Critics of GM crops are opposed to monoculture in Argentina. Credit: Bigstock

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

The debate over the reform of Argentina’s seed law has pitted transnational corporations that make transgenic seeds against social and rural organisations and academics opposed to the expansion of monoculture in defence of biodiversity and food security.

Over a year ago, the agriculture ministry said it would present a bill to overhaul a 1973 law on seeds that was modified several times to accommodate the expansion of monoculture and genetically modified seeds since the 1990s. GM soy is now Argentina’s chief export.

But the ministry has not yet introduced a bill, although it has two drafts. Argentina’s seeds association, which represents biotech companies, supports the ministry’s efforts to draw up a new law.

However, the proposed reform has drawn criticism from those who see it as an attempt to restrict farmers from saving or selling their own seeds for further planting.

The companies argue that the world requires higher crop yields per hectare to meet the growing demand for food. They also say a law to regulate and control the market for seeds would guarantee the recovery of the investment made in research and development of GM seeds.

But those opposed to the expansion of GM crops say they undermine biodiversity, increase agriculture’s vulnerability to climate change, and threaten the survival of rural families, who carry out the important task of selecting and storing the best seeds for replanting.

In Argentina, the world’s third-largest producer of soy, around 98 percent of the crop is Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, which is resistant to the company’s own glyphosate herbicide.

In addition, 80 percent of the maize grown in Argentina is transgenic.

The U.S. biotech giant plans to build a new plant to produce GM maize seed in the central Argentine province of Córdoba in 2014, which will produce 60,000 tons of seed a year.

The idea, the company says on its web site, is to contribute to the goal of doubling food production by 2050. But alongside that pledge, Monsanto plans to step up control over the seeds it produces.

Carlos Carballo, professor of food sovereignty in the Agronomy Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, said the expansion of GM seeds threatens the diversity of native seeds that are adapted to the soil and climate conditions of each region.

“Seeds aren’t merchandise; they are part of humanity’s heritage,” Carballo told IPS.

The Argentine government’s plan for bolstering food production foresees the continued expansion of GM soy and corn monoculture, which will lead to “a mass expulsion of small farmers” from the countryside, he said.

Land conflicts are already a reality in Argentina. A study by the agriculture ministry and the National University of San Martín reported in 2012 that there were 830 disputes involving 60,000 families, mainly subsistence farmers.

The number of conflicts increased as the agricultural frontier expanded, led by GM crops. The problem is that many poor families do not have legal title to their land, even though it may have been in the family for generations.

Companies force farmers to sign contracts

Carballo pointed out that in 2012, Monsanto announced that it would not sell any more seeds to producers who had not signed contracts allowing the firm to oversee their use.

Just a few months after that announcement, Monsanto reported that between 70 and 80 percent of soy producers had signed the contract.

Under the agreement, producers not only pay royalties for planting the seeds but also promise not to save Roundup Ready seeds to replant, under threat of legal action.

Monsanto, the biggest producer of GM crops in Argentina, was largely behind the expansion of transgenic soy in the 1990s, with its initial strategy of not insisting on the payment of royalties, agronomist Javier Souza, Latin America regional coordinator of the Pesticide Action Network, told IPS.

“That allowed it to expand to all of the countries of the Southern Cone” of Latin America, said the academic. Monsanto is now responsible for 47 percent of the soy and 28 percent of the maize sold worldwide, according to the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

The strategy now is to force farmers to sign the contracts. “The producers have no choice, nor can they reuse the seeds,” Souza said.

GM crops threaten native seeds

He also said that in the northern province of Salta, the use of GM soy is spreading in small rural communities, threatening the survival of native seeds.

“We need a law that promotes respect for the production methods of communities that preserve, improve, breed and trade seeds,” he said.

The movement opposed to GM seeds suggests that Argentina could follow the model of the seed laws of Brazil or Bolivia, where GM crops are allowed but native seeds are protected and their use is promoted.

Carballo said that with support from government or from international NGOs, in Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru there are “seed guardians” who select and protect seeds in seed banks that are open to the public.

Argentina also has local programmes for seed protection, like the one that has been operating for two decades in the northeastern province of Misiones.

Through the native seeds programme, the provincial and national governments provide technical support and financing for the selection, preservation and breeding of seed varieties.

“High quality seeds are produced there, which the state later purchases and distributes, because maize is the basis of production of proteins for small rural economies that grow barnyard fowl and hogs,” Carballo said.

“This model foments rural employment and improves the quality of food,” he added.

He said the case of Misiones shows that there are low-cost alternatives for preserving native seeds…and for doing so within a legal framework.

Native varieties of maize, like these drying in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern state of Chiapas, are key to preserving crop diversity. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 8 2013 (IPS)

In the 2011 action-thriller “Unknown”, scientists are persecuted by the biotech industry because they plan the open release of a drought- and pest-resistant strain of maize that could help eradicate world hunger.

There are certain parallels with the situation today in Mexico, the birthplace of maize, which is at the centre of the global fight to protect the crop’s diversity from the onslaught of genetically modified varieties.

“It’s the first time in history that one of the most important harvests in the world is threatened in its centre of diversity,” Pat Mooney, the head of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), an international NGO, told IPS.

“If we let the companies win, there will be no chance to defend them in other parts. What is happening here is of key importance for the rest of the world.”

Civil society organisations are raising their guard against the possibility that the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) may approve commercial cultivation of transgenic maize, a move widely condemned by environmentalists and other activists, academics, and small and medium producers due to the risks it poses.

In September, the U.S. corporations Monsanto, Pioneer and Dow Agrosciences presented six applications for commercial plantations of transgenic maize on more than two million hectares in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and the northeastern state of Tamaulipas.

Moreover, in January these companies and Syngenta presented 11 applications for pilot and experimental plots to grow transgenic corn on 622 hectares in the northern states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa and Baja California. And Monsanto has applied for an additional plantation in an unspecified area in the north of the country.

Since 2009, the Mexican government has issued 177 permits for experimental plots of transgenic maize covering an area of 2,664 hectares, according to the latest figures provided by the authorities.

But large-scale commercial release of GM maize has not yet been authorised.

“They are going to serve up transgenic maize on every table in spite of the fact that food sovereignty depends on growing native corn,” said Evangelina Robles, a member of Red en Defensa del Maíz (Maize Defence Network) which campaigns against GM corn. “As a result, we have to demand its prohibition by the state,” she told IPS.

Mexico produces 22 million tonnes of maize a year, and imports 10 million tonnes, according to the agriculture ministry. The country purchased about two million tonnes of GM maize from South Africa over the last two years, and is set to import another 150,000 tonnes.

Three million maize farmers cultivate about eight million hectares in Mexico, two million of which are devoted to family farming. White maize is the main crop for human consumption, while yellow maize, for animal feed, is largely imported.

The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Policy (CONEVAL) estimates the country’s annual consumption of maize at 123 kg per person, compared to a world average of 16.8 kg.

The historical link with pre-Columbian indigenous cultures gives maize a strong symbolic and cultural significance throughout Mesoamerica, the area comprising southern Mexico and Central America, where it was domesticated, producing 59 landraces or native strains and 209 varieties.

In the state of Mexico, adjacent to the capital city’s Federal District, small farmers have found their native maize to be contaminated with GM maize, according to tests carried out by students at the state Autonomous Metropolitan University.

“We swapped seeds and decided to do some tests. Now we are more careful when exchanging, and over who participates in the fair, although we still have to carry out confirmation tests,” activist Sara López, of the Red Origen Volcanes (Volcanoes Origins Network), an association of small farmers that has been organising producers’ fairs since 2010, told IPS.

Environmental, scientific and small farmers’ organisations have discovered GM contamination of native maize in Chihuahua, Hidalgo, Puebla and Oaxaca.

Contamination is “a carefully and perversely planned strategy,” according to Camila Montecinos, from the Chile office of GRAIN, an international NGO that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

Transnational food companies “chose maize, soy and canola because of their enormous potential for contamination (by wind-pollination),” said Montecinos, one of the experts participating in the preliminary hearing on transgenic contamination of native maize at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an international opinion tribunal which opened its Mexican chapter in 2012 and will conclude with a non-binding ruling in 2014.

“When contamination spreads, the companies claim that the presence of transgenic crops must be recognised and legalised,” in order to pave the way for marketing the GM seeds, to which they own the patents, she said.

Mexico’s environment minister, Juan Guerra, has said that all available scientific information will be examined before a decision is made.

But that will not be easy. The National Confederation of Campesinos (Small Farmers), one of the main internal movements in the ruling PRI, has had an agreement with Monsanto since 2007 under which the company is to “conserve” native varieties.

Meanwhile, the Peña Nieto government still has not approved regulations for the format and contents of reports on the results of releasing GM organisms, and the possible threats to the environment, biodiversity, and the health of animals, plants and fish.

“For 18 years, corporations have been unsuccessful in convincing the people that their products are good. Maize is being used as a means of political and economic control. People need maize to be alive,” the ETC Group’s Mooney said.

The transgenic seeds on the market are herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready and Bt (for the Bacillus thuringiensis gene they carry for pest resistance) versions of cotton, maize, soy and canola. While they are legally grown in Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Spain, they are banned for example in China, Russia and the majority of the EU countries.

Recent studies published in the United States show that transgenic crops do not significantly increase yield per hectare, do not reduce herbicide use, and do not increase resistance to pests, in contrast to biotech industry claims.

“We are analysing what legal action to take against the new applications (to plant GM maize),” said Robles, of the Maize Defence Network.