“We believe that Mexico has every right to ask for what it wants,” says Lynn Clarkson, chief executive of Illinois-based Clarkson Grain company. “As a supplier, the United States should give its customers what they want.”
What Mexico, one of the biggest buyers of US corn, wants is to grow its own non-GM corn and import only non-GM corn to meet domestic demand. Its reasons for doing so include protecting the health of the population, the environment and Mexico’s genetic diversity of maize. Loss of that diversity would have “direct repercussions on the diversity of maize and ecosystems in all of North America and the rest of the world,” concluded a 2015 paper by the Commission of Environmental Cooperation, the environmental side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
But Mexico’s proposed ban on GMO corn poses a direct threat to the profits and power of the world’s biggest seeds and chemicals manufacturers. If Mexico were to ban GMO imports, it would also send a message to other countries in Latin America, one of the biggest markets for GMO crops, that there are alternatives available. And those alternatives do not offer the same juicy proprietary perks as GMO seeds.
Strange Behavior for a Supposedly Capitalist Nation
This is why the US has launched a trade dispute against Mexico for seeking to phase out the importation and use of genetically modified corn and glyphosate, a probable carcinogen, on health, environmental and food self-sufficiency grounds. But as an article in the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada notes (translation by yours truly), not all farmers in the US oppose the Mexican government’s stance:
Clarkson Grain is a small company compared to many of its US counterparts, but in its sector it is a pioneer in the production and sale of organic and non-GMO corn and soybeans.
The Clarkson executive is an expert in non-GMO agriculture and has previously served on advisory panels for the US Department of Agriculture and the US Office of Commerce.
She says it is extremely strange for a nation that claims to be capitalist to be denying the customer what it wants.
Bill Freese, science policy adviser at the Washington DC-based non-profit Center for Food Safety, puts it in even starker terms:
It is scandalous that the United States is trying to force Mexico to accept transgenic corn with glyphosate residue, Freese said in an interview with La Jornada .
“We think that the United States should stop bullying Mexico to import this type of corn. Mexico is a sovereign country that must decide what to import or not.”
Freese believes that Mexico is doing the world a favor by raising concerns about GM corn. It is clear that glyphosate is a known carcinogen, he says.
AMLO Blinks
As regular readers know, Mexico is one of the biggest buyers of U.S. corn, consuming around 17 million tonnes of mostly GM yellow corn annually, mostly for animal feed. But on December 31, 2020 Mexico’s President Andrés Manual Lopéz Obrador (aka AMLO) published a decree calling for all imports of GMO crops, including corn, and glyphosate to be phased out by the end of January 2024. Crucially, the decree enjoys the support of Mexico’s Supreme Court, which in 2021 ratified the Precautionary Measure that bans permits to sow genetically modified corn in Mexico.
But the ban on GMO imports would also hurt US farmers, global Big Ag companies and biotech behemoths. More than 92% of the corn grown in the States is GMO. Domestically, almost all of it is used as animal feed or to produce ethanol and processed food such as corn syrup. The rest is exported, roughly a quarter of which goes to Mexico.
“Most farmers, my generation and younger, have never even used conventional corn. We’re not set up to do it. We don’t have the equipment to do it,” Hinkel Farms’ Elizabeth Hinkel told FOX Business’ Madison Alworth on “Mornings with Maria“. “So it would be a huge investment if we had to go back to growing conventional. And on top of that, our yields would be decreased.”
As I reported in my Feb 2 piece, “Is the Unstoppable Force of Mexico’s GMO Ban About to Meet the Unmovable Object of US Big Ag Lobbies?“, Mexico and the US Department of Agriculture were heading for a head-on collision over Mexico’s proposed GMO ban.
At some point, something has to give; one side must blink. One can only hope, for the sake of Mexico and the world at large, it isn’t AMLO.
A lot has happened since then. Amid ratcheting pressure from the US side, AMLO’s government did eventually crack, albeit only partially. On February 13, it issued a new presidential decree that rowed back certain key elements of the original decree banning the importation of GMO products (including corn) and the use of glyphosate.
Crucially, the new decree allows for the continued importation of genetically modified yellow corn as long as it is used as animal feed or in processed food for human consumption. Any ban on GM feed corn would only be implemented incrementally, pending a full review of the science and the availability of adequate supplies of non-GM corn. The decree also retains plans to prohibit use of GMO corn for direct human consumption (i.e. in dough and tortillas) as well as the herbicide glyphosate, the deadline for which was brought forward to March 31, 2024.
Mexico also reserves the right to adopt precautionary measures it deems important to safeguard public health and the environment, including the genetic integrity of its full diversity of native corn. But as the land and food rights expert Timothy A Wise wrote a few weeks ago, “precaution” is a dirty word to US industry and government officials.
Given that almost all Mexican imports of GMO yellow corn are used in animal feed or industrial food processes, the decree represented a significant concession in Mexico’s standoff with the US. As El País reported at the time, the AMLO government had “relaxed its ruling on the prohibition of GMO corn in the country.” Also, “it eliminates the deadline to end the use of transgenic seed for animal fodder and industry, which had been set for January 2025.”
In other words, it gives US farmers plenty of additional time to rethink their business model, should they choose to do so. Yet even that was not enough to appease Mexico’s USMCA partners, the US and Canadian governments. On March 15, U.S. Trade Representative Katherina Tai confirmed that Washington is seeking consultation with Mexican authorities on the country’s plans to ban genetically engineered corn from human consumption.
“The United States has repeatedly conveyed our serious concerns with Mexico’s biotechnology policies and the importance of adopting a science-based approach that complies with its USMCA commitments,” Tai said in a news release. “Mexico’s policies threaten to disrupt billions of dollars in agricultural trade and they will stifle the innovation that is necessary to tackle the climate crisis and food security challenges if left unaddressed. We hope these consultations will be productive as we continue to work with Mexico to address these issues.”
Filling Mexico’s Corn Gap
AMLO’s response so far has been to stand his ground, or at least what little ground he has left. On March 7, he insisted that prohibiting the human consumption of transgenic corn does not violate the USMCA. According to Sharon Anglin, a senior lawyer at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, he is right: the section on agricultural biotechnology in the USMCA treaty does not have a solid enough legal base for the US government to initiate a trade dispute against Mexico over this issue, especially given the Mexican government’s legitimate concerns about health and the environment.
At the same time, the US Corn Growers Association and other US and Mexican lobbying groups insist that Mexico will not be able to grow enough non-GMO corn on its own territory to meet its needs. But US growers could comfortably fill the gap, says Clarkson: perhaps there would be a small price increase and it would take a little longer, perhaps as long as two years, to produce more unmodified seed. But if Mexico wants it, it can be done, she says.
If that were to happen, it could spark a genuinely green counterrevolution in the US, as farmers abandon GMO varieties in order to maintain a key export market. Given enough time (which Mexico is now offering) and market incentives, many US corn farmers would happily revert to growing non-GMO corn, first for the Mexican market and then perhaps later for the domestic one.
More and more US farmers are already questioning the status quo, says Dale Wieoff, the communications director of the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy, a non-profit research and advocacy organization that promotes sustainable food, farm, and trade systems. Farmers are beginning to talk about the health of the soil, reducing the control of corporate monopolies, and diversifying the cultivation of food in the United States, Wieoff told La Jornada in December: People are beginning to see the need to reassess the way we grow food in this country.
Sifting through the comments to my last piece on this issue, many regular NC readers with experience and knowledge of the industry seem to concur. Thousand points of green wrote:
If more than 92% of the corn grown in America is GMO, that means that more than 7% of the corn grown in America is GMO-Free. Why don’t the GMO-Free corn growers in America and the GMO-Free corn buyers in Mexico try to find each other? Why doesn’t the Non GMO Project try to get them in touch with each other?
If non-GMO corn were to take off in the US, it may go some way to reversing some of the hollowing out of local economies and communities that has taken place across large swathes of the corn belt, said Insouciant Iowan:
A switch to non-GMO corn would likely halt the depopulation of rural Iowa, since, as indicated, it requires attention that machines and glyphosate don’t give.
NC reader Truly raised some important technical and cost issues, while also noting that a partial shift away from GMO to non-GMO corn in the US could have significant implications for the actual meaning of efficiency for the country’s farmers:
Growing organic corn requires either mechanical or electrical cultivation. Mechanical means a big steel cultivator mounted to a tractor. Diggers churn the top soil in the gaps between the rows, killing weeds. They cant get the weeds right in the row, and they cant be used after corn gets over 2 feet tall. Electrical cultivating is the new big thing. It takes a lot of horsepower. My friend runs a 200+ HP tractor that has an additional 200+ HP alternator. This system actually “zaps” the weeds. They get hit with a bolt of juice, it fries even the roots. Similar limitations to mechanical cultivation.
As for nitrogen, organic turkey manure is selling like gold these days. You have to order it months in advance. Semiloads delivered to the field must then be reloaded into big (expensive) spreaders.
All this adds cost and labor to the project. And yields are significantly lower. My friends fields look like a weed patch to me. But organic sells at at least triple the price. maybe even up to 5 times higher.
As a commenter down thread notes, all of this is good for job creation. Right now the trends in farming are going huge or going tiny. The tiny operations seem competitive. Big ag suggests efficiency means the least amount of workers to work the most amount of land. I think it means how little land do you need to make a living. Our grandparents could raise a family of 8 on 80-160 acres. Now it takes 1000 plus acres to keep one farm family going.
Of course, if costs were to rise too high, that may price the corn out of range for many Mexican consumers and businesses. But hopefully by then Mexico will be much more self-sufficient in its own production of yellow corn while also sourcing more of its imported non-GMO corn from other countries such as Brazil and Russia. Even if that happens, US farmers could sell their wares to US consumers, some of whom will surely be prepared to pay a premium to enjoy the superior taste and health benefits of non-GMO corn.
That could ultimately feed through to significant improvements in both the diet and health of US consumers while at the same time protecting Mexico’s invaluable biodiversity in maize. But before any of that can happen, the US government is determined to break the Mexican government’s resolve and force it to continue importing GMO corn, a product it no longer wants.
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“Most farmers, my generation and younger, have never even used conventional corn. We’re not set up to do it. We don’t have the equipment to do it,” Hinkel Farms’ Elizabeth Hinkel told FOX Business’ Madison Alworth on “Mornings with Maria“. “So it would be a huge investment if we had to go back to growing conventional. And on top of that, our yields would be decreased.”
Corporate mega mono-culture agro-business. It should be illegal to call it “farming”.
Electrical cultivation? Zapping weeds? I recall that once the corn was high enough to shade the ground between the rows that weed growth all but ceased. Of course those were primitive non-GMO weeds growing among non-GMO corn. Maybe being set up to grow GMO corn, to buy all the bells and whistles and go into debt to do it, is the point for some.
The real criminal behavior here is how Monsanto/Bayer has managed to bully 92% of corn producers into using their seed and chemicals, and what this does to the biome of the topsoil. Glyphosate inhibits a key enzyme that synthesizes the crucial amino acid tryptophan. This kills most soil bacteria and fungi that are necessary for soil health. But now, due to extensive PR actions and legal intimidation almost all US corn farmers have signed a deal with the devil. Now they want to force Mexico to do the same. It is not free market capitalism, it is coercive, lawfare capitalism.
Many years ago, I once met a sugar beet farmer ( I forget from what state) who said that the sugar beet mill to whom he and the other sugar beet growers in the area sold their sugar beets for the mill to make sugar from . . . . demanded that he and all the other sugar beet farmers had to grow one certain kind of patented GMO beet, and the mill would not buy any other beet except that one single kind.
So the coercion comes from many directions.
The only thing which supporters of Clean Genes FrankenFree agriculture can do is to spend as much-more-money-as-necessary ( and which they can afford) on buying Clean Genes FrankenFree food for themselves and their families and/or anyone else they buy food for. This at least keeps a parallel Clean Genes FrankenFree food system alive in the teeth of mainstream efforts to destroy it and FrankenPollute and FrankenTaminate every single food plant and seed on the earth with their bioactive FrankenGene fallout.
Oh, and . . . . supporters of Clean Genes FrankenFree food can also grow their own in gardens if they have a place to garden. And they can keep buying Clean Genes FrankenFree seeds from ethical seed companies to keep those companies and seedlines alive for the future. A future which hopefully includes the eventual extermination and utter annihilation-from-existence of every GMO food and every company which is involved in any way in the GMO business.
Perhaps we could create genetically modified gophers that will only eat the weeds?
““Mexico’s policies threaten to disrupt billions of dollars in agricultural trade and they will stifle the innovation that is necessary to tackle the climate crisis and food security challenges if left unaddressed.”
So, making people eat GMO and cancer causing glyphosate is part of their means of tackling the climate crisis? Is this part of the depopulation program?
that’s just a nice side benefit.
main thing is twofold:1. sunk cost/path dependency…all that research and development, then all the coercion and propaganda to get to this point, where almost all corn is frankencorn…which was all in service to…2. suck up ever more government welfare checks(corn subsidies).
Big Ag are among the largest freeloaders in the world, after all.
no thought is ever given to , ‘do we need more corn?”.lol…gooberment pays for corn, so we’ll do whatever it takes.
Since glyphosate kills plants ( except the glypho-ready kinds) , it seems to me that the growers of perennial food plants don’t yet have a way to apply glyphosate to their trees, shrubs, bushes and non-wood perennials without killing them. Or at least killing their economic viability productivity.\
If that thinking is correct, then it should be possible to avoid deliberately applied glyphosate by eating food products from perennial trees, shrubs, bushes, vines and non-woody perennials ( asparagus, strawberries, etc.) We can’t avoid the background glypho fallout residue which covers every single thing and will keep covering every single thing until the entire glypho industry has been exterminated from existence and wiped off the face of the earth. But we can avoid ingesting the greater amounts of glypho applied to every single plant that growers can conceivably invent a reason to spray glypho on.
As far as annual plants go, especially beans and grains, Certified Organic may be the only way to avoid deliberately applied glypho, now that glypho is mass-sprayed as a pre-harvest desiccant to get millions of acres of grains and beans to dry down all at once for single-pass harvest at the harvester’s scheduling convenience.
And of course people who support Roundup and believe in its use should eat as much of it as possible, to show their support for Roundup Incorporated. They should figure out which foods contain the highest amount of Roundup and they should focus on eating those foods in particular.
‘If that were to happen, it could spark a genuinely green counterrevolution in the US’
Is that the same green revolution that has also led to increasing cancer rates? Can we be serious here. Industrial agriculture depends on cheap oil to make it all possible and that includes the pesticides along with the fertilizers. And cheap oil is no longer a given going forward. Even though Mexico is a source of oil, it would make more sense to go back to non-GMO agriculture and use the oil saved for exporting as a source of energy.
No, Rev. The key word (or part of a word) in that sentence is “counter”. The last thing I’m proposing as a possible good path ahead is another “green” revolution.
Should have clarified my comment more but never thought that you would propose another “green” revolution. At best that would leave us with a Pyrrhic victory which we could ill afford. We’ve been there, done that, and got the t-shirt.
Language is a battlefield and words are weapons. We go to verbal combat with the words we have, not the words we wish we had or would prefer to have at a later time.
Green is still a warm huggable word to most people. So if we can re-conquer the word green and take it away from “green revolutionaries”, I think we should do so. If ” green counter-revolution” is not clear enough, perhaps we could bolt some clarifying words onto it . . . like ” true-green counter-revolution” or other things people might think of. Or ” clean green counter-revolution.”
Here in America there used to be a children’s show called Captain Kangaroo. I watched it every morning. One of Captain Kangaroo’s TV-show friends was a character named Mister Green Jeans. Here are some images of Mister Green Jeans.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrEt9Yj_xlkzDIAcSZXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZANMT0NVSTA4OV8xBHNlYwNzYw–?p=mister+green+jeans+image&fr=sfp
This would mean nothing to any foreign audiences. But to Americans of a certain age or older, this will trigger many happy memories. Perhaps these memories could be leveraged in the American market by creating a no-GMO mascot character to be named Mister Clean Genes. He could wear a green lab coat. He could be a spokes-character for FrankenFree ( no-GMO) food. ” Mister Clean Genes says: ‘ Its Franken Free!’ ”
The goal is to destroy all enemy symbols and defeat all enemy brains. And make Franken Free the New Default Normal.
Or perhaps he could be called Mister Green Genes.
I really appreciate your comment about “depopulation of Iowa”. I think it lines up with my thoughts about how we define efficiency.
My garden project is just for fun right now. But I am told that one person can make a living intensely farming/gardening one, yes one, single acre.
My garden is on my friends farm, on the old family garden plot. If you google-map Jirik Family Farm of Kilkenny MN, switch over to satellite view and zoom in on a rectangle down by the bend in the road. You might be able to see I use “fabric” heavily for weed prevention. There are lots of tricks for weed control.
A fundamental issue involving AMLO’s rebuff of GMO corn cum glyphosate is the challenge to US hegemony in the western hemisphere. Were AMLO up for another term, the US and Canada might bring aggressive means to bear in disciplining him. Since AMLO’s time in office is running out, the US may content itself with promoting a successor more sympathetic to the hegemony of which GMO is but one tentacle.
How do you ” disarm ” an octopus? One tentacle at a time.
The GMO tentacle seems a good tentacle to focus on, given the unique damage it causes. Take off that tentacle and the octopus becomes a septopus.
Hi,
Thanks for a good overview. I’m an organic grain farmer in NW Wisconsin and wanted to add a couple of things.
First, the price of organic corn at my closest buyer is $10.50/bushel, while the conventional (gmo/chemical) is $5.65 at the local elevator.
The USDA puts out a rough guide to organic prices, bi weekly, here –
https://www.ams.usda.gov/market-news/organic
Also, some random observations/comments from my experience:
Weed zappers have their place, but they are an expensive last resort. Ideally they don’t get used. There aren’t many around, so you have to buy an expensive piece of equipment that normally won’t get used. The only custom contractors near me who could do the work with their own machines are booked months in advance.
I don’t know about repopulating the countryside with organic farms, but you can make a decent living with about 300 acres, as opposed to the 1000+ you need with chemical/conventional.
My yields on average are about 80% of conventional. My input costs are less and I can use slightly smaller equipment, though I spend more time in the tractor (and have more pieces of equipment). I also have to truck what I grow 175 miles to the nearest organic buyer, as opposed to the local conventional elevator about 5 miles away. There is a huge need for organic production infrastructure if you want to scale it up.
A good listserve for anyone who might be interested in going to, or learning more about, organic grain production is the University of Wisconsin’s OGrain – https://ograin.cals.wisc.edu.
Thanks for your personal insights, Bruce, as well as the two links you provided. They have been duly noted. If you don’t mind me asking, what do you use for fertiliser and pesticide?
Hi Nick,
I buy turkey litter from the local turkey barns. Last year it cost me about $50/ton applied, I think the price is up this year, not sure how much. Depending on my soils test, which show what I’m lacking, I’ll put 2-3 tons/acre on my corn and wheat. I buy organic potash along with any micronutrients, from Cashton Farm Supply, to put on my beans.
I’ve heard about neem oil, as well as various types of vinegar, being used as an OMRI approved organic pesticide, but the results are generally poor, at least from the OGrain listserve I mentioned, where it gets talked about from time to time.
The best defense against the bugs/weeds is multi layered. Good seed genetics, minimize the weed seed bank through cultivation, and good crop rotation so you’re in the field at different times in the weed cycle so that the pests don’t have something to come back to in subsequent years.
Cultivation is a problem eg. soil loss/degradation. Erin Silva at UW has a long term study on no-till soybeans that is interesting, but it can be difficult to put into practice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aiocr_icrfw
Also, Dr. Joel Gruver at Western Illinois University is doing interesting test plots on growing cover crops in/with no till organic.
https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=1009823&mid=9124251
This kind of thing is interesting to me, but I only have a limited window to do the basics, which keeps me busy during the growing season, so I keep my experiments short.
That said I’ve got 24 acres of a perennial wheatgrass – Kernza – growing for the first time this year. We’ll see how that goes.
Thanks for covering Ag issues on NC. I appreciate the info.
Wait a minute. When I was on a quest to bicycle in all 50 states, I was hosted by Tom Gruver and family in Scott County, Kansas. Any relation to Dr. Joel Gruver?
I am just a small backyard hobby gardener. I read about these things because I try understanding them and I sometimes offer links and/or other things for fellow amateurs to read. But I don’t have the credible results to presume to offer any advice to working professionals in the field. The best I can do is offer possibly interesting bits of information and etc. in case a serious professional might find them useful.
That said, have you heard of a publication called Acres USA ? https://www.acresusa.com/ Has anyone you know heard of it? If you or they have, do you or they have any thoughts about its usefulness to what you or they do?
( Meanwhile, what can those of us in the retail individual end-buyer community do to help organic agriculture along? If we like what they produce, we can accept the necessity of paying whatever the higher price for it is . . . . in order to keep organic farming alive and visibly successful as an inspiration and a possible avenue of escape for petrochemical farmers who would like to run off the Petrochemical Plantation and step off the Petrochemical Hamster Wheel.)
Hi tpog,
I subscribed to Acres when I first converted to organic, in 2016. It had a lot of good ideas, but none of them seemed to work for me. For example I looked at growing both hazelnuts and hops, as well as small scale poultry. There are no shortage of ideas, just hard to personally put them into practice due to lack of available equipment, infrastructure, personnel, markets, all while avoiding bankruptcy and physical injury.
The main challenge, for me, is balancing biology and “economics”.
As far as supporting organic farmers I’d say first, Thanks! One selling point that is often overlooked, at least when talking to environmentally minded people, is that we don’t use gmos, herbicide, pesticide, synthetic fertilizers etc.
My goal is to grow healthy soil that in turn produces healthy food. (I pay about 1% of my sales to be inspected annually, to get the USDA label needed to sell my commodity grains as organic.) Some people argue (and I disagree) that none of those inputs make it onto/into the food that’s produced, but they sure do get spread into the general environment/water. So by buying organic you’re supporting that kind of stewardship.
” Organic! The cancer juice stays off before the name goes on.”
I tried an acre of hops in Ontario, Canada. Near the Great Lakes it’s very hard to do organically because of downy mildew. In poor soils you also need to apply potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen – the plants grow 20ft a year so they need to be fed. The morale of the story is you need to consider your land and climate carefully and select what you grow accordingly.
I developed a tremendous respect for farmers, at least small-scale farmers. It’s hard work and if you’re growing ‘specialty’ crops you may not be covered by crop insurance. And farmers not only have to grow and nurture, they have to market and sell – easy when it’s a cash crop but otherwise it can be heartbreaking to not be able to sell your product. And customers can be very fickle.
On glyphosate, I believe the reason it’s in our food chain is not because of GMOs but its use as a desiccant on non-GMOs – killing the plant just prior to harvest so it can dry on the stalk. Whatever you may think about pesticides, spraying just before harvest breaks the key spraying rule of establishing a ‘pre-harvest interval’.
Nick Corbishley, your reporting and commentary are an incredibly valuable addition to Naked Capitalism. Thank you, and many thanks to Yves for bringing you on!
Thank you, Carla. I’m not exaggerating but your very kind comment made my day!
Just wondering what sort of corn the Chinese prefer. I’m guessing non-gmo. Africa?
The Chinese are a big enough buyer that they may be able to enforce their preferences. They may well say to any supplier wannabe to grow noGMO for the Chinese share of their sales.
” Franken free or no Ren Min Bi .”
Wonderful to hear wise voices south of the border….please watch your back AMLO. Kinda wonder how long it will take to purge/breed the stupid out of corporate mono culture, dominance headspace. Feeding cows maize and making fuel for internal combustion engines with fed subsidies as well as forcing these products in neighbors with WTO fairness judgements…sheesh. One more letter to senate critter and still buying organic and shop at farmers market. 15 years no meat
It is possible to buy meat from strictly pasture-range fed animals. That keeps your meat-money away from the Merchants of Roundup and away from the Merchants of GMO and keeps alive a small but growing sector of people who are growing meat animals without feedlotting.
So far they are a minority but they are a growing minority. Buying their meat keeps them alive and standing on the land against the day of a better future when feedlotting itself goes all the way extinct and the choice either becomes grass-fed meat or no meat at all.
Here is an example of a strictly grass-and-range animal growing operation in my area from whom I buy my beef.
https://www.vestergaardfarms.com/