February 27, 2004

 

 

Proliferation of GM Corn Worries Mexico

 

Mexican farmers were worried over the proliferation of genetically modified (GM) maize in the country, and brought up the issue at a United Nations meeting on biosafety. 

 

A sideline event at the First Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which opened on Monday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, tried to alert the participants from around the world about the possible adverse impact of GM crops.

 

Doctor Ignacio Chapela of the University of California at Berkley was believed to be the first to discover the contamination in the traditional maize varieties produced by Mexican farmers in 2001, which was documented in a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature magazine that November.

 

More studies have been conducted in the past two years, with more alarming findings, according to Silvia Ribeiro, a researcher with the ETC Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration.

 

Of the 105 samples gathered from 95 plots in 53 communities from 10 Mexican states, 48.6 per cent tested positive for transgenic proteins, according to Ribeiro. Of that total, 17 per cent were positive for three or more of such proteins.

 

All the samples were taken from local farming communities far from urban centres, she noted.

 

"They are small-hold farmers who have traditionally used their own seeds and not applied chemicals," Ribeiro said. "Contamination found in random samples from these communities indicates that the problem is much more serious."

 

Because the samples have been found to be extensively contaminated by the type of maize called Starlink of Aventis, which was developed and has been marketed by Bayer, this type of maize is now mainly used as animal fodder and is prohibited in the United States for human consumption.

 

It is officially forbidden in Mexico to commercially release GM crop seeds and grow GM crops, according to Ribeiro.

 

Other commercial GM brands like YieldGard from Monsanto, and Knockout from Novartis, now owned by Syngenta, were also identified as containing transgenic proteins, Ribeiro said.

 

While those in favour of GM crops would say the effects of GM maize contamination is uncertain, Ribeiro is not optimistic.

 

"There is growing evidence that GM crops can pose a threat to the stability of a crop's genome and can have other negative impacts on related biodiversity and the environment," she said. "It also causes enormous damage to Mexico's culture of maize, which has lasted for thousands of years."

 

All the traits found present in the maize crops of Mexican farmers are patented, which is particularly worrying, she said.

 

"Mexican farmers could be sued by the GM seed giants for 'illegal use' of their products and it is very likely we would lose the suit, although our farmers are innocent," Ribeiro said. "They didn't buy the seeds and they didn't know the seeds are genetically modified."

 

The GM maize comes from transnational corporations like Monsanto and the seeds for these crops have found their way to the Phillipines, according to researcher Neth Dano, with an environment protection organization called SEARICE, in Southeast Asia.

 

M. M. Lewanika, from the Zambian government delegation to the UN conference, condemned the big companies which have attempted to impose GM food on Zambia and other African countries in the name of aid projects.

 

"There's a connection between food aid and GM contamination," he said. "Our government refused the aid for fear of the contamination."

 

At another seminar on biosafety co-sponsored by Malaysia's Third World Network and the Institute of Gene Ecology of Norway, environmentalist Adolfo Boy from a group called Rural Reflection in Argentina gave an account of the wrath of farmers from his country over GM soybeans.

 

"Ours used to be a country of dairy farms and fields of rice and corn," he said. "But now they have all given way to GM soybeans, which now take up 75 per cent of our total acreage."

 

In the fields planted with soybeans, said Boy, "there is no grass, no birds, no life. It is actually deserts of soybean."

 

All these GM crops have been released without adequate risk assessment, said Professor Terje Traavik from the Institute of Gene Ecology of Norway. And the absence of risk assessment is largely due to the lack of grants for related research.

 

This is an obvious loophole in the Cartagena Protocol, he pointed out, as it fails to clarify who shoulders the burden for risk assessment. Although he and many others hold that the liability should go to the party providing the GM products, in reality it is often the recipient party that shoulders the burden of such assessments.

 

Also at stake is who should make such assessments. To avoid conflicts of interest, Professor Traavik suggested that independent scientists with public funding should be entrusted to conduct studies on risk assessment involving GM products.

 

The ETC Group, Greenpeace and many other groups are urging the week-long UN meeting to publicly acknowledge that GM contamination poses a potentially serious threat to biological diversity, particularly in crop centres of origin.