Using free trade agreements to contaminate indigenous corn.

• Author: DeSantis, S'ra
• Position: Biodevastation 7

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has allowed United States agribusiness corporations to dump millions of tons of corn onto Mexico. The apparent strategy of these corporations is to spread genetic contamination throughout the world through future free trade agreements, which force poorer countries to accept imports of genetically modified seeds and products. Thirty to forty percent of the corn that the US dumps on Mexico is genetically modified. Reports recently released from several organizations in Mexico, including the ETC Group, found contamination in corn in 33 communities in nine states. This contamination serves as a prime example of how genetically engineered crops and free trade interface; together they create the genetic pollution of corn in its center of origin.

Central America is currently under attack by the Bush Administration, which is aggressively negotiating two free trade agreements for the area, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). One of the main goals of these free trade agreements is to secure dumping grounds for US genetically engineered (GE) products, since numerous countries throughout the world continue to close their doors to GE imports.

Genetic contamination in Mexico

Campesinos (farmers) and corn have a symbiotic relationship. Without the other, neither could survive. The lifestyle of the campesino depends on corn, which provides their nutrition, economic livelihood and a basis for many religious ceremonies. Mexican campesinos maintain current varieties and facilitate the evolution of new ones. New varieties will evolve only if farmers remain the stewards of corn and the protectors of biodiversity. There are over 20,000 varieties of corn in Mexico and Central America. In southern and central Mexico, researchers have identified 5,000 varieties. Each variety has evolved to adapt to elevation levels, soil acidity, sun exposure, soil type, and rainfall. In 1998, the Mexican Congress passed a moratorium on the cultivation of genetically engineered corn to protect indigenous varieties.

David Quist, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and Ignacio Chapela, professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered that indigenous corn varieties from Oaxaca contained DNA from GMOs. Their findings prompted two Mexican governmental agencies, the National Commission on Biodiversity (Conabio) and the National Ecological Institute (INE), to sample indigenous corn from 20 communities in Oaxaca and two in Puebla (another state in southern Mexico). They found that 95% of these communities (21 out of 22) had a 1-35% contamination rate, meaning that between 1% and 35% of the indigenous kernels they sampled contained traces of DNA from GMOs. In total, 8% of the 1,876 of the seedlings they tested were polluted by GMOs.

Recent tests conducted by indigenous and farming communities and several organizations exposed horrifying results in October 2003 (see www.etcgroup.org for more details). They tested 2,000 corn plants from 138 rural indigenous...