This may be an important battle for Big Ag lobbies and biotech companies but it is an existential one for Mexico, for whom corn is the cornerstone not only of its cuisine and diet but also its culture.
Following months of failed negotiations, the U.S. government has escalated its food fight with Mexico by calling for the formation of a dispute settlement panel under the USMCA North American trade deal. The cause of the dispute is a decree passed by Mexico’s government that seeks to prohibit the use of genetically modified (GM) yellow corn for human use. Its reasons for doing so include protecting the health of the population, the environment and Mexico’s genetic diversity of maize.
The U.S. Trade Representatives Office, or USTR, argues that Mexico’s restrictions on GM corn imports are not only not based on “science” but “they undermine the market access [Mexico’s government] agreed to provide in the USMCA.”
Mexico is the birthplace of corn as well as the world’s richest repository of corn varieties. But it is also the second largest buyer of US-grown GM yellow corn, which is used almost exclusively for animal feed. 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 largest buyer, China, is also trying to wean itself off US corn, partly by buying from other major suppliers, such as Brazil and Argentina, but also by expanding its own cultivation of yellow maize. It has its own set of reasons for wanting to do so, including its ever escalating trade war with the US. If Mexico were to do the same, as it is trying to, US corn growers could have serious difficulty finding replacement markets, with big knock-on effects for Big Ag, biotech firms and the four of five US states that depend heavily on the corn industry.
A Long, Legal Battle
This is a battle that has been raging since at least 2002, when transgenic traits were found in native maize varieties in the southeastern state of Oaxaca. As Timothy A Wise, a senior research fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute and a senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), recounts in chapter 7 of his book, Eating Tomorrow, “Not only had the transgene migrated on the wind, through maize’s open pollination, it had done so despite a nationwide ban on the planting of transgenic maize.”
Since then the world’s biggest GM seeds company have been trying to get official approval for the experimental and commercial planting of GM crops, including maize, in Mexican soil. In 2005, they finally got what they wanted when the Vicente Fox government lifted a seven-year moratorium on the cultivation of GM crops in Mexico. For the first time ever, GM maize could be planted in the country, but only in areas that were not considered “centres of origin for the crop.”
This stipulation would later become pivotal when new scientific research revealed that more or less all of Mexico, including the fields earmarked for GM crop trials in the northern borderlands, were centres of origin for maize.
Corn is the cornerstone not only of Mexico’s cuisine and diet but also its culture. In 2007, a mass social movement emerged bringing together more than 300 peasant organisations, environmentalists, human rights defenders, small and medium-scale producers, consumers, academics, women’s groups and chefs. They gathered under one unifying slogan: “Sin maíz, no hay país” (without maize, there is no country). Their mission was (and still is) to preserve Mexico’s native maize varieties as well as avert legislation that would apply brutally rigid intellectual copyright laws to the crop seeds they are able to grow.
In 2013, a collective of 53 scientists and 22 civil rights organisations and NGOs brought a suit against the GMO giants. And won. In September of that year, Judge Jaime Eduardo Verdugo issued a precautionary injunction on all further permits of GM crops, citing “the risk of imminent harm to the environment.” Shortly after that, another brave judge, Marroquín Zaleta, suspended the granting of licenses for GMO field trials sought by Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, Pionner-Dupont and Mexico’s SEMARNAT (Environment and Natural Resources Ministry), as I reported for WOLF STREET at the time:
In defending his ruling, Zaleta cited the potential risks to the environment posed by GMO corn. If the biotech industry got its way, he argued, more than 7000 years of indigenous maize cultivation in Mexico would be endangered, with the country’s 60 varieties of corn directly threatened by cross-pollination from transgenic strands. Monsanto’s response was as swift as it was brutal: not only did it – and its lackeys in the Mexican government – appeal Zaleta’s ruling, it also demanded his removal from the bench on the grounds that he had already stated his opinion on the case before sentencing.
However, Monsanto’s bullying tactics failed to impress the judges [of Mexico’s federal appeals court]. On August 15, the court convened to review Zaleta’s alleged bias ruled against the US corporation’s legal suit. Also spurned by the Mexican courts was the world’s third largest GMO seed manufacturer, Syngenta, whose reapplication for a license to run test trials of its maize crops was rejected.
Phasing Out GM Corn Imports
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) is the first Mexican president in a long time to have prioritised Mexico’s food sovereignty. Even on the campaign trail, in 2018, he said:
“We buy over 14 million tonnes of corn. (…) This is a contradiction, an aberration. Corn originally comes from Mexico and it now turns out that Mexico is one of the biggest importers of corn in the world. This cannot go on.”
Once in office he began putting his words into action. In late 2020, he passed a decree to phase out all imports of GM crops, including corn, and the herbicide glyphosate by January 2024. The decree enjoyed the support of many agricultural, environmental, public health and consumer groups.
But it also prompted a concerted push back from Big Ag lobbies and global biotech behemoths, which ultimately prompted a partial retreat from AMLO. In February this year he issued a new decree reiterating plans to block GM corn imports for human consumption but eliminating the deadline for imports intended for livestock feed and industrial use, which encompasses almost all US corn. The government reserved the right to substitute GM corn for animal feed some time in the future.
In other words, the process of weaning Mexico off GM corn would take longer than originally envisaged. One reason for this is that Mexico was struggling to build up its own production of non-GM yellow corn. What this meant is that the new decree would have minimal impact on US farmers, at least for some years to come, as Mexico gradually reduces its imports of . Only four percent of US corn exports are white corn, and most of that does not go into tortillas. Yet even that did not placate the US government.
Last Thursday (Aug 17) the U.S. government announced it is formally requesting a dispute settlement panel in its ongoing confrontation with Mexico over its limits on genetically modified corn.
As I noted in a previous piece, the outcome of this dispute settlement panel could have global repercussions:
If the panel sides with the plaintiffs, as tends to happen in most of these cases, Mexico could face significant retaliatory sanctions should its government decide to proceed with its ban on GM corn for human consumption. The message will be clear to governments worldwide: think twice before adopting measures to protect public health and the environment, if those measures threaten in any way the economic interests of a major exporter with whom you have signed a “free trade” agreement.
An interesting case in point right now is Colombia whose government is seeking to renegotiate its FTA with the US, signed in 2012. One of the main bones of contention are the FTA’s rules on agriculture, in particular corn. Almost all of the corn Colombia now consumes comes from the US, whose corn producers receive billions of dollars in government subsidies each year making it all but impossible for Colombian farmers and campesinos to compete, and Canada.
“If I wanted to replace that corn with planted Colombian corn, I would have 1.2 million more jobs and the Agrarian Bank would have to lend to those peasants and producers, but we would have 1.2 million more jobs, which is work, which ultimately is wealth,” said Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro in a speech to coffee growers a few days ago. “Why can’t I do it? Because the Free Trade Agreement with the United States that [my predecessors] signed a few years ago prohibits me.”
Mexico’s government also appears to be in combative mood. The Economy Ministry explained that it is prepared to defend the Mexican position before the international panel. Likewise, it indicated that Mexico will demonstrate: “1) that the national regulation is consistent with the commitments subscribed in the Treaty; and 2) that the contested measures do not have commercial effects.”
As IATP noted in a report, the US government has demanded that the Mexican government provide scientific evidence to support its GM ban. Yet when the AMLO government invited its US counterparts to collaborate in joint research on the effects of GM corn, they refused.
In response to U.S. officials’ critique of Mexico’s ban on GM corn as not founded in science, the Mexican government organized a robust series of webinars this spring that presented substantive evidence on the human health concerns surrounding GM food. For years, Mexico’s national science agency has maintained a public database of evidence underlying the concerns about public health and corn biodiversity from both GM corn and the herbicide glyphosate. A synthesis report of these scientific finds is due out shortly.
The U.S. government has refused Mexico’s offer to collaborate in an examination of the science, particularly in relation to less-well-studied concerns about the consumption of animal products fed on GM corn and glyphosate. Victor Suarez, Mexico’s Undersecretary of Agriculture for Food Self-Sufficiency, told Reuters the U.S. thinks it can unilaterally determine the science of the issue.
The final ruling of the dispute panel will not be known until March or April next year, but US lawmakers representing corn-belt communities are already discussing how large a tribute to impose on Mexico when — not if — the dispute panel rules in Washington’s favour. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley has proposed a figure of $4 billion while Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer is calling for compensation of up to $20 billion. In the end, it won’t be up to them, or the US government’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, to decide.
“Regardless of the amount claimed by the US government, the dispute resolution panel will be in charge of determining the final amount of compensation, which may be greater, less, or equal to what the USTR requests, if applicable,” Jorge Molina, a public policy and international trade consultant, told the Mexican daily El Financiero.
Washington’s case against Mexico rests primarily on article 11 of chapter two of US-MCA, which states that the Mexican government must treat all corn imports in a similar way, regardless of their type or use. But Mexico’s government is confident it can win the panel dispute.
“We are convinced that our national regulation is consistent with all international treaties, particularly with the T-MEC, and that the measures taken do not have commercial effects,” said Mexico’s Economy Minister Raquel Buenrostro. “We took great care that it did not clash with any international treaty, particularly with the T-MEC”.
This is almost certainly true. And as Buenrostro adds, the February 2023 decree was not a prohibition or a violation of a trade agreement, but rather a basic manifestation of supply and demand forces. Mexico produces more than enough white corn as well as corn of many other colours to feed its human population, so why use genetically modified yellow corn?
Crucially, the decree has had no material impact on trade between the US and Mexico. Roughly the same amount of US-produced yellow corn continues to cross the border into Mexico on a month by month basis, where it is exclusively used as animal feed and for industrial purposes. That Mexico wants to gradually — as in, over a period of years — substitute GM yellow corn with non-GM corn, by finding other sources as well as expanding its domestic production of yellow corn, does not amount to a ban, says Buenrostro.
What’s more, the main motives for taking these actions are to protect the health of the population, the environment and Mexico’s genetic diversity of maize, which is a common good that extends far beyond Mexico’s borders. And it is not as if Mexico’s government is not giving US corn farmers plenty of additional time to rethink their business model, should they choose to do so. As we reported some months ago, some US farmers are willing to do that:
More and more US farmers are already questioning the status quo, says Dale Wieoff, the communications director of the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy, a non-profit research and advocacy organization that promotes sustainable food, farm, and trade systems. Farmers are beginning to talk about the health of the soil, reducing the control of corporate monopolies, and diversifying the cultivation of food in the United States, Wieoff told La Jornada in December: People are beginning to see the need to reassess the way we grow food in this country.
This is a point that AMLO raised last Thursday on hearing about USTR’s decision to form a dispute settlement panel:
I think this is going to be very important because this is not just a Mexican issue. It is an issue that is going to help consumers in the US and all over the world. Because what we did was issue a decree so that yellow corn, which we consider genetically modified, is not used for human consumption. It can be used as animal feed but not for human consumption.
He also emphasised that his government’s decree is based on scientific research, including recent investigations that have shown that glyphosate has harmful effects on human health, the environment and biological diversity, and has been flagged as a possible carcinogen. AMLO said he welcomed the dispute panel since it will give an opportunity to present evidence on the matter free of conflicts of interest. The most important question, however, is whether the dispute panel itself is free of conflicts of interest.
AMLO also reiterated his proposal to Mexico’s North American trade partners, the US and Canada, to form a group of researchers to investigate and determine, once and for all, whether or not GM corn and glyphosate is harmful to human health and the environment. Presumably, the US and probably Canada will turn down the invitation. After all, if such a committee were formed and actually did its job, it could pose a huge threat to the profits and power of the world’s biggest seeds and chemicals manufacturers.
In a similar vein, if Mexico were to begin supplanting its GMO imports with non-GMO varieties, it would send a message to other countries in Latin America, one of the world’s biggest markets for GMO crops, that there are alternatives available. And those alternatives do not offer the same proprietary perks to Big Ag and biotech corporations as GMO seeds. As mentioned earlier, Colombia’s government is also calling for changes to its FTA with the US, which the US Ambassador to Colombia recently described as a win-win for both countries.
While the outcome of this trade dispute between Mexico and the US may be important for Big Ag lobbies, biotech companies and the handful of US states that heavily depend on the corn industry (onus on the word “industry”) and all the public subsidies it receives, it is an existential one for Mexico, for whom corn is the cornerstone not only of its cuisine and diet but also its culture.
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Wow. Neo-liberalism is literally trying to eat it’s seed corn.
Corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world. One might also guess that shipping subsidized corn to Mexico would impair Mexican corn farmers’ income. In fact NAFTA has a bailout for the big farmers, but the little, subsistence farmers–you know, the ones keeping the diversity and disease-resistance of the corn genome–were out of luck. There was a huge wave of immigrants in the wake of NAFTA as Mexican median income declined 39%–almost a US Great Depression decline.
But hey, those little farmers weren’t making any money for Cargill, or Monsanto!
“But Mexico’s decree on GMO corn poses a threat to the profits and power of the world’s biggest seeds and chemicals manufacturers.”
Further, there may be additional nervousness within Big Ag elites to GMO the world due to events in Ukraine, which they might have expected to be their rear door entry into Europe. In addition to losing much of Ukraine, it exposed nations like Poland will not lye down like many Euro poodles do, to Establishment elites dictating they implement US enriching policy and that could add further wrenches in Big Ag Agenda.
Poland had a very independent, privately driven agricultural sector even during the socialism phase of their republic, with maybe 70-80% of agriculture in private hands. No party in Poland would endanger that big voting base, no matter what.
Why are Mexican farmers so concerned about preserving native corn varieties? It is important to know that corn cannot exist without human involvement. The kernels (seeds) are so tightly packed together and strongly attached to the cob and wrapped in husks that if an ear falls to the ground it will never grow a new corn stock. The kernels must be removed from the cob and planted individually and covered with soil. Mexican farmer geneticists developed corn from grass more than a thousand years ago and designed specific varieties to thrive in different microclimates. So much scientific thinking and hard work over centuries now to be ruined by greedy short-sighted capitalists.
This shows what the “free trade deals” are actually about. They are to force other countries into mandatory business arrangements. Basically a whole lot of “offers you can’t refuse”. No wonder they are pushed so hard by big business and their partners in the government.
Professor Michael Hudson keeps reiterating this in most of his interviews, on how the US attacks first and foremost the ability of countries to feed themselves.
Will someone with better expertise than I please explain how GMO corn cannot be used for replanting and how this economically impacts the small farmer?
The GMO seeds are sterile. They will not sprout.. A farmer cannot use seed from last yea’s crop to grow this year’s crop, and must buy seeds.
The practice over thousands of years was for farmers to keep some of the year’s seeds for next year.
thats the terminator gene, to be specific.
not all gmo’s have it.
without it, saved seeds will sprout…but like with any hybrid(whether done in a gene lab or he old fashioned way) you never know what youll get…try planting an apple seed from a gala apple, for instance.
hybrids rarely “come true”.
a bigger issue, for Mexico, is whatever flounder gene is in the gmo corn is in the pollen.
corn is wind pollinated, and the flounder gene, or whatever, floats on the wind and lands on a non=gmo corn plant.
mexico is worried about that happening at scale to their myriad landraces of corn, thus messing them up.
another issue…one i havent heard about since early 2000’s…is patent infringement.
back then, there were canola(rapeseed) farmers who never wanted the monsatan gmo canola….but their neighbor a mile off did plant it.
pollen carried on wind “infected” their non-gmo canola, and monsatan found out, somehow, and sued the pants off of them, for theft of intellectual property.
big deal at the time among anti-big ag folks.
biggest issue in all this, to me, is the hypocrisy.
nafta and its replacement wont allow mexico to subsidise their farmers, and forces them to buy us corn…which wouldnt exist without giant subsidies to conagra, et alia…and calls it free trade.
nafta, etc was always a weapon.
hell, big ag has always been a weapon.
part of the foreign policy toolkit, like sanctions, imf and the pentagon.
All of this. If memory serves, Monsanto found out farmers were “infringing” on their IP by sending their agents around to surreptitiously collect “samples”, which they then analyzed.
Never mind if a farmer refused to plant their GMO seeds, for if a neighboring farm did, the GMO tweaked pollen would blow in, contaminate their crop, produce a positive test result in the surreptitiously collect samples, and Big Ag would get even more money via litigation.
Total scumbags, these people.
The most important question, however, is whether the dispute panel itself is free of conflicts of interest.
I’m not optimistic on this point. That the AMLO government is fighting back does inspire optimism.
The drive by wall st to own the genetics of food is quite possibly the worst thing about this malevolent country.
I can see if the AMLO government back down on corn, then the US will be encouraged to go after Mexico for other issues like oil and water. But having your food supply controlled by another government is something that no government wants to do. In some ways, this is actually an existential fight and perhaps AMLO should go after the US for all those subsidies that they give their farmers.
A clever lawyer could make the case of a biological weapons attack on the food supply of the Mexican people, since the terminator gene attacks the native corn varieties and renders them infected.
What twisted logic argues that forcing Mexican farmers to compete with a heavily government subsidized commodity, somehow constitutes “free trade?” Maybe “free” for giant multi-national agribusiness, but there ain’t nuthin’ free about it for Mexican campesinos.
Under NAFTA, the Clinton administration insisted on dismantling the Ejido system of Indigenous collective ownership of the land, established during the Mexican Revolution by Emiliano Zapata. The result was massive dislocation of Indigenous campesinos, which resulted in tens of millions voting with their feet to work in El Norte.
Other major reasons for this mass migration included the tsunami of U.S. factory farm corn exports with which Mexican farmers couldn’t compete, as well as the militarization of the border that made it virtually impossible for the seasonal migration that was the norm in the mid-20th century. Most of this disaster should be blamed squarely on Bill Clinton.
AMLO should be applauded for his strong stand against U.S. imperial policies.
I gather we can add “heavily subsidized” to “U.S. factory farm corn exports”, and that’s part of the reason it was/is so cheap (also leading to massive use of nasty stuff like HFCS as a sweetener, etc.).
Again, to call this some kind of “free market” seems absurd.
The big seed and chemical frankenfood corporations have got bigger worries than Mexico. There is a new move across the US to let natural plants grow like a garden instead of all those poison-green lawns. Natural variety is the best form of resilience. And, of course, “free trade” for whom?
Re: Colombian corn
Aren’t those farmers just planting something other than corn? How would switching to corn create more jobs, let alone 1.2 million?
Seriously doubt that coca cultivation employs 1.2 million, and additionally whatever profit gained from those products is most likely not being distributed amongst the workers. I think most illegal cultivation of coca has actually moved to Honduras and a couple other countries, not sure though.
Not coca, corn. Is this another case of the war on drugs deranging people’s perceptions of neighboring countries so that they see narcos everywhere?
Every time I read about ” yellow corn for Mexican cattle feedlots” a question begs itself in my mind. At other times and places we read about how bad CAFOs in America are. I begin to wonder, are CAFOs in Mexico any better? Is the Mexican demand for CAFO loads of beef a recent occurrence? If the Mexican public is bound and determined that they will have CAFO amounts of beef, is there a way to provide it without literal corn-supplied CAFOs? If there were, could it be applied in Mexico, allowing Mexico to side step corn-for-cattle altogether and render the whole question of American GMO corn for Mexican CAFOs completely moot?
John Kempf ( who has been favorably referred to by Lambert Strether here on Naked Capitalism) wrote an article in Acres USA suggesting such a way may exist. It was published in the June 2022 issue on page 4 and is titled ” 6,000 Pounds of Beef Per Acre ( What is the most efficient way to produce protein on farmland?”) The article is nowhere on line so far as I can tell.
I gather this blog frowns on huge chunks of copy-pasted material offered in a comment. But if I show my sincerity by hand-typing letter-by-letter a smaller amount of selected text from this article, I hope it may be permitted to appear as a hint of the possible promise of the grass-based approach to cattle raising.
Kempf writes . . . ” When optimal CO2, water, sunlight and nutrients are provided, grasses and forages maintained in a vegetative growth stage can be extraordinarily productive. I would suggest they can produce more food protein and calories per acre than any other method, while also regenerating the entire ecosystem.”
” This idea has been around for a long time.”
” Here’s a description of it, in fact, from a cover article in this magazine from 1977: ” . . . .
Kempf then goes on to reprint several detailed paragraphs from that 1977 article about what C. J. Fenzau of Boise, Idaho did and how he did it. He ” divided a 31-acre field into single-acre plots. He put 272 cattle into the first single-acre plot when the grass was knee-high, on April 5, 1976. By the next morning the first plot had been mowed down much like a city lawn. During that single day the cattle had eaten the whole plant — the rich upper part, the leafy mid-part and the fibrous stem. This gave the animals a total ration — a well-balanced ration at that.”
After describing what cattle usually do to a section of pasture if left there for days to keep eating at the same plants, the article says . . . ” On the second day, the cattle were moved to acre No. 2. The first acre was then given a shot of irrigation water. This melted away the still-soft droppings and set the stage for at least 30 days of growth. There was a second irrigation during the 30-to-35 day growth period.”
More paragraphs describe further details of Fenzau’s procedure in this project, and calculate out the numbers and weights of cattle involved to determine that over 6,000 pounds of beef per acre were raised on those particular acres in that particular manner.
That text concludes this way . . . ” Needless to say, the best fertility management has to underscore such heads-up farming. This management has only one name — scientific eco-farming.”
Then Kempf returns to say . . . ” These results were achieved in 1976 — without the forage genetics and nutritional management knowledge we have developed today. What would have to happen to get back to these production levels?”
and . . . ” What is the true potential of forages that could be released if we managed their nutrition as closely as we managed that of other crops? What if we managed our pasture nutrition as well as our grain crops?
John Kempf concludes with . . . ” Who benefits fromo the increased farm profitability of this management system? Who benefits when farmers continue to grow grain that produces less food per acre, with lower profitability? What are the incentives to maintain the status quo?”
Kempf appears to offer a glimmer of real hope that ” CAFO amounts” of beef can be grown without any corn and any CAFOs at all. Would such an approach be workable in any parts of Mexico? Would any Mexican cattlegrowers be interested if it were?
That was an excellent comment, IMHO worthy of informed comment then and now (although I’m not the person to make such comment.) Here’s the direct link to the comment.