After 14 years of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) devastating effects on the majority of Mexican farmers, Mexico’s food system now faces another serious threat: Genetically Modified (GM) corn. Illegally planted and unknowingly imported since the late nineties, GM corn has contaminated farms all over Mexico, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers, endangering consumer health, and putting at risk the incredible genetic diversity of native Mexican corn varieties.

For over a year now, farmers, scientists, and activists all over Mexico have been mobilizing to the banner “Sin maíz, no hay país“—Without corn, there is no country. A nationwide campaign bearing the same name has been organizing protests and rallies against the importation of GM corn and in support of maiz criollo, known in English as ‘indian corn’ or maize.

At a Sin maíz, no hay país event in Huajauapan, Oaxaca, the long-time activist for indigenous rights and honorary Zapatista Commander Don Felix Serdán called for the prohibition of GM corn, saying that it represented a threat to food security and to Mexico’s sovereignty.

“If we lose our corn, we lose our sovereignty, our very dignity. We will depend on the U.S., we will have to buy their GM seeds. That will be slavery. Now, we’re no longer self-sufficient and there is no food security,” he said. “We have the responsibility to avoid the contamination by GM corn, to protect our communities.”

The sad story of Mexico

Mexico is one of the few countries that allows the importation of GM corn, technically only for use as feed corn for livestock, but since the late nineties enormous quantities of it have been entering—unlabeled—into Mexico’s food system. The European Union and Japan have banned the importation of GM corn until its possibly negative effects can be studied.

However in Mexico—where some 1.2 billion corn tortillas are consumed daily (that’s 12 a person)—GM corn is unknowingly consumed by humans despite serious concerns about its effects on human health. Farmers also unwittingly plant GM corn, and native varieties have been contaminated by GM corn all over the country—thanks to the fact that maize pollen can travel in the wind large distances and pollinate far away farms where native maize is being grown.

The Mexican government hasn’t taken any steps to slow or stop the influx of GM corn, nor has it attempted to study the consequences of GM contamination or the effects on human health. And despite the importance of Mexico’s native corn diversity and the fact that GM contamination has been discovered all over the country, GM corn keeps flooding into Mexico.

“Today, approximately 60% of the corn that enters Mexico is genetically modified,” says Cati Marielle, Director of the Sustainable Agricultural Systems division of the Environmental Study Group (GEA, in it’s Spanish initials), a NGO dedicated to helping indigenous farmers.

“It’s the sad story of Mexico, to be subordinate to the interests of the United States government, which in turn represents the interests of transnational corporations,” she continued.

Financial interests vs. health risks

The principal biotechnology corporations doing business in Mexico are Monsanto, DuPont-Pioneer, Syngenta and Dow, but Monsanto is the key player both in Mexico and worldwide, owning 90% of GM seed patents globally, a business worth 8.6 billion dollars in 2007.

Monsanto became well known in Europe when in the late nineties a German judge made public a study performed by Monsanto on one of the GM corn varieties it was marketing in Europe at the time, MON810.

“The confidential report by Monsanto said that its lab rats had been harmed by its own seeds,” said Marielle. “They had problems in kidneys, liver and the nervous system and had eaten nothing but GM corn.”

In the US, a variety of GM corn made its way into the Taco Bell fast food chain and caused a scandal, forcing Aventis, the biotech company that made it, to recall its seed and burn its fields. The corn, known as Starlink, had been marketed as feed corn, after showing to have negative health results in humans.

“Starlink corn was approved in the States for livestock only. In humans it produced serious problems in the digestive tract,” said Marielle. “The problem with Starlink corn was that suddenly they found it in Taco Bell. The scandal obligated the US government to punish the producers and make them re-label their products. But in Mexico we really don’t know if we’ve been eating Starlink corn because there are no controls {on GM seeds} in Mexican customs.”

Although Starlink is prohibited for human consumption in the U.S, in Mexico some 44 million tons of second-generation foodstuffs are produced annually from imported GM corn, including Starlink.

“The problem,” says Marielle, “is that it’s distributed as a grain, but without a label, without any indication that it’s GM corn.”

More than 11 million tons of GM corn were imported last year, of which 8 million was directed to internal food production, representing one third of the corn consumed annually in Mexico.

This has Marielle and health advocates worried, because corn products are the foundation of the Mexican diet.

“It’s not the same thing to be eating kilos of corn products every day in thousands of dishes, than to have a little snack once in a while,” she said.

“Officially, GM corn only enters for consumption by animals and for industrial products for human consumption. But if you go to the supermarket you’ll find an astonishing quantity of products that contain corn, although it appears that you aren’t buying corn,” Marielle added.

Greenpeace Mexico has published a list of commercial products that contain GM corn and it includes various commercial brands of tortillas, as well as snacks like Doritos and most brands of breakfast cereals. GM corn is also the basis for many industrial food products like corn syrup, fructose, and vegetable oils.

A Monsanto press representative, Darren Wallis, said that GM products have been eaten by humans since their inception, but did not comment on questions about GM corn’s possible negative effects.

“Biotechnologies, from Monsanto and may other companies,” said Wallis, “have been used in parts of the world now for more than a decade. Food products from staple crops like corn and soybeans have used ingredients from these crops for the same amount of time and have been widely consumed by people around the world.”

GM contamination, is it worth it?

The planting of GM corn has never been legal in Mexico, although some biotech companies have permission to plant small “pilot fields” to test out their GM varieties in the field. Yet in 2007 some nine thousand hectares of GM corn were commercially harvested in Chihuahua state, in northern Mexico. The government is aware of this, but has done nothing to stop it.

Pat Mooney, a Nobel prize contender for his work on the global seed situation, said in the national newspaper La Jornada that Mexico’s farmers and consumers have become “guinea pigs” for the biotech industry, pointing out the possibly “disastrous” results of the wide-spread GM contamination already taking place in Mexico.

“GM seeds and agrochemicals have become a huge industry with each having a world market of 25 billion dollars annually,” he said.

“The goal of the transnationals is to take control of the source of food, because seeds are the first link on the food chain.” added Mooney.

However, long-term effects of GM contamination on native maize are still unknown. In general, the science of genetic modification leaves much to be known. The bio-tech companies themselves are clueless as to exactly how and where their transgenes attach themselves to the DNA in the process of creating a GM corn variety.

“There is a part that the scientists call ‘trash’, because they don’t know what it is. The trans-genesis process is really up to chance. They don’t know where in the DNA sequence their transgenes land, and there is an enormous incertitude over what will happen in successive generations,” said Marielle.

When GM contamination of native maize was discovered in 8 states in 2001 by both independent and government studies, some plants were discovered to have been contaminated more than once, and by different GM corn varieties—including Starlink. Farmers in areas of contamination have also reported high rates of mutated cobs.

Although the real extent of contamination is uncertain because GM corn pollen can cross-pollinate fields dozens of kilometers away, it is clear that GM corn can seriously affect insect populations – both pests and those beneficial to crops – with possibly catastrophic results.

One of the most common types of GM corn is known as Bt corn, which produces its own insecticide thanks to the genetic fusing of a toxic bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis, into the corn’s genome. Bt varieties are the primary contaminators of maize in Mexico, to the fears of many farmers and scientists. Studies have shown that it’s pollen is fatal to the larvae of Monarch butterflies, millions of which breed each year in central Mexico.

More alarming is that crop-destroying pests can become resistant to the Bt toxin, posing a threat not only to GM farms, but contaminated ones as well — which could lead to wide-spread crop failures in the not-so-distant future.

Even Monsanto has realized this. Although the company has published strategies on avoiding the development of Bt-resistant pests, it maintains that such a possibility is unlikely.

“[Bt corn] is a good tool for farmers because it is toxic to target pests like the corn ear worm in corn and specific pests in cotton and is something already found in nature,” said Wallis.

To protect non-GM corn varieties from contamination, Monsanto suggests separating some corn in “refuge areas” in order to maintain separate pest populations and avoid contamination from GM varieties.

“Monsanto has a rigorous stewardship plan that protects technologies, like Bt, and promotes its longevity. For Bt in particular, this comes in the form of natural refuge in cotton and refuge acres in corn,” said Wallis.

In spite of such efforts, Marielle feels that the risks just aren’t worth it.

“When we talk to Monsanto’s scientists who work with GM crops, they say, ‘what we know is really very little’”. With so much information lacking, they want to sell us a product that’s really not as safe as they say it is,” she said.

It’s the patents, stupid

Recently, Mexico has passed two laws relating to the planting and sale of GM seeds; in 2005 the Biosecurity Law—known as the Monsanto Law for that companies involvement its creation—and in 2007 the Law of Seed Production, Certification and Sale. Both laws set the stage for the legal planting of GM corn, as well as the criminalization of farmers found to have fields contaminated by GM corn. Neither requires that GM products be labeled as such.

These laws are part of a process to institutionalize the rights of the transnational biotech sector, similar to one already established in the US and Canada. After a few years of planting GM crops—in ‘pilot’ or test fields, or by farmers who’ve bought the seed—Monsanto takes farmers whose fields have been contaminated to court for patent violations, forcing these farmers to buy Monsanto’s GM variety, year after year.

In Canada, Monsanto won a case in 2001 against Percy Schmeiser, a Saskachewan canola farmer whose field was contaminated by GM canola from a neighboring field.

“The court ruled that regardless of how Monsanto’s genetically-altered canola gets on a persons land, it’s the property of Monsanto. And even if it cross-pollinates into your crop, then your plant becomes the property of Monsanto,” said Schmeiser in a 2001 interview in England. “A farmer should always have the right to be able to use his own seed,” he added.

Although the judge ruled that Schmeiser did not have to pay Monsanto, he is not yet free from their grasp. After hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and almost ten years since his fields were discovered to have been contaminated, Monsanto’s GM canola keeps popping up in Schmeiser’s fields—despite all of his efforts to rid them of it—cross-pollinating his crop and contaminating his seed.

According to Marielle, in the end everything comes down to patents.

“Everything is tied to the patents, they’re what’s at play. For farmers, they represent a threat to a common good—maize—with the inheritance of hundreds of generations of farmers and seven thousand years of maize agriculture in Mexico. 59 maize races with over 1200 identified varieties are cultivated here. There is a continuous diversification of maize that creates varieties adapted to every ecological niche,” she said.

Monsanto wants to control the national market of seeds and fertilizers, turning every farmer it can into a life-long client, and in the process effectively wiping out the genetic diversity of maize.

“It’s not just the ingression of a GM gene into the native maize varieties, but the fact that the gene is the private property of Monsanto, entering into a public good,” Marielle emphasized.

In reality, Monsanto’s efforts to market its GM corn varieties in Mexico have only just begun.

This is the first of a two-part article looking into Monsanto’s activities in Mexico. The second part can be found here