Scientists from Mexico, Canada and the United States met on March 11, at the Victoria Hotel in the Mexican city of Oaxaca for a symposium on the effects and possible risks of the presence of genetically modified maize in Mexico. The furtive presence of this maize growing in peasants' fields has been documented since 2001, first in rural Oaxaca and more recently all over the country. This finding could have serious implications for agricultural biodiversity because Mexico is the center of origin and variety of maize, which is the world's third most important agricultural crop (after wheat and rice).
According to Alejandro de Avila, director of the Oaxaca Ethno-Botanical Garden, the latest archaeological findings establish that maize was first discovered and domesticated in Oaxaca 10,000 years ago, not 6,000 or 8,000 years ago as was believed until recently. Maize is considered the greatest agronomic achievement of the human race, and the greatest treasure that Christopher Columbus took from the Americas to Europe. Today it is cultivated on the Mediterranean Coast, in Africa and even in China. But its center of diversity is still Mexico, home of the lion's share of the thousands of varieties and strains that are the result of millennia of patient work and experimentation by peasants. These varieties have been developed to express favorable traits like nutritional value, tolerance to acid or saline soils, resistance to droughts, freezes or strong winds, immunity from disease, and others. There's even a variety that fixes its own nitrogen. It is not unusual at all for an indigenous village in Sierra Juarez to have more maize varieties than all of the United States.
This wondrous diversity is what motivates agronomists from all over the world to travel to Mexico to acquire specimens to improve their maize varieties and also the reason why the International Center for Research and Improvement on Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) is based there. For them, the corn fields of small Mexican farmers are an irreplaceable agricultural biodiversity resource, indispensable for human nutrition. A social or ecological disturbance in this zone could compromise the viability of maize as a food and endanger the world food supply. The CIMMYT, with all its laboratories and seed deposits, can never replace the dense and complex rural web of social and ecological relations that support and nurture countless varieties of maize.
The inter-governmental Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), formed to address the environmental issues raised by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), sponsored the symposium. But that morning of March 11, while invitees were arriving at the hotel and registering for it, the organizers and the private guards hired to provide security looked uneasy. They knew a protest was coming and that the demonstrators would arrive any moment.
The previous day, indigenous and environmental groups, and progressive intellectuals hosted an alternative forum titled "Defending our Maize, Protecting Life." They feared that experts generally favorable to the biotechnology industry and its transgenic products might declare that the genetic contamination of maize is a consummate, irreversible fact of life and that from now on Mexicans will just have to get used to it. The participants decided to attend the next day's symposium to present their viewpoints and concerns to the scientists and officials. Their admission to the symposium had not yet been confirmed, but they would go anyway.
Enter Genetically Modified Corn
In 1996, genetically modified corn began to be planted in the United States, becoming 30 percent of the national harvest within five years. Mexican scientists and environmentalists expressed concern that this corn was entering Mexico in imports, with uncertain consequences for agricultural biodiversity. The government responded the following year by imposing a moratorium on the planting of transgenic crops. But the measure was never enforced and corn imports continued with no control. The citizenry was never informed that the grain was not to be used as seed.
Already in 1999 the Mexican chapter of Greenpeace had samples of U.S. corn that was entering Mexico analyzed, and it had tested positive for transgenic content. The government then formed an interagency committee called the Inter-Secretarial Commission on Bio-Security and Genetically Modified Organisms (CIBIOGEM) to look into the matter. To this day this body has done nothing, according to civil society groups. Its web page has not been updated since August 2003.
In 2001 it was discovered that the genetically modified corn had been used as seed and planted by peasants who had no idea of what it was. "This is no small thing. It's pollution in the very center of origin of a crop of major importance to the world food supply, which implies greater impacts than in other zones, since the contamination can extend itself not only to native maize, but also to its wild relatives," warned Silvia Ribeiro of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group).
This genetic flow "is polluting and degrades one of Mexico's major treasures. As opposed to the dispersion and genetic flow between native maize varieties and conventional hybrid varieties, it does not transfer maize genes only, but also gene fragments from bacteria and viruses (that have nothing to do with maize), whose environmental and health effects have not been seriously evaluated," Ribeiro stressed.
"The pollution of our maize attacks the fundamental autonomy of our indigenous and farming communities because we are not merely talking about our source of food; maize is a vital part of our cultural heritage," denounced indigenous leader Aldo González. "Native seeds are for us a very important element of our culture. The (Mayan) pyramids could be destroyed, but a fistful of corn is the legacy that we can pass on to our children and grandchildren, and today we are being denied that possibility."
The following year environmental, indigenous and peasant organizations filed a complaint with the CEC, which then named a multinational panel of 17 experts to investigate the problem and issue a report with recommendations.
The panel received comments from the public, but only on the internet, angering peasants and indigenous people. After all, how many Mixtec or Zapotec villages in the Sierra Juarez have internet cafes? How many even have electricity? How many Oaxacan or Chiapan indigenous people know even a single word of Spanish? In response to the demand for citizen participation, the CEC decided to take the panel to Oaxaca to carry out the symposium of March 11.
Meanwhile, Mexican President Vicente Fox's government was up to mischief. Late last year Víctor Villalobos, CIBIOGEM's executive secretary and the Agriculture Ministry's coordinator of international affairs, signed behind the backs of the Senate and the citizenry a cross-boundary agreement within the framework of NAFTA that grants genetically modified organisms (GMOs) legal entry to Mexico.
Countdown to Oaxaca
A month before the symposium, the seventh meeting of the parties to the U.N. Biodiversity Convention took place in Malaysia, followed immediately by the first conference on the Cartagena Protocol, also in Malaysia. The protocol, which took effect in September of last year, is an international agreement that aims to address the possible risks of GMOs. During the conference, Prof. Terje Traavik of the Norwegian Institute of Genetic Ecology made a ruckus when he presented a pilot study that pointed to human health hazards inherent in genetically modified crops and in the very process of genetic engineering.
Across the world the previous day in Washington, D.C., the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) had presented a study that indicated that U.S. traditional seed stocks of corn, soy and canola, which are used as reference and supply sources by agronomists and farmers, are polluted with transgenic material. Taken together, Traavik's and UCS's studies constitute a resounding indictment of the biotechnology industry.
In the Cartagena Protocol meeting the delegations of signatory countries, after great difficulties and intense negotiations, overcame the pressures of transnational biotechnology corporations and reached an agreement that would have required the labeling of all internationally traded GMOs. But the agreement came to nothing because just before its signing the chief of the Mexican delegation, none other than Victor Villalobos, said he found the text unacceptable. Even the members of the Mexican delegation looked at him dumbfounded and open-mouthed. Since the protocol works by consensus, Villalobos was able to undermine the hard-won progress that had been achieved, and thus the delegations had to return to their home countries with a diluted and emasculated agreement, which puts the matter of labeling in the hands of the protocol's signatory governments. Some observers questioned the usefulness of an international agreement that leaves each country to do whatever it pleases.
The reaction of Mexican civil society was furious. The participants of the March 10 forum signed a declaration against Villalobos, demanding his resignation. "We are ashamed to learn that Mexico is currently being accused in international forums of doing the dirty work of transnational corporations to the detriment of other countries," read the declaration. "Villalobos does not represent the feelings or the interests of Mexicans."
They also repudiated the "unendurable corruption" of government officials who force GMO promotion. "We are not interested in knowing if they receive money from transnational corporations or not, if they do it out of a mercenary interest or out of ignorance or irresponsibility. We are not police. But we need no further inquiry to affirm without reservations that they do not represent us and that they're incapable of understanding our realities and aspirations, much less defending them."
And adding spice to the tension that was brewing on the eve of the Oaxaca symposium, participants received the sensational news that the voters of California's Mendocino County had favored a ballot measure against GMOs.
Different Languages
Finally the protesters all arrived at the Victoria Hotel to register for the symposium: peasants, Greenpeace activists, representatives of indigenous communities, progressive academics and intellectuals. The organizers wisely admitted everyone, and the conference room soon turned into a Tower of Babel. The scientists, officials and journalists, who spoke English, Spanish or French, were now joined by indigenous people speaking Mixtec, Zapotec, Chinantec or one of the dozens of pre-Columbian languages that are spoken in the region.
The difference between the parties went far beyond linguistic barriers. It was a clash between totally distinct and incompatible modes of thinking and worldviews. The CEC panel members spoke in highly technical language and each stuck to a particular specialty. They tried to discuss separately ethical, technical, environmental and economic aspects.
But the indigenous people and their allies, with their holistic and integral vision, did not accept this. For them it was unethical to look at the different aspects separately. They spoke of the millennia-old indigenous view of the cosmos, spirituality, culture, inalienable moral principles and duties, colonialism, neo-liberalism, sovereignty and struggle. They put forth questions about the risks of GMOs, industrialized agriculture and the power of transnational agribusiness corporations.
The demonstrators demanded an end to corn imports, transgenic or otherwise, and government fulfillment of its duty to take concrete steps to track the genetic contamination and stop it, adding: "We solicit the solidarity and support of all those who are carrying on a struggle similar to ours in other parts of Mexico and the world, so that GMO-free zones are increasingly extended."
Carmelo Ruiz Marrero is a Puerto Rican journalist, specializing in biodiversity issues, and a contributor to the IRC Americas Program americas@irc-online.org. He is a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program and a senior fellow of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
