NOTE: For the French original of this Le Monde
article:
http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2008/12/11/au-mexique-le-berceau-du-mais-contamine-par-des-ogm_1129750_3244.html
This translation is by Truthout's French language editor, Leslie
Thatcher.
---
---
GMO Contamination in Mexico's Cradle of
Corn
Joëlle Stolz
Le Monde, 11 December
2008
http://www.truthout.org/121208D
Raise the alarm for Mexican
corn's biosecurity: a molecular study conducted by Mexican, American and Dutch
researchers demonstrates the presence of genes from genetically modified
organisms (GMO) among the varieties of traditional corn cultivated in the remote
regions of Oaxaca State in the southern part of the country, even though the
Mexican government has always maintained a moratorium on the use of transgenic
seed.
The results of this study incite the experts to demand much more
restrictive protective measures. "Old time" agriculture as practiced in Mexico -
where wind-blown pollination of corn is the norm and where peasants are in the
habit of exchanging their seed - seems to aggravate the risk of rapid GMO
contamination.
An article that details their conclusions should be
published in the next edition of the review, "Molecular Ecology." It was written
by Elena Alvarez-Buylla of the Institute for Ecology of the Autonomous National
University of Mexico (UNAM), with the collaboration of a dozen other
scientists.
Their work could relaunch the controversy that was unleashed
in 2001 by a highly controversial article in the magazine, "Nature," the authors
of which, biologists David Quist and Ignacio Chapela from the University of
California at Berkeley, revealed that criollos (traditional) corn from the
Oaxaca region - one of the cradles of that cereal - were contaminated by Roundup
Ready (RR) and Bt genes, property of the American company Monsanto.
In
her book, "The World According to Monsanto," (due for release [in English, a
French edition is already available] in March 2009 and already available for
pre-order at Amazon.com), Marie-Monique Robin related how Mr. Chapela became a
victim of "media lynching" at that time at the instigation of the dominant
company in the GMO market. "Nature" ended up publishing a disclaimer, deeming
that the two biologists' article was insufficiently backed up.
However,
seven years later, the work Mrs. Alvarez-Buylla directed broadly confirms their
conclusions, as a report published in the November 13 "Nature" emphasizes. The
researchers have discovered transgenes in three of the twenty-three fields of
Oaxaca's northern sierra where samples were taken in 2001, then in two places
sampled in 2004.
American Allison Snow, of the University of California
and author in 2005 of a preliminary study that seemed to undermine Ignacio
Chapela and David Quist's discoveries (and which were then immediately exploited
by GMO partisans), is publishing an additional complimentary note in the same
issue of "Molecular Ecology," in which she judges the molecular analysis
conducted by the UNAM team to be "very good," bringing to light "the positive
evidence of transgenes."
This acknowledgement did not come without
difficulty. "We battled for two years to get the results of our study
published," declares Mrs. Alvarez-Buylla. "In the course of my entire career, I
have never encountered so many difficulties! There were efforts to stop the
publication of this scientific data!" Biologist José Sarukhan, a UNAM researcher
and member of the United States National Academy of Science, had recommended the
article for publication by that organization's review. The latter rejected the
article in March, with the justification that it risked provoking "excessive
media attention for political or environmentally-related reasons ..."
How
- in spite of the moratorium - have GMO transgenes migrated to the far depths of
Oaxaca's mountains, and also to Sinaloa State in the north, the biggest producer
of corn for human consumption, and to Milpa Alta, a district on the periphery of
Mexico? They are found in one percent of the plots analyzed, which is a lot in
the Mexican context, where 75 percent of the corn planted comes from seeds
selected by peasants from their own harvest.
The first hypothesis is that
some farmers are illegally importing transgenic seeds. Strong suspicions
surround the company Pioneer, a big supplier of hybrid corn seeds purchased by
Mexico from the United States and distributed to small farmers through
government aid programs.
Preliminary data indicate that a third of
Pioneer's seeds are contaminated by GMO, any distinctive labeling of which
Monsanto has succeeded in preventing.
The study's authors call for a
strengthening of "biosecurity measures" to preserve native corn varieties,
especially in Mexico, corn's "center of origin." They say Mexico must set up
truly independent laboratories and adapt criteria of molecular analysis to the
Mexican reality, rather than trusting "methods used in countries such as the
United States which have an agricultural system entirely different from our
own."
But their greatest concern at present involves planned
pharmaceutical trusts which want to make a profit on corn biomass and use it as
a bioreactor in order, for example, to express vaccines and anti-coagulants.
"Given the incidents that have already occurred in the United States
where they have trouble separating bioreactors from GMO, we may fear that corn
could turn into the garbage bin of the pharmaceutical industry, at the expense
of its purpose as food," fears Mrs. Alvarez-Buylla. "What shall we do when
anti-coagulants arrive in Mexicans'
tortilla?"
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