Mexican Judge Departs From Script, Turns Monsanto’s Mexican Dream Into Legal Nightmare

by Don Quijones • September 1, 2014

By Don Quijones, freelance writer, translator in Barcelona, Spain, but currently in Mexico. Raging Bull-Shit is his modest attempt to challenge the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media. This article is a Wolf Street exclusive.

• Introducing GM corn into Mexico would pose a huge environmental risk given that the plant is native to the country. The GM varieties would drastically diminish the crop diversity of both Mexico and the world at large.
• GM corn would make the crop production process a lot more expensive. Buying the same crop seeds year after year – as already happens in the U.S. and across many agricultural sectors in the global south (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and India) – would increase the costs throughout the Mexican food chain, putting millions of smallholders out of business.
• GMO corn will also increase Mexico’s social and political dependence on oligopolies. Once transnational corporations dominate the seed market of a particular crop (as has happened with Soy and is fast happening with Corn), they will continue introducing GM seeds for other crops and increasing their power over Mexico’s agricultural sector. As Schubert warned, this has already happened in the United States, “where seed companies are one of the main sources of financial funding for the two main political parties and have put their own people in senior positions of power to dictate national and international agricultural policy”.
• GM maize expressing Bt protein and herbicide resistance and the chemicals required for their cultivation pose a serious health hazard to those who consume it – especially on the scale at which it is consumed in Mexico.
• Most importantly, once the GM seeds are planted, they’ll be no going back. The country’s native varieties, which are the result of thousands of years of careful selection and breeding, will be irreversibly contaminated – even if the GM seeds are introduced on a modest scale.

A War for Survival
Thanks to the rare intervention of a brave judge, the civil movement to protect Mexico’s crop diversity and the common ownership of seeds has delivered a significant blow to the interests of some of the world’s largest and most powerful transnational corporations. But if history has taught us anything, it is that the likes of Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta are unlikely to sit on their hands and let a few pesky Mexican judges thwart their plans for full-spectral dominance of the global food supply.
As Silvia Ribeiro, a researcher for the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (Grupo ETC), warns, never before in the long history of human agriculture and food have we faced such serious concentration of power and ownership of the global seed industry, the primary link of the global food chain. In the year 2014, just six American and European companies – Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Dow, Bayer and Basf – control 100 percent of the GM seeds planted in the world. All of them were originally chemical manufacturers.
It wasn’t always that way. Indeed, such concentration of the seed industry is a wholly new phenomenon. Thirty-five years ago, there were thousands of seed manufacturers and not a single one of them had more than one-percent control of the global market. Fifteen years later, the top ten companies had captured 30 percent of the market, yet Monsanto was not among them.
Now Monsanto alone, after having acquired a huge portfolio of seed companies such as Agroceres, Asgrow, Cristiani Burkard, Dekalb, Delta & Pine and the seeds division of Cargill North America, controls 26 percent of the entire global market of all seeds, not just GMOs. Monsanto, second-placed Dupont, and third-placed Syngenta combined control 53 percent of the market.
Such concentration of ownership has granted a handful of Western corporations and the governments with which they are inseparably intertwined vast control over one of the world’s primary resources, food. And although these companies control almost all commercial seeds, whether genetically modified or not, they prefer to sell GMOs despite the fact that 16 years of official US statistics have proven that they are less productive, significantly more expensive and not (as the GMO giants claim) resistant to all pests or disease. The two main reasons for their preference for GMOs are: a) they use a lot more agrichemicals, an industry in which the same companies have a controlling stake; and b) by patenting GMO seeds, the companies can guarantee that farmers will have to come back for more, year after year, decade after decade.
Put simply, it is enforced dependence on a scale never before imagined. As the dark lord of U.S. geopolitics Henry Kissinger is alleged to have once said, “control oil, you control the nations; control food and you control the people”. Thankfully, in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Chile, France, Germany, the UK and India, the resistance is rising and spreading. Whether it will be enough to head off one of the greatest threats to human freedom, health and the environment, only time will tell. Don Quijones. An exclusive for Wolf Street.
And there’s a tightly coordinated campaign by the Spanish government and its corporate masters. Spain’s Silent Reconquest of Mexico
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– Chula Gemignani, US director Viva La Milpa Project http://vivalamilpa.com/
LEASE READ THIS and SHARE/POST IT: Mexico is NOT as in N-O-T banning GMO Corn. PLEASE STOP POSTING and sharing posts that this is the case. I understand why you want to celebrate any resistance against the biotech companies but NOTE THIS AND PLEASE REMEMBER ALWAYS (so you do not have to keep wondering whether to celebrate those facebook posts or not..)…Until ALL importations of corn from the US stop as in S-T-O-P, GMO corn continues to infiltrate Mexico (and any other country we export to that does not regulate seed)
Farming Revival:  It takes intelligent people to help solve it. It takes hard core activists who don’t believe what they read on facebook but research what is actually the truth. It takes LOVE IN ACTION.  The ban against GMOs in Mexico is a huge movement and so complicated. It means a complete farming revival. Mexican must go back to the land and revive the farming traditions but how? How do you start a farming revival in a country where the majority of the farmers now are 60 and older? How do you convince the younger generation who fled their village and family farm to go work in the city into returning to a farm where they witnessed their family go hungry? Their association to farming is poverty because that is all they have known. How to you start a farming revival in a country that is so corrupt that the government knocks on the doors and demands cut of any successful farmer no matter how big or small the farming opperation is or what the cost to the farmer or his families needs would be. How do you start a farming revival when the water is being privatized and hard to find to water your crops with? Oh believe me the Mexico Corn Conflict is soooo complicated.
Lets deconstruct the claim the Mexico has Banned GMOs…
This ruling only bans the biotech companies from their PLANTING projects. (OK sure go ahead and clap, that is a good thing of course)
HOWEVER:
6 million tons of GMO corn are imported ANNUALLY from the US to Mexico because of NAFTA /TLC (1974) deregulations and a HUGE money exchange over corn imports between US and Mexico governments.
The problem CONTINUES and so does the fight.
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