[R-G] Killing Farmers with Killer Seed

[Anthony Fenton]

June 23, 2008
http://counterpunch.org/ross06232008.html
Biotech's Assault on Mexico
Killing Farmers with Killer Seed

By JOHN ROSS

As the global food crisis escalates, Big Biotech (Monsanto, Novartis,  
Syngenta, Dupont-Pioneer, Dow et al) are capitalizing on the  
desperation of the hungry at runaway prices and rapidly diminishing  
reserves as a wedge to foist genetically modified (GMO) seeds on a  
reluctant Third World.

Latin America is a prime marketing target for Big Biotech's little  
darlings, often tagged "semillas asasinas" or "killer seeds" for their  
devastating impacts on local food stocks.  Now the killer GMOs are  
suspected of literally provoking murder most foul.

Last October, Armando Villareal, a farm leader in the Mexican border  
state of Chihuahua, was gunned down after a farmers' meeting in Nuevo  
Casas Grandes.  Villareal had been denouncing the illegal planting of  
GMO corn in the Mennonite-dominated municipalities of Cuauhtemoc and  
Naniquipa.

Chihuahua Mennonite communities originally migrated from Canada after  
a dispute with the Canadian government over education in the 1920s and  
were granted land by post-revolutionary president Alvaro Obregon.   
Over the decades, the Mennonites  have successfully cultivated up to  
60,000 hectares in the northeast of the state.  Acutely insular with  
their signature dress (denim overalls for the men, prairie dresses and  
calico bonnets for the women) and speaking low-German as befits their  
European roots, the Mennonites have never integrated into the Mexican  
mainstream and their success as farmers - they have benefited from  
Mexican government irrigation projects - has created tensions in a  
region where aridity limits agricultural production for most farmers.

Hundreds of tractors lined up in a cortege at Villareal's October 15th  
funeral during which he was compared to another Chihuahua hero,  
Francisco Villa.  Ironically, the slain farmers' leader who claimed to  
have evidence that the Mennonites' killer seeds had been smuggled in  
from Kansas, was not opposed to planting GMO corn which his  
"Aerodynamica" group hoped would save strapped farmers money on  
pesticides and power costs.  His followers had even burnt tractors to  
demand that the Mexican government grant them permits to plant the  
transgenic corn.

Eight months later, Armando Villareal's murder remains unresolved.

The Chihuahua farm leader's assassination is not the only death of a  
militant Latin American campesino being linked to Big Biotech's  
encroachments.  In Parana Brazil about the same time Villareal was  
gunned down in Chihuahua, Keno Mota, an activist of the Movement of  
Landless Farmers ("Movimento de Sem Terras" or MST), affiliated with  
the international poor farmers coalition Via Campesina, was drilled by  
security guards during an action on an illegal experimental station  
under cultivation by the Biotech giant Syngenta - the Syngenta plot,  
adjacent to Iguazu National Park, a protected nature reserve, violated  
Brazilian strictures as to where such "semillas asasinas" can be  
planted.

Unlike Mexico, Brazil has few restrictions on GMO crops and indeed  
under social democrat president Lula da Silva, has become the second- 
largest GMO soybean producer on the continent.  Neighboring Argentina  
is Numero Uno.  Big Argentinean growers, who have been blocking that  
southern cone nation's highways in a dispute over tariffs on soy  
exports for weeks, have announced intentions to surpass the United  
States as the largest grower of genetically modified maize in coming  
years. Argentinean corn is grown exclusively as feed for the gaucho  
nation's cattle industry, a cornerstone of its agrarian economy.

Mexico, where maiz was first domesticated 8000 years ago and where  
corn is at the core of culture as well as nutrition, has been more  
circumspect in embracing GMO seed.  Under the banner of the "No Hay  
Pais Sin Maiz" ("we have no country without corn") campaign, farmers  
and environmentalists have joined hands to prevent GMO contamination  
of native species and the nation's Bio-Security Commission, initialed  
CYBOGEN, an inter-secretarial government body, declared a moratorium  
on the cultivation of genetically modified corn in the late 1990s.

Nonetheless, millions of tons of GMO maize pour into Mexican tariff- 
free each year from the U.S. under provisions of the North American  
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)

Now, in the wake of the much-hyped global food crisis, Big Biotech is  
pressuring the Mexican government to permit experimental plantations  
of the semillas asasinas as the only solution to predicted shortages,  
a ploy that Monsanto and its ilk have successfully sprung on the  
European Union.

Although GMO corn remains officially proscribed in Europe, seven EU  
members will grow the modified maize this year.  Agribiz combines like  
the British National Beef Association, insist that "all resistance to  
GMO crops must be abandoned" in light of the growing international  
food psychosis.

One motive for the industry's big push, according to Sylvia Ribero who  
keeps tabs on Big Biotech for the left daily La Jornada: patents for  
some of the major GMO seed brands like Monsanto's BT corn are set to  
expire in the next five years.

Buckling under the Biotech barrage, Mexico's CYBOGEN posted  
regulations this March for applicants who contemplate cultivation of  
"experimental" GMO corn.  Now, with a 60-day countdown ticking,  
Mexican farmers could be legally planting genetically modified maiz by  
July.

Under ground rules issued by both the Agriculture and Environmental  
secretariats (SAGARPA and SAMARNAT), experimental patches of GMO corn  
must be limited to regions where native corn stocks will not be  
contaminated by windblown pollens from such fields.

But the Mennonite farmers who occupy huge tracts in Chihuahua  
apparently jumped the gun.  Under the tutelage of Monsanto and  
Syngenta-Golden Harvest with the SAGARPA and the SAMARNAT turning a  
blind eye, the Mennonites have sewn GMO corn in at least two of their  
"camps" or agricultural stations (#102 and #305) in the municipality  
of Naniquipa where Villareal spotted the illegal patches last year.   
Decrying insufficient safeguards against windblown pollens, Chihuahua  
campesinos led by Victor Quintana of the "No Hay Pais" campaign, also  
affiliated with Via Campesina, and a deputy in the Mexican congress  
for the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), have  
threatened to tear out the Mennonite fields before they flower in mid- 
summer.

Quintana's group worries that the Mennonite "experiment" will  
germinate five to 25 million "granos" or kernels, each of which is a  
potential threat to native corn.
SAGARPA regards the Mennonite "experiment" as a field test to see just  
how far the pollens can be spread by winds and other weather conditions.

Windblown GMO pollens are held responsible for the contamination of  
maiz in neighboring Sinaloa state where Greenpeace activists found  
traces of genetically modified corn in 96% of samples taken in nine  
municipalities in 2007 - Sinaloa is Mexico's top corn producing  
state.  Aleira Lara, Greenpeace anti-GMO campaign coordinator,  
considers that trying to confine experimental plots to one  
geographical region is merely cosmetic.  Last year, the Greenpeacers  
listed 39 instances of windblown GMO contamination in 23 countries.

Native Mexican corn was first found to have been infected by NAFTA GMO  
imports in 2001 when Indian campesinos in Oaxaca's Sierra of Juarez  
discovered that maiz from a lot introduced from Michigan and sold by a  
local government DICONSA grain distribution center had been  
inadvertently planted in the Zapotec-Chinanteco village of  
Calpulapan.  Subsequent investigation by the National Ecology  
Institute, documented in a report suppressed by the Secretary of  
Agriculture, turned up traces of GMO contamination (some as high as  
60%) in 11 out of 22 corn-growing regions in Oaxaca and Puebla.  Maiz  
was first domesticated in the Puebla-Oaxaca altiplano eight  
millenniums ago.

Although the CYBOGEN has never until now licensed the production of  
genetically modified corn in Mexico, the semillas asasinas have almost  
certainly been cultivated here since the late 1990s.  The  
International Commission for the Betterment of Corn and Wheat  
(CIMMYT), financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, with experimental  
fields in Texcoco just outside Mexico City is thought to be one source  
of windblown contamination.  Roberto Gonzalez Barrera, the King of the  
Tortilla, the owner of MASECA, the world's biggest corn flour miller  
now a third owned by Archer Daniels Midlands, once boasted that he had  
thousands of hectares under GMO corn.  NAFTA imports fall off DICONSA  
trucks on rural highways and the pollens are blown into roadside  
"milpas" (cornfields.)

Now GMO infestation is about to get much more acute.  In a move to  
offset soaring prices and shrinking reserves that invariably generate  
social discontent, Mexican president Felipe Calderon has announced the  
tariff-free importation of millions of tons of basic grains (corn,  
wheat, soy, sorghum.)  Because the Cargill Corporation, which has  
dominated grain distribution in Mexico ever since the government's  
CONASUPO system was privatized in 1999, claims it cannot separate out  
GMO from uncontaminated imports, the impacts on native corn and other  
grains will be greatly magnified - Greenpeace estimates that 60 to 70%  
of all corn imports are contaminated by genetically modified organisms.

John Ross is in Mexico City pounding away on "El Monstruo - Tales of  
Dread & Redemption In the World's Most Terrifying Urban  
Monster" (working title) to be published in 2009 by Nation Books.   
Ross himself is available at johnross at igc.org.