More GM crops in Puerto Rico.

• Author: Ruiz-Marrero, Carmelo
• Position: Biodevastation

Why We Should Worry

The US-based Monsanto, the world's biggest seed company and undisputed world leader in agricultural biotechnology, announced in June 2011 that it would increase its activities in Puerto Rico. The corporation is investing $4.3 million in the construction of a 20,000-square foot laboratory for corn and cotton seed development in the southern municipality of Juana Diaz. These will be genetically modified (GM) seeds, no doubt, since Monsanto spends the bulk of its research and development budget on this technology. The announcement was made in Washington DC during the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual conference. Puerto Rico Industrial Development Corporation executive director Jose Perez-Riera and agriculture secretary Javier Rivera-Aquino were in the convention in a celebration mood with Juan Santiago, Monsanto's chief of operations in Puerto Rico, while he was making the announcement.

Pioneer Hi-Bred, Monsanto's leading competitor in the GM seed business, is not far behind. That same month it inaugurated in the municipality of Salinas a 22,000-square foot seed laboratory. Pioneer, which has been in Puerto Rico since 1989, has been a subsidiary of multinational corporation DuPont since 1999. The DuPont-Pioneer corporate giant was the world's largest seed company until 2005, when Monsanto surpassed it by purchasing Mexico's Seminis seed company for $1.4 billion.

Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuno attended the Pioneer laboratory's festive inauguration and heaped praise on the agricultural biotechnology corporations that operate in the island. "Puerto Rico is an ideal place for bioagricultural research," Fortuno the inauguration. "The island boasts a regulatory framework aligned with the US, an efficient transportation system, a longer growing season suitable for planting crops year-round, novel economic incentives, and a highly-educated workforce."

What's wrong with all this? GM products are the subject of a worldwide heated controversy, whose participants include doctors and scientists as well as peasant movements, international organizations and political leaders, and has led to arrests, violent repression and persecution against scientists that have dared to contradict the official discourse on biotechnology. Since the 1990's this debate has produced numerous books, television and newspaper reports, documentaries, scientific symposia, contentious international negotiations, and even protest marches and civil disobedience.

When we say genetically modified we mean an organism whose genetic code, or genome, has had foreign genes inserted into it through genetic engineering. The process of genetic engineering tears down cell barriers in order to make genetic combinations that would have never happened in nature, and it's used in food and agriculture since the 1990s. There are actually tens of millions of hectares of farmland planted with GM crops in the world, the great majority of them in only four countries: the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. Almost all these GM crops are soy and corn. The rest are mostly cotton and canola.

These GM crops do not yield more than their conventional non-GM counterparts, they are not more nutritional, and do not use less toxic agrochemicals. The majority were altered to be immune to a herbicide called Roundup, a product of Monsanto, and they are thus known as Roundup Ready. The rest produce their own pesticide, and are known as Bt crops. This soy and corn are used to make, among other things, flour, starch, cooking oil, high fructose corn syrup...