Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Thanks,Ken, this is a tragic story for so many reasons. Here's a link to
that piece
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross11212007.html

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 11/21/2007 at 2:31 PM Ken Hargesheimer wrote:

NAFTA and Biotech: Twin Horsemen of the Ag Apocalypse
The Last Days of Mexican Corn
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.
The single, spindly seven foot-tall cornstalk spiring up from the planter
box outside a prominent downtown hotel here was filling out with new
"elotes" (sweet corn) to the admiration of passer-bys, some of whom even
paused to pat the swelling ears with affection. Down the centuries most of
the population of this megalopolis migrated here from the countryside at
one time or another over the course of the past 500 years and inside every
"Chilango" (Mexico City resident) lurks an inner campesino.
But the solitary stalk, sewn by an urban coalition of farmers and
ecologists under the banner of "No Hay Pais Sin Maiz" ("There Is No
Country Without Corn") in planter boxes outside the downtown hotels,
museums, government palaces and other historical monuments can just as
easily be seen as a signifier for the fragile state of survival of Mexican
corn.
As the year ripens into deep autumn, the corn harvest is pouring in all
over Mexico. Out in Santa Cruz Tanaco in the Purepecha Indian Sierra of
Michoacan state, the men mow their way down the rows much as their fathers
and their fathers before did, snapping off the ears and tossing them into
the "tshundi" basket on their backs. 
In the evenings, the families will gather around the fire and shuck the
"granos" from the cobs into buckets and carry them down to the store to
trade for other necessities of life. It is the way in Tanaco in this
season of plenitude just as it is in the tens of thousands of tiny farming
communities all over Mexico where 29 per cent of the population still
lives. But it is a way of life that is fading precipitously. Some say that
these indeed may be the last days of Mexican corn.
In fact, this January 1 may prove to be a doomsday date for Mexican maiz
when at the stroke of midnight, all tariffs on corn (and beans) will be
abolished after more than a decade of incremental NAFTA-driven decreases.
Although U.S. corn growers are already dumping 10 million tons of the
heavily subsidized grain in Mexico each year, zero tariffs are expected to
trigger a tsunami of corn imports, much of it genetically modified, that
will drive millions of Mexican farmers off their land - in NAFTA's first
13 years, 6,000,000 have already abandoned their plots - and could well
spell the end of the line for 59 distinct "razas" or races of native corn.
Corn was first domesticated eight millennia ago in the Mexican states of
Puebla and Oaxaca and Mexico remains the fourth largest corn producer on
the planet but its 22,000,000 ton annual yield pales in comparison to U.S.
growers who are expected to harvest near 300,000,000 tons this year,
accounting for 70 per cent of the world's maize supply. A third of U.S.
corn acreage is now under genetically modified seed.
Big Biotec has had its guns trained on Mexican corn for a long time but
under the national biosecurity law, Monsanto and its ilk have been barred
from selling their GMO seed here. Now the transnationals are putting a
full court press on the CIBOGEN, the inter-secretarial committee on
bio-security, to vacate the prohibition on GMO sales - the measure was
originally enacted in the late '90s in an effort to protect native seed
from contamination and homogenization by genetically modified materials. 
This September, the CIBOGEN was on track to designate experimental GMO
farms in the north of Mexico (Sonora's Yaqui Valley and the Valley of
Culiacan) where there are no native corns that could be corrupted by the
engineered seeds but the designation was abruptly postponed around issues
of potential contamination to the great frustration of a powerhouse
pro-GMO coalition motored by the Biotec giants and including the Mexican
National Farming Council (big growers), the National Association of
Self-Service Stores (Wal-mart - now the biggest tortilla retailer in the
country), and the National Farmers Central (CNC) which groups together
rank and file farmers attached to the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party. 
A dubious milestone in the history of corn was reached in July when
scientists at the National Genetics & Biodiversity Laboratories announced
that they had successfully mapped the genome of Mexican maiz. That was the
good news. The bad news is that the genome will be available to anyone who
can pay the Institute's asking price.
Who owns the genome is crucial to the survival of Mexican corn. There is
little doubt that the Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis Missouri would
love to get its hands on this breakthrough information so that for-profit
scientists could design seeds modeled upon the DNA of native corns for
commercial sales. 
Mexican corn is a rich source of genetic history. Millions of adaptations
to specific conditions have created a seed stock with extremely variegated
properties. For millennia, native seed savers have set aside corn seed
that is resistant to drought whose DNA structure Monsanto will now be able
to simulate in its laboratories and market under its brand.
Monsanto took a giant step in locking up the genetic wealth of Mexico this
past April 18 when it signed an agreement with the National Association of
Corn Producers (CNPMM), a section of the CNC that groups together big corn
farmers, to establish regional seed banks in the center and south of the
country. CNC members were designated "guardians of the seed" and charged
with assembling collections of native corn to be housed in
Monsanto-financed repositories. 
(Big bucks from Cargill and Maseca-ADM have also funded the seed banks.)
"Allowing Monsanto to get so close to the secrets of Mexican corn is like
asking Herod to baby-sit," writes Adelita San Vicente, an activist with
the "No Hay Pais" coalition in a recent agrarian supplement of the left
daily La Jornada. 
55 per cent of the crops needed to feed the human race are now grown by
just ten corporations. The biggest players in this monopoly game are
Bayer, Dow, Dupont, Syngenta (once Novartis), and Monsanto. None of these
conglomerates is a seed company. They all began their corporate life
selling chemicals for war and farming. 
Monsanto, which dominates 71 per cent of the GMO seed market, has operated
in Mexico since the post-World War II so-called "green revolution" that
featured hybrid seeds ("semillas mejoradas") that only worked when
associated with pesticides and fertilizers manufactured by the
transnational chemical companies. Selling hybrid seeds and chemical
poisons in Mexico continues to be profitable for Monsanto whose total 2006
sales here topped 3,000,000,000 pesos ($300 million USD.) It doesn't hurt
that Monsanto Mexico sells hybrid seed for $2 Americano for a packet of a
thousand when its states-side price is $1.34. 
22,000,000 Mexicans, 13,000,000 of them children, suffer some degree of
malnutrition according to doctors at the National Nutrition Institute and
Monsanto insists that it can feed them all if only the CIBOGEN will allow
it to foist its GMO seed on unwitting corn farmers. But the way Monsanto
sells its GMO seed is severely questioned. 
Farmers are forced to sign contracts, agreeing to buy GMO seed at a
company-fixed price. Monsanto's super-duper "Terminator" seed, named after
California's action hero governor, goes sterile after one growing cycle
and the campesinos are obligated to buy more. By getting hooked on
Monsanto, Mexican farmers, once seed savers and repositories themselves of
the knowledge of their inner workings, become consumers of seed, an
arrangement that augurs poorly for the survival of Mexico's many native
corns.
Moreover, as farmers from other climes who have resisted Monsanto and
refused to buy into the GMO blitz, have learned only too traumatically,
pollen blowing off contaminated fields will spread to non-GMO crops. Even
more egregiously, Monsanto will then send "inspectors" (often off-duty
cops) to your farm and detect their patented strains in your fields and
charge you with stealing the corporation's property. 
When Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser came to Mexico several years back
to explain how Monsanto had taken his farm from him for precisely these
reasons, local legislators laughed that it was a science fiction scenario.
"It is going to happen to you," the old farmer warned with all the
prescience of an Aztec seer.
Mexican corn is, of course, not the only native crop that is being
disappeared by global capitalism. Native seeds are under siege from pole
to pole. In Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together to
form the birthplace of agriculture, one of the very first acts of George
Bush's neo-colonial satrap L. Paul Brenner was to issue the notorious
Order 81 criminalizing the possession of native seeds. The U.S. military
spread out throughout the land distributing little packets of GMO seeds,
the euphemistically dubbed Operation "Amber Waves." To make sure that Iraq
would no longer have a native agriculture, the national seed bank, located
at Abu Ghraib, was looted and set afire. 
The threat to native seed has become so acute that the United Nations Food
& Agricultural Organization is funding the construction of a doomsday
vault on remote Svalbard Island in northern Norway 800 miles from the
North Pole. It was thought that seeds cryogenically frozen and stored in
deep underground bunkers would be insured of survival. But as the polar
bears of that gelid bioregion now know only too well, nothing is safe from
the globalizers' hunger to destroy the planet and what it grows.
  John Ross is preparing to return to Mexico for the holidays equipped
with a new - if uneasy - eye. Mil gracias to everyone who kicked in to
help buy it. Contact: johnross@igc.org 


       
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