THE STRUGGLE FOR MAIZE

Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican CountrysideBy Elizabeth Fitting

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4938-9

Contents

LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………….xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………xvLIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………1INTRODUCTION: The Struggle for Mexican Maize…………………………….33Part 1: Debates………………………………………………………35CHAPTER 1 Transgenic Maize and Its Experts………………………………75CHAPTER 2 Corn and the Hybrid Nation……………………………………117Part II: Livelihoods………………………………………………….120CHAPTER 3 Community and Conflict……………………………………….155CHAPTER 4 Remaking the Countryside……………………………………..197CHAPTER 5 From Campesinos to Migrant and Maquila Workers?…………………230CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………..239APPENDIX: Producer Interviews, 2001–2002…………………………..249NOTES……………………………………………………………….265GLOSSARY…………………………………………………………….271BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………293

Chapter One

TRANSGENIC MAIZE AND ITS EXPERTS

Maize has united Mexicans.—In Defense of Maize, Manifesto pamphlet, October 2004

Outside of Mexico, the government proudly refers to maize as part of our culture, but here at home their policies don’t support native varieties.—Interview with biologist at CONABIO, the Biodiversity Commission, May 2005

When transgenes were found in local maize varieties growing in the highlands of Oaxaca in 2001, the gap in the regulation of gm corn became the topic of debate—a gap that Mexican environmental groups had been pointing to several years prior. While one arm of the Mexican state placed a de facto moratorium on scientific field trials of gm corn in 1998, another arm was approving shipments of imported corn from the United States, which included transgenic varieties not labeled or identified as such. Regulators from the Ministry of Agriculture’s Directorate of Plant Health decided that in Mexico, the center of origin, domestication, and biological diversity of maize, trials of GM corn were potentially more harmful than beneficial.

Early on in the GM corn debates, some scientists downplayed concerns about gene flow between landraces and GM corn varieties by arguing that they were “more related to cultural factors rather than biological ones.” Yet as the corn debates intensified, cultural concerns began to take center stage. Anti-GM corn activists and critical scientists affiliated with the emergent coalition In Defense of Maize emphasized that maize is quintessentially Mexican, the cornerstone of ancient Aztec and Mayan cosmologies, that it was originally domesticated in the area, and that it is now the most cultivated crop and the mainstay of most diets, rural and urban. As one coalition slogan put it, “Without corn, there is no country” (Sin maíz, no hay país).

By employing maize as a symbol of Mexican culture, the pro-maize and anti-GM coalition challenges the official perspective which focuses on the risks of gene flow between transgenic corn and criollos and privileges scientific expertise in evaluating such risks. In the process notions of expertise and risk are contested. The coalition maintains that campesinos who grow maize are affected by regulatory frameworks and agricultural policy and should therefore have a place at the table when decisions are made, but it also contends that campesinos are corn experts. In making this claim the coalition rightly challenges the assumption that smallholder corn agriculture is inefficient because of its low yields and its use of “traditional” technology, such as non–breeder improved seed. As we shall see in chapter 2, this argument refocuses attention on questions of food sovereignty and quality rather than on a market-based logic of efficiency.

Debates about GM foods and crops are dominated by questions and calculations of risk in Mexico and internationally. In his well-know book Ulrich Beck defines risk as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself.” (1992 [1986], 20). Modern societies are “risk societies” because they distribute the hazards of industrial production and technology, rather than simply the goods and benefits of such production. Since the development of new technologies like agricultural biotechnology can create unintended or incalculable consequences, and in the process outpace existing regulatory frameworks, these technologies are often open to controversy (Herrick 2005). Moreover, contemporary societies are “risk societies” in the sense that the discourse of risk has become a very powerful way to discuss and manage hazards. In the GM corn debates critics of transgenic maize have learned to translate their concerns into the discourse of risk even as they challenge the narrow governmental focus on the risks of gene flow.

While debates about the regulation of transgenic corn are highly polarized, some supporters and participants in the coalition In Defense of Maize—who express their opinions at conferences, in the press, and in anti-GMO campaigns—articulate perspectives about agricultural biotechnology in general that go beyond simple pro or con formulations. The most common example of this tendency was seen among scientists (and to a lesser extent the environmental activists) I interviewed, who felt that transgenic corn should not be imported or commercially released in Mexico, but also mentioned that biotechnology has a place in the improvement of agricultural crops. In other words, these interviewees did not reject all forms of agricultural biotechnology or transgenic crops, but focused on the particular problems and risks associated with maize in the Mexican context. These interviewees also stressed the unique importance of maize in Mexico—which is quite different from its importance to Mexico’s NAFTA partners.

In many ways rural Mexico is distinct from an industrial “risk society,” but the finding of transgenic corn among native cornfields illustrates that rural areas are nevertheless affected by the “hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself ” (Beck 1992, 92). In a different body of scholarship, peasant societies have long been discussed in relation to risk, in that peasants devise strategies to contend with the uncertainties of small-scale agriculture and the possibility of food shortages (Scott 1976). In Mexico recent policies and economic conditions have exacerbated the insecurity faced by small-scale agriculturalists, and maize plays a role in peasants’ strategies to reduce that insecurity.

To date only a few studies have been conducted on the rural public’s perception of GMOS in Mexico. They suggest that when the news of the GM corn controversy arrived in rural communities, it was not accompanied by contextual information or by “interlocutors to respond to questions and concerns” (Larson and Chauvet 2004, 4). In the affected communities in Oaxaca, campesinos reacted with mistrust of the government and scientists, and wanted to know what transgenic contamination meant, in practical terms, for their agricultural varieties and practices (ibid. 13, 25). In the Tehuacán Valley, however, where studies also found evidence of transgenes, the GM corn controversy was not discussed or raised as an issue of concern by residents during my research. While in any society information may be unevenly communicated, shared, or received, this is particularly true in societies characterized by high levels of social inequality, such as Mexico. This chapter therefore focuses on the GM corn debates among participants and interlocutors, including representatives from campesino communities. But for the most part the corn debates have involved activists, scientists, industry representatives, government officials, academics, and journalists, both experts and laypeople. These activist, industry, official, and scientific communities are not homogeneous, nor do they have clearly marked boundaries. Some participants in the corn debates wear more than one hat; for instance, as both maize scientist and government ministry employee, as peasant community representative and local government official, as indigenous campesino and activist, or as university researcher and newspaper columnist who works in alliance with the coalition In Defense of Maize.

While there is an identifiable official government position on the importation, testing, and commercial release of transgenic maize, a position that is embodied in policy and frequently articulated by the Ministry of Agriculture (and that is also the official industry position), the state is not a unitary entity, and different arms of the state often work at cross-purposes. Thinking about the state as a set of political offices and as the making or unmaking of certain forms of political rule draws our attention to the struggles and alliances within and between different ministries, offices, and public servants in regulating transgenic corn imports and tests. Additionally, thinking about the state in this way draws our attention to how laws and policies contain contradictory logics, and how law and policy are inconsistently put into practice and do not always achieve anticipated results. Pundits who planned and predicted a drop in Mexican maize production after NAFTA, for instance, were wrong—or at least have been to date.

The GM corn debates embody competing visions of agricultural development and the future of the countryside. Anti-GM activists call our attention to the political nature of the neoliberal corn regime, despite attempts to present its policies and genetically engineered crops and foods as non-issues. Unlike in some other countries, where the benefits of agricultural biotechnology go largely unquestioned in mainstream discourse and media, In Defense of Maize and its allies contest “biohegemony,” or what Peter Newell calls the material, institutional, and discursive power which validates and reproduces the interests of corporate agricultural development (2009, 38).

The GM corn debates are also an arena for rival definitions of biotechnology and biodiversity. Some participants highlight how the novelty of genetically engineered plants has unknown consequences; they point to the risks of gene flow between GM varieties and traditional ones. Conversely, other participants downplay the novelty of genetically engineered plants and argue instead that gene flow between GM and traditional varieties contributes to the biological diversity of plants. The question is whether agricultural biotechnology is seen as an aid to biodiversity and its rural guardians, or as a potential threat or hazard.

DEFINITIONS: BIOTECHNOLOGY AND BIODIVERSITY

Biotechnology refers to a set of recombinant DNA techniques first developed in the 1970s which use organisms, their parts, or their processes to modify or create living organisms with particular traits. Agricultural biotechnology includes genetic engineering and tissue culture techniques. Genetically modified or transgenic plants are the products of such tools; they are plants whose genomes contain inserted DNA material from other plants or species. Although both conventional plant breeding and farming practices produce new gene characteristics in plants, plant breeding and farming diver from genetic engineering in that they work at the level of the whole plant. Genetic engineering has the capacity, at least in theory, to overcome the sexual incompatibility of different species and to identify, isolate, and relocate any gene from one organism to a recipient plant’s genome. In practice, these technologies do not always express the incorporated genetic material or the targeted traits in a predictable or precise manner; genes may function differently in new contexts. Further, there is disagreement over the claim that genetic engineering is faster and more precise than scientific plant breeding (Gepts 2002; Levidow and Tait 1995; McAfee 2003b).

Agro-biotechnology has the potential to aid both subsistence and commercial agriculture in diverse environments; but unlike plant breeding in North America, which was initially developed in public institutions, biotechnology “has been driven by the private sector from the start” (Otero, Scott, and Gilbreth 1997, 259; Kenney 1986). The links between corporate and public research in agricultural biotechnology are increasingly blurred by complex institutional and funding arrangements. Rather than condemn all agricultural biotechnology, some researchers argue for supporting public research, particularly on crops of use and benefit to poor farmers of the global south (Stone 2002).

“Modern” and “Traditional” Varieties

The development of new corn varieties through scientific plant breeding and biotechnology relies on the genetic information from “traditional” varieties found in Mexico and elsewhere. Without traditional varieties conventional agriculture would be unable to adapt to new conditions or pests. The southern corn leaf blight that destroyed 15 percent of the corn crop in the United States in 1971 is perhaps the most famous example of the vulnerability of industrialized mono-crop agriculture. Cornfields were sown with varieties that shared a genetic component susceptible to the new blight. “The epidemics of the early 1970s served to underline a simple but humbling point: although the ‘North’ (meaning most northern industrialized countries) is grain-rich, it is gene-poor” (Fowler and Mooney 1990, xi). In this way conventional agriculture is dependent upon seed stored ex situ, in germplasm banks and in situ, maintained and developed in peasants’ fields.

Modern or improved corn varieties (also called cultivars) are those varieties developed through scientific plant breeding and biotechnology. In contrast, traditional varieties—called “landraces” in English and maíz nativo or criollos in Spanish—are varieties maintained, selected, and improved by farmers in the field; they are “crop populations that have become adapted to farmers’ conditions through natural and artificial selection” (Aguirre Gómez, Bellon, and Smale 1998, 7). In Spanish, criollo is the commonly used term to discuss traditional varieties. It refers to both landraces and creolized varieties, the latter of which are the outcome of an intentional or accidental mix of landraces with scientifically improved varieties. The terms “modern” and “improved” are problematic because they imply that criollos are not the result of human intervention or improvement. This is not so. The development and maintenance of criollos involve a kind of on-farm or in-field plant breeding, albeit one distinct from the scientific plant breeding tradition which emerged in sixteenth-century Europe.

Maize is a naturally hybridizing plant, but a maize “hybrid” is a modern variety that results from the crossing of two different varieties, each of which has first been inbred to the point of being genetically uniform. The first generation of a hybrid variety (called F-1 by plant breeders) has an increased yield, or hybrid vigor. Unlike open-pollinated varieties developed by scientific plant breeders, though, the second generation of hybrid corn (F-2)—that is, the generation that appears after the seed is saved and replanted—exhibits a considerable reduction in yield. Farmers interested in maintaining good yields must purchase hybrid seed for each planting. These varieties also tend to depend on commercial inputs such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Today all commercial transgenic corn varieties are also hybrids.

All seed is both a means of production (as seed to be planted) and a product (the seed to be sold, exchanged, or consumed); but hybridization transforms self-regenerative seed into a non-renewable product. As the sociologist Jack Kloppenburg has explained, hybridization “uncouples seed as ‘seed’ from seed as ‘grain’ and thereby facilitates the transformation of seed from a use-value to an exchange-value” (1988, 93).

Hybrid corn played a key role in the establishment and success of seed companies in the United States in the early twentieth century. Today the top ten multinational seed corporations account for over half of the world’s commercial seed sales, worth nearly $12.6 billion in revenues (ETC Group 2007). The value of biotech seed and related technology fees is $7.5 billion globally (International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications 2008). In recent years, large seed companies have come to dominate the sale of seed in Mexico. From the 1960s the state seed producer and distributor, PRONASE, was made responsible for producing and distributing commercial varieties developed by Mexico’s public research office on forests, agriculture, and livestock (INIFAP). This arrangement amounted to a monopoly on the seed industry that limited the role of private companies in seed production and sale. But as part of the neoliberal corn regime of the 1980s and 1990s, a seed law was introduced (1991) and PRONASE was dismantled, opening the way for several national and multinational corporations to dominate the market. In 2007 a new seed law took effect which required any seed exchanged or sold—even local criollos&mdash criollos—to be registered in the national seed catalogue, or else the person exchanging or selling it will face penalties. This law does not reflect the realities of small-scale, informal seed exchange and sale in Mexico but rather creates a means for large companies to take action against seed producers who challenge their share of the market. Like other aspects of the neoliberal corn regime, this law expands the state’s powers in the countryside while simultaneously opening the door for the further accumulation of capital.

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