Chefs in Mexico Are Fighting a Future of GM Corn Lisa Abend - VICE News
go to original October 15, 2015

In August, a Mexican federal district judge repealed a two-year-old ban on genetically modified maize, ruling that those who supported it had failed to show that the planting of transgenic seeds caused harm. For the biotech companies behind the suit (including Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, and Dupont), the judge’s decision was a victory. But for opponents, who quickly lodged an appeal that halted implementation of the measure, the decision represents an attack not just on the country’s most important crop, but on the very essence of Mexican identity.

Controversy about genetic modification is not, of course, limited to Mexico. Globally, supporters argue that crops that are engineered to be drought- or herbicide-resistant, for example, or to contain greater nutritional value, can increase farmers’ yields and help curb hunger and malnutrition. Opponents, however, contend that transgenic crops and the herbicides used with them pose risks to human health, farming economies, and food sovereignty.

‘The cultivation of transgenics is an attack on the diversity of our native maizes,’ write the chefs.

All of those concerns are in play in Mexico, but none dominates the discussion like worries about biodiversity. Corn, after all, is believed to have first been domesticated there; well before the Spanish arrived, the crop was viewed, as one scholar puts it, “as the food with which the gods had chosen to feed mankind.” Landrace maize - those varieties that, through natural cross-pollination, have evolved to be perfectly suited to their environment - is at its most diverse in Mexico, and biotech crops, opponents argue, threatens those native breeds.

Read the rest at VICE News

Related: GMO Corn Debate in Mexico Dominated by Biodiversity Concerns (Genetic Literacy Project)

Related: Mexico Supreme Court Postpones Debate of 7 Injunctions Against Planting GM Soybeans (Mexico Voices)

Related: The Complex Nature of GMOs Calls for a New Conversation (PRI's The World)

Related: Why One Mexican Farmer Got Her Whole Town Hooked on Worms (HuffPost)

Photo: Flickr/David Boté Estrada

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