Mexico is not only dangerously dependent on US growers for its most important staple crop; it is growing more and more dependent by the year. Mexico’s government wants to reverse this dynamic, but the US has other ideas.
Mexico’s government recently unveiled plans to impose a temporary 50% export tax on white corn, a staple food in the country, which will remain in effect until at least June 30. Mexico is fully self-sufficient in white corn but depends on the US for much of its supply of yellow corn. The government said the move was necessary to guarantee supply and price stability of the staple, but it almost certainly also forms part of the government’s broader campaign to reduce Mexico’s dependence on US imports of GMO food, in particular corn.
“The supply and production of white corn in our country are important factors in determining its price and, therefore, of the various consumer products made from it,” the decree published in Mexico’s official gazette said.
A Towering Wall of Resistance
Needless to say, the move did not go down well with the US government, which is threatening to sue Mexico’s government over its plans to phase out all imports of GMO crops, including corn, by the end of January 2024. Those plans were first set out in a presidential decree issued by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) on Dec 31, 2020. The decree also pledges to prohibit use of the “probably” carcinogenic weedkiller glyphosate — the herbicide that commonly accompanies many GMO crops. The cultivation of GMO crops is already banned in Mexico.
In the words of the Non GMO Project, a Washington State-based non-profit, AMLO’s decree is “ambitious, controversial and well-worth defending.” But it faces a towering wall of resistance, particularly from Big Ag lobbies in the United States.
The CEO of the US National Corn Growers Association, John Doggett, warned in November that AMLO’s decree would be “devastating” both for the Mexican people, who will have to contend with much higher corn prices, and U.S. corn farmers, who will suddenly lose access to their largest overseas market. He also noted that GMO corn isn’t the only crop being targeted by Mexican officials: “Biotech soybeans, cotton and canola import approvals have also been rejected by Mexico’s regulatory agency over the past year.”
More than 92% of the corn grown in the States is GMO. Roughly a quarter of all the corn exported by the US goes to Mexico, where it is predominantly used for animal feed. As such, Mexico’s ban will undoubtedly hurt some US farmers.
To cushion the impact, the AMLO government in December proposed postponing the deadline for the ban until January 2025 as well as exempting yellow feed corn from the ban until an independent investigation (i.e. not financed by GMO producers) can be conducted into its effects on human health.
But Mexico’s offer to show flexibility in both the scope and timing of its restrictions on GM corn was not enough to appease the US government. A couple of weeks ago, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said the Biden administration is unwilling to make any commitments regarding Mexico’s tweaked proposal. That was after threatening to initiate a U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement dispute resolution in December.
“The message is quite simple; we believe in a science-based system,” Vilsack said. “We understand and appreciate some of the challenges President López Obrador has outlined but at the end of the day, the agreement we reached with Mexico and Canada is in support of a science-based system.”
It may have escaped Vilsack’s notice but at this stage in proceedings government appeals to “trust” or “follow” corporate-controlled science do not have quite the same effect they once did. What’s more, there is little in the way of consensus on the issue. In recent years, a number of studies have warned that contamination of Mexico’s native corn varieties by GMO strands would have disastrous consequences for the food supply not only in Mexico but around the world as a whole.
“Impacts on the genetic diversity of Mexican maize could have direct repercussions on the diversity of maize and ecosystems in all of North America and the rest of the world,” concluded a 2015 paper by the Commission of Environmental Cooperation,the environmental side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “Mexico is one of the centers of origin for maize. To lose a variety of maize in Mexico is to lose it throughout the planet.”
An Immovable Object
As if to draw a line under the matter, Vilsack said the position of his government is immovable. The AMLO government’s response was to place a 50% tax on all exports of white corn.
In a statement last week, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Chief Agricultural Negotiator Doug McKalip and U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Alexis Taylor upped the ante. Mexico’s repurposed approach, they said, “still threatens to disrupt billions of dollars in bilateral agricultural trade, cause serious economic harm to U.S. farmers and Mexican livestock producers, and stifle important innovations needed to help producers respond to pressing climate and food security challenges”:
Then came the warning shot:
In our meetings today, we reemphasized the concerns previously expressed by Secretary Vilsack and Ambassador Tai. We appreciate our Mexican counterparts’ time and dedication in trying to hammer out a solution. We made it clear today that if this issue is not resolved, we will consider all options, including taking formal steps to enforce our rights under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
For the moment, it is hard to see either side backing down. AMLO has every reason to want to carry through with his ban on GMO corn and other biotech crops. This is not just about protecting people’s health or crop diversity; it is about restoring Mexico’s ability to feed its own people.
Once the birthplace of maize, Mexico is now the world’s second largest importer of corn. This is thanks largely to NAFTA, which eliminated the Mexican government’s protection mechanisms for Mexican farmers while preserving U.S. corn subsidies for US farmers. The results were devastating for Mexico, notes Non GMO Project:
During NAFTA’s first decade, cheap U.S. corn flooded the Mexican market, causing the price of domestically-grown corn to plummet. The economic devastation to Mexico’s agricultural sector cannot be overstated, and contributed to a 75% increase in illegal immigration into the States.
During the same time period, genetically modified corn entered the market. As GMO corn was adopted by more U.S. farmers, it gained a foothold in shipments headed for Mexico, ultimately leading to contamination of valuable native varieties.
In 2022, Mexico overtook China as the number-one destination for US exports of corn. According to figures from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), in the fiscal year from October 2021 to September 2022, Mexico’s grain imports from the US surged 25% to reach $5.12 billion, the highest figure since there records began, in 1970.
In other words, Mexico is not only dangerously dependent on its northern neighbor for its most important staple crop; it is growing more and more dependent each and every year. And AMLO wants to reverse this dynamic. Since coming into office in late 2018, he has made food security and self-sufficiency one of the main priorities of his government. In November, he announced: “We have to aim for self sufficiency in food, just as we have done with energy.”
To that end, Mexico is exploring new relationships with foreign non-GMO producers, including fellow Latin American powerhouse Brazil, the world’s second largest corn exporter. Last Friday (Jan 27), the Mexican Secretariat for Agriculture and Rural Development (Sader) and the Brazilian Embassy in Mexico agreed to work toward strengthening and expediting agricultural trade between the two countries.[1] Mexico is also in talks with US producers of non-GMO corn while also supporting small- and medium-sized farmers at home to increase domestic production.
But it may take longer than originally envisaged for Mexico to wean itself off US-supposed GMO corn completely. According to Victor Suárez, the Undersecretary of Food and Competitiveness of the Secretariat of Agriculture, Mexico will not be able to replace all of the corn it imports by 2024, but it still hopes to reduce its purchases from overseas by between 30% and 40%. The country, he said, is advancing “significantly” in its objective of replacing imported GMO corn.
Something’s Gotta Give
That terrifies US Big Ag lobbies. Especially given the lessons such a ban, if effective, could give to other parts of the world. After all, this is about banning not just the cultivation but also the consumption of GMOs. It would send a clear message to other countries in Latin America, one of the biggest markets for GMO crops, that there are alternatives. It may even spark a genuinely green counterrevolution in the US, as farmers abandon GMO varieties in order to maintain a key export market.
Given enough time (which Mexico is now offering) and market incentives, many US corn farmers would happily revert to growing non-GMO corn, first for the Mexican market and then perhaps later for the domestic one. After all, it is only really a matter of changing seeds. The problem is that some of the larger seed companies may not want to produce more non-GMO seeds for growers since they already make most of their money from GMO varieties. Plus, non-GMO seeds do not offer the same juicy proprietary perks as their GMO counterparts.
For the moment, the GMO giants seem content to swamp the airwaves and news pages with warnings about the catastrophic threat posed by Mexico’s GMO ban. One study financed by Crop Life, the biotech industry trade association, and other agribusiness interests in the U.S. and Mexico, warns of crippling costs and lost output for U.S. farmers and soaring inflation and severe food insecurity in Mexico.
But as notes Timothy A. Wise, a senior research fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute, in his article, No Reason for Alarm over Mexico’s GM-Corn Ban, the study “starts from a set of unrealistic assumptions designed to produce inflated estimates of harm to U.S. farmers and Mexican consumers” [2]. Which is hardly surprising given the conflicts of interest at play.
There are also serious doubts about whether or not the US can actually compel Mexico to buy its GMO exports. According to Sharon Anglin, a senior lawyer at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, the section on agricultural biotechnology in the USMCA treaty does not have a solid enough legal base for the US government to initiate a trade dispute against Mexico over this issue, especially given the Mexican government’s legitimate concerns about health and the environment.
Yet the standoff between the two governments continues to intensify. At some point, something has to give, one side must blink. One can only hope, for the sake of Mexico and the world at large, it isn’t AMLO.
[1] Worth noting that Brazil is the second largest producer of GMO crops on the planet after the US. As such, it remains to be seen whether Brazil could actually represent a genuine alternative supplier. At the very least, many of its farmers would have to revert to growing non-GMO crops (hardly a bad thing).
[2] Wise’s article, featured on the website of US non-profit Foot Tank, is well worth a read for anyone seeking to understand some of the broader issues and conflicting interests at play. Wise’s work has been cross-posted on Naked Capitalism a number of times, including here, here and here.
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I smell SMO (Special Military Operation) in the air…if USA standard tool of regime change doesn’t work.
A couple of Republicans have introduced what they style as an AUMF to go after the cartels in Mexico. It’s unclear whether they intend to resurrect Pershing for the task.
It is not clear to me if that AUMF would mean cross-border action. If so, is all of Washington crazy?
The US is fighting a war in Ukraine, trying to provoke a war with China, at a near war with Iran, and is cordially hated by a good proportion of the Global South. This is when they propose invading their neighbour to the south.
Wars are very profitable. Think of them as boost to the US economy. /s.
Starting wars is really our only remaining competence, it’s what we do best!
Considering that we never win them and don’t really know how to fight them or end them, it’s not really much of an expertise, but that’s what the Market State has made of us.
Like educational and medical debt, another branch of the Ouroboros economy, which seemed like a perpetual motion machine while the Fed was doing QE.
Capitalists really are an amazing lot, they think it is completely normal to sue someone for not buying their product. They make a product that is intentionally slathered in Roundup and sue any country that won’t buy the tainted corn.
BLM specialists working on a native grass restoration project on land we leased from them told me Roundup does not work; the plants have developed resistance. BLM used something much nastier and long-lived on the project. My wheat farmer cousins unanimously agree that Roundup is no longer an effective herbicide. Anecdata, to be sure, but these guys have demonstrated competence to me in what we have done together, and have years of direct experience with ag chemicals.
You have to wonder if the makers of Roundup are searching for new territories where the weeds have not yet developed resistance.
BLM? Black lives matter?
Bureau of Land Management
Bureau of Livestock and Mining according to the late, great Cactus Ed Abbey.
Bureau of Land Management, which owns land never homesteaded across the West, and manages it largely for the benefit of cattlemen (though they don’t see it that way). They control a majority of the land in many Western states, and 80 percent of Nevada.
I reckon they might find a hospitable president in Ukraine’s Zelensky…
It may come down to who has more at stake here. For Mexico, it is regaining food security for a country of some 130 million people to prevent future food shortages leading to food riots. For those Big Ag corporations, it is a matter of annual profits and executive bonuses.
It’s more than that, the world markets are gradually closing to GMO products. Big Ag would need to switch to non-GMO varieties, which are more labour intensive. US agricultural labour has been hollowed out, so short of importing millions of migrants, there is no labour reservoir for this business.
The whole US agricultural business model, based on heavy use of mechanization and chemicals to minimize use of human labour, is unsustainable without GMOs. Domestic markets are not big enough to support the volume of crops US is producing, so there would be bloodbath across the whole industry.
A I will fix it. No labor force needed. No consumers, either. No Problems. Hell, no Pandemic….
A I — it is in a culturally sterotyped refrain: A I, A I, y A I y A I…. (Cielito Lindo…)
Big Ag does not go quietly into the night. Lotta stranded capital at risk… think of the Canola farmer Percy Schmeiser in SK …
https://earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/percy_schmeiser_vs._monsanto/#:~:text=So%2C%20in%201998%2C%20when%20pollen%20from%20a%20field,St.%20Louis-based%20multinational%20that%20sued%20the%2070-year-old%20farmer
Gabe Brown runs a 5,000 acre operation with Non-GMO crops and no Haber Bosch nitrogen fertilizer and very few employees. How does he do it?
Gary Zimmer of Otter Creek Farm in Wisconsin runs a 1,000 acre operation which is at this point all Certified Organic with of course zero GMO and zero Haber Bosch nitrogen fertilizer. Unless he has armies of employees I have not read about, how does he do it?
Growing organic corn requires either mechanical or electrical cultivation. Mechanical means a big steel cultivator mounted to a tractor. Diggers churn the top soil in the gaps between the rows, killing weeds. They cant get the weeds right in the row, and they cant be used after corn gets over 2 feet tall. Electrical cultivating is the new big thing. It takes a lot of horsepower. My friend runs a 200+ HP tractor that has an additional 200+ HP alternator. This system actually “zaps” the weeds. They get hit with a bolt of juice, it fries even the roots. Similar limitations to mechanical cultivation.
As for nitrogen- organic turkey manure is selling like gold these days. You have to order it months in advance. Semiloads delivered to the field must then be reloaded into big (expensive) spreaders.
All this adds cost and labor to the project. And yields are significantly lower. My friends fields look like a weed patch to me. But organic sells at at least triple the price. maybe even up to 5 times higher.
As a commenter down thread notes- all of this is good for job creation. Right now the trends in farming are going huge or going tiny. The tiny operations seem competitive.
Big ag suggests efficiency means the least amount of workers to work the most amount of land. I think it means how little land do you need to make a living. Our grandparents could raise a family of 8 on 80-160 acres. Now it takes 1000 plus acres to keep one farm family going.
Thanks Nick for this great article.
“…may not want to produce more non-GMO seeds for growers since they already make most of their money from GMO varieties. Plus, non-GMO seeds do not offer the same juicy proprietary perks as their GMO counterparts.”
Because markets, of course.
I have never understood how I can sue you, and collect, because you do not wish to continue using what I sell.
Side note: Since I first saw and smelled a feed lot, I have all but given up eating beef.
I would think that scientific proof would be had in the successful corn cultivar produced through many centuries in Mexico and not some 40 years of GMO that has produced monoculture corn incapable of maintaining a healthy biome and one which is becoming more edible resistant. The only thing it has produced is an easier crop to harvest using industrial means and a dependence on industrial inputs — an artificial guarantee of corporate profits at the expense of human capital and life.
Get rid or diminish labor for profits – but this hurts your customers ability to purchase – as for nations…its the same old financial game of making others countries your colonies dependent upon your financial sector – otherwise known as debt bondage or colonialism
as for nations…its the same old financial game of making others countries your colonies dependent upon your financial sector – otherwise known as debt bondage or colonialism
An existential crisis, it seems… especially with these words of jerome powell lifted from the S. Kelton in links today, which I recommend…
Powell: We want to see a lot of things but especially wages coming down.
This comment from powell made larry summers
(“Unlikely” dem hero, see https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/15/larry-summers-emerges-as-the-unlikeliest-democratic-hero-00051433) so happy he kicked his cleaning lady…twice!
Edible resistant is bang on. Have you tasted a corn tortilla produced in the USA or Canada lately? Ugh! Not only is the corn utterly flavourless, they also add guar gum and various starches to ruin the texture, and of course, preservatives so that they can sit on store shelves for weeks without becoming any worse. We buy delicious locally handmade tortillas (or fresh masa) when at our Mexican home; when in Canada, we must make our own from white corn masa harina brought in from Mexico.
When my Mexican, Guatemalan & Honduran coworkers first came up, their general health, BMI, blood sugar, resilience & adaptation to stress, immunity, “toughness & vitality” all seemed better than ours. After a few years eating largely GE monoculture imitations of herbicide dessicated, synthetic fertilizer hardpan & return water irrigated, CAFO rBGH & antibiotic gavaged sickly box shaped swine, somatotropin fattened, HFCS & nitrosamine flavored TexMex slurry, their own moms didn’t recognize them, upon return for affordable healthcare?
NAFTA absolutely caused havoc with Mexico’s corn and forced emigration. Distinctive locales had their own variety, there are at least 59 distinct varieties attached to separate locations. https://www.discoverbaja.com/2020/06/01/mexicos-heirloom-corn/
Some varieties fix nitrogen https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/articles/2018/august/indigenous-mexican-variety-of-corn-captures-the-nitrogen-it-needs-from-the-air
US corn GMO varieties have stacked resistance to not only glyphosate but other herbicides and pests. Bt producing corn protects the growing plant from insects and reduces insecticide use in the US https://www.livestrong.com/article/500667-bt-corn-advantages-disadvantages/
Mexico switching origination to Brazil for its corn would cost a little more due to shipping but market disruption in the US would make corn cheaper and boost cross border wheat sales for feed as wheat is non-GMO. Some US farmers would make the switch if they could find seed and create a two tier market, which is doable.
In line with the Masienda site mentioned within the discoverbaja site, there is another bread/grains supply site called Breadtopia which offers a few more and other kinds of artisan heirloom Mexican corn varieties in the same vein as Masienda.
Here is their homepage. https://breadtopia.com/store/
Here is their corn page in particular. https://breadtopia.com/product-category/grains-flours/corn/
Funny, it’s not just Bt maize, stacked traits legumes & GE seed oil & rBGH/ antibiotic feed vs Mexican equivalents. In Amish & PA’s organic farm country, we’d watched SE Asian, E European refugees & Caribbean workers eating fast/junk food, amidst farms that shocked Lee’s troops 150yrs ago: soil improved by rotation, contour (if any) tillage, cover crops & micrograms, not lethal chemicals maintaining fertility, moisture, tilth; resilience from & resistance to pests, drought & disease. Fracking’s destroying this to the west!
In general GMOs produce an unpredictable result. It’s like winding evolution up and then letting it go. But the real problem with the vast majority of GMO research and implementation is which goals are being set. So far it has mostly been about increasing yield through application of specific inputs sold by the producers of the GMO crops. And of course there’s the intellectual property that brings yearly seed sales.
I commend AMLO, not because i’m deeply anti-GMO but because the current arrangement only benefits the profits of a few, trans-national ag corporations at the expense of Mexico and her people. It doesn’t really benefit American farmers either. Big Ag was pretty upset with Russia when it did the same thing; it’s probably even more mad that Russia’s agriculture sector didn’t collapse but has prospered. Practically, Mexico can do this. The problems will be political and wrapped in the trade agreements with its unfriendly neighbor.
Mexican feedlot-for-cattle corn buyers could buy Non-GMO Russian corn from Russia till Mexico is able to grow all its own feed corn for cattle feedlots.
At this point in time opposing US interests is the same as opposing Anton Chigurh.
” You know how how this is going to turn out, don’t you? “
Thanks so much Nick. So glad you brought in the Nafta facts. I was watching/reading that disaster in the 90’s, as per Mexico’s corn. I remember reading at the time they actually had 400 different varieties some cultivated since Indian times that would be infected. And THAT , along with US subsidized Walmart type corps., taking over retail sector, is what really lead to 2 million having to come here…..Never addressed by democrats of course.
The Free Trade Clintocrats engineered it, on purpose.
Since Indian times?!? How about 11000 years? The oldest corn known was found (some fossil impressions I guess) in a cave in Oaxaca. We in the US don’t know about the indigenes in Mexico much. They still occupy a lot of their original turf. They weren’t slaughtered the way the indigenes in the US were. The policy of the US in this matter is worse than a violated trade agreement, it’s a case of the US pushing its genocidal politics across the border. We take away their food, we annihilate their culture. The Toltecs are organized to fight GMO corn to save their own.
A switch to non-GMO corn would likely halt the depopulation of rural Iowa, since, as indicated, it requires attention that machines and glyphosate don’t give.
Since about half of Iowa’s corn crop is already devoted to ethanol production and the rest to animal feed, a reduction of corn exports would see increasing political pressure to increase ethanol production and animal feeding operations.
Corn production is already responsible for fouling Iowa’s streams and waterways with nitrogen, phosphates, and sediment from erosion. Animal feeding operations include cattle, poultry, and pigs–pigs number more than 23 million head, just under one-third of all US hogs. Iowa leads US in egg production. Export reductions would increase pressure to feed more animals.
What would prevent Iowa farm-owners from switching their land over to managed pastures growing those more animals directly on the pasture itself?
Fat asses in air conditioned tractors making $250,000 a year getting subsidized everything.
If more than 92% of the corn grown in America is GMO, that means that more than 7% of the corn grown in America is GMO-Free. Why don’t the GMO-Free corn growers in America and the GMO-Free corn buyers in Mexico try to find eachother? Why doesn’t the Non GMO Project try to get them in touch with eachother?
America does have a Small Ag and a LIttle Ag in the deep dark shadow of its Big Ag. If Mexican corn-buyers were just non-nationalistic enough to buy GMO-Free corn from America’s Small Ag and Little Ag corngrowers until Mexico was able to grow all its own GMO-Free feedlot corn for Mexico’s own feedlots, Mexico would get the GMO-Free corn it wants while it ramps up its own home-growing ability, and America’s GMO-Free Small Ag and Little Ag sectors would have visible markets and contracts to wave in the face of Big Ag and its sympathisers. ” We do it so why don’t you? What’s your problem?” They would also have a visible success they could offer to GMO farmers who want to escape from the GMO Big Ag Plantation.
If a Wall is too high to climb over and too strong to blast through, you dig under it. That’s what moles and gophers are for.
This is probably naive, but I wonder if there’s anything the average American can do to aid AMLO in his battle to rebuild Mexico’s food sovereignty. What think you, NC brain trust?
Big Ag was already big before the invention of GMOs. If we abolished GMOs from existence, Big Ag would still be big based on the good old conventional hybrids.
Big GMO has figured out how to use GMO farmers as its human shields. Anything Americans could do right in America to weaken and attrit and degrade Big GMO in particular, and separate Big GMO from its Big Ag human shield by giving Big Ag offramps from GMO back to Conventional Hybrids, would weaken and isolate Big GMO enough that AMLO would be facing a shrunken and weakened enemy.
So ideas on how to shrink, degrade, attrit, weaken Big GMO in particular might be helpful, if such ideas can actually exist.
The author says a “mouthful” in his opening statement: “Mexico is not only dangerously dependent on US growers for its most important staple crop; it is growing more and more dependent by the year.”
Not only are the Mexican government officials in the clutches of the US AG-Hegemon, the super wealthy Mexicans profit very handsomely from that relationship.
They current dynamic will continue, leaving more and more millions of average Mexican citizens in the lurch of poverty.
Thank you, Nick! And Go, AMLO!
Re-reading the article more slowly I see that Mexico and some American Non-GMO corngrowers are already exploring eachother to some extent. And there is a whole grouping of smaller corn-seed growing/selling companies in the US which sell mainly or strictly Non-GMO seed. Are they big enough to increase their amount of seed fast if many US farmers suddenly wish to defect from using GMO? I don’t know.
If there already are some Non-GMO corn US producers and/or dealers in talks with Mexico, one hopes they involve all the rest of the Non-GMO US corn producers and / or dealers so that they can have some safety in numbers from US government and major dealer efforts to sabotage or obstruct such talks. The more Non GMO corn that American farmers see Mexico buying at one time from other American farmers, the more currently GMO American farmers might feel ready to take the risks in leaving the GMO system.
( Separately, in the verbal combat arena, we should train ourselves to say ” you mean corporate junk science?” every time a Vilsack-figure says ” science”. Every single time. ” Corporate junk science” needs to enter the mainstream language as a functional single word.”)
comment about corn, corn itself is the subject . . .
Here is a Mexican video in Spanish about ” The Races of Corn in Oaxaca”. By ” races ” they mean ” landraces”. The video is at the level of basic science for the interested layman. It gives names, features, distribution maps, etc. Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34lXQQKJn5o
Here is a video in Spanish called . . . ” CONSEGUIMOS PRODUCIR 7 MAZORCAS EN UNA SOLA PLANTA DE MAIZ NATIVO CON NUESTRO SISTEMA ORGANICO ” It is set in and around Xakabchen in Yucatan Peninsula ( the Maya area I believe). The first 60 seconds of the video are showing from many angles a single stalk of corn with 7 ears of corn on it, so we the viewer can see that this is not a fake or a trick. The stupid productionist would say : ” Wow! 7 ears on one stalk? We can produce 7 times the normal amount of corn per unit of land with enough more inputs!” The smart leisurist would say: “Wow! 7 ears on one stalk? We can produce the normal amount of corn per unit land with 7 times less seed and 7 times less work!” Here is the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZcqJU0XUnI
There are other videos about other aspects of Indigenous corn in Mexico to be found with a little work and scrounging on You Tube and elsewhere. It gives an impression of what it is the Corn Protectors are seeking to protect.
I attend Acres USA conferences some years. This last December I attended the Conference at Covington, Kentucky. Two of the other paying attendees were professional farmers from either mid or North Mexico. I think I remember them saying Sinaloa State but I can’t remember for sure. Their operation was seriously and strictly commercial.
I broached the subject of Indigenous Artisanal corns and they said that sort of thing exists in South Mexico. In Mid and especially North Mexico the agriculture is “modern, commercial, industrial”. I mostly just listened and did not ask very much. I gathered their orientation also was ” modern, commercial, industrial”. If that was correct, it goes to show that people within the “modern, commercial, industrial” part of the Mexican corn sector are becoming interested in the Acres USA approach which is eco-bio based and rigidly rejects GMO/Petrochemical/Haber-Bosch Nitrogen inputs or concepts. So if these two Mexican farm sector attendees at the Acres USA conference can apply eco-bio correct methods on their operation and make it work and make it be SEEN to work, they may recruit other industrial farmers in Mid and North Mexico to eco-bio correct agriculture and those others may recruit yet others.
( About 10 years ago at an Acres USA conference there was a young man from Mexico who explained to Neil Kinsey ( https://kinseyag.com/about/ ) that he was representing his family farming enterprise which was a 5,000 acre wheat and other things operation in Sonora State , Mexico. They then went on to talk about various aspects of his family’s operation. If his operation ended up practicing eco-bio correct agriculture and still does so, that would be a point of spreading recruitment right there in itself).
More about corn diversity itself . . .
Middle North America ( “America”) and Upper North America ( “Canada”) were also secondary centers of corn biodiversity in their own right. Many of the Indigineous Tribes and Nations had ( and some still have) their own corn varieties and landraces developed over millennia, some quite different from anything in Mexico.
Some of these still exist and can even be ordered from obscure little companies, as can derivatives of them further developed by selectors and breeders of the EuroSettler States of America and Canada. And of course some Mexican varieties are also made available in America and Canada now, too. I begin to wonder whether there are true-seed corn growers selling seed at less-than-wholesale to many different obscure little seed companies at the same time, because I see some of the same varieties at company after company after company.
Putting the name of an interesting variety of corn and then the word “image” into a better-than-Google search engine brings up the images and their URLs for some interesting url diving. ( I like Yahoo as a multiple image aggregator for url diving sessions). Corn names like ” Eureka Ensilage” or ” Jellicorse” or “Boone County White” or ” Hickory Cane” or “Cherokee White Flour” or any other Americanadian corn type of your choice will lead you to some of these obscure little seed companies.
Here is a link to the “corn department” of the White Buffalo Trading Company showing the different corn seeds they offer.
https://www.white-buffalo-trading.com/store/c2/CORN%2C_non-GMO%2C_Zea_mays.html#/
Here is a link to the “corn department” of Mary’s Heirloom Seeds showing the different corn seeds they offer.
https://www.marysheirloomseeds.com/collections/heirloom-corn
Here is a link to the “corn department” of Annie’s Heirloom Seeds showing the different corn seeds they offer.
https://www.anniesheirloomseeds.com/categories/Corn/
Here is a link to the “corn department” of Lucky Seed showing the different corn seeds they offer. This store offers mainly hybrid sweet corns. ( Hybrid and GMO are NOT the same thing. Just as conventional and GMO are NOT the same thing. GMO is a unique form of genetic pollution injected into the targeted victim plant.)
https://www.theluckyseed.com/corn-seeds-c-26_38?sort=20a&page=1&zenid=0cqfmq4nofbv0d62s45nadghr5
Here is a link to the “corn department” of True Leaf Market showing the different corn seeds they offer. Some are hybrids and some are varieties.
https://www.trueleafmarket.com/collections/corn-seed-for-garden-planting
Here is a link to the “corn department” of SowTrue Seeds showing the different corn seeds they offer. They are the only source I have found so far for something called ” Blue Ridge White Capped Dent”.
https://sowtrueseed.com/collections/corn
Here is a link to the “corn department” of Thresh Seed Company showing the different corn seeds they offer. It is a mix of varieties and hybrids.
https://www.threshseed.com/collections/corn
Here is a link to the “corn department” of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange showing the different corn seeds they offer. It is more biased towards varieties than to hybrids.
https://www.southernexposure.com/categories/corn/
Here is a link to the “corn department” of Sand Hill Preservation Center. It is mostly varieties, not hybrids, and seems to be the sole source for many of them.
https://www.sandhillpreservation.com/corn
There are more such companies, and some are more obscure and hard to find than these are. It takes the patience which comes from genuine interest. They are there and can be found. At some point a comment gets just too big. Every time somebody grows and eats or buys and eats a Non GMO corn, they have just-that-much run off the GMO Plantation. The long struggle to exterminate the GMO corn industry and wipe every single GMO corn from off the face of the earth will be a matter of patient defection, patient attrition, patient tilting of the correlation-of-forces plane away from GMO corn and towards the legitimate types of corn which deserve to exist.