farmers, the primary breeders 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 turned over control of its agricultural sector to Cargill, ADM, and other North American food giants.

Even US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists have warned that genetically engineered crops should not be grown where wild relatives exist (prohibiting for example GE cotton from being grown in parts of southern Florida, where wild relatives of cotton exist), much less in biological centers of diversity such as the maize-growing areas of Mexico.

Of course this concern over genetic pollution didn�t prevent the EPA in October 2001 from giving the green light to allow biotech corn to continue to be grown for seven more years in the US, ignoring environmental and public health concerns voiced by scientists and consumer groups. And the EPA knows full well that millions of tons of GE-tainted corn continue to be exported by US corporations to centers of corn biodiversity such as Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

Genetic engineering and corn dumping pose a serious threat not only to Central American corn biodiversity, but also to continental peace and stability. Since NAFTA went into effect, local and regional markets for indigenous and small farmers in the region have been undermined and destroyed. Farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to sell their corn, beans, coffee, or other crops. Rural poverty and hunger have increased, forcing millions of campesinos to migrate to the US. Mounting desperation has also spawned widespread and at times violent agrarian conflicts in Mexican states such as Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero and threatens to reignite armed struggle across Central America.

For more information go to www.organicconsumers.org.