Amid The Alien Corn

Immigration, drugs, and now - maize?

"Amid The Alien Corn" is taken from John Keats' poem Ode to a Nightingale. I doubt Keats had GMO in mind when he wrote that line, but it fits today’s narrative on corn so well. So I’m stealing it.

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It would take some contorting to overstate the importance of corn as a food source in Mexico. Roughly 10,000 years ago, through a process of selective breeding, farmers in Mexico's highlands produced what we today call maize, or corn. Corn is, as an historical fact, hecho en Mexico.

Over the centuries since its cultivation, maize became a critical component of the diet of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. And it continues to fill that roll today. Tamales, tortillas, hominy, elote, esquites - corn is a staple of the Mexican diet. Corn occupies a nearly sacred place in the traditions and cultures of Mexico, a space it has occupied since the Middle Stone Age. So it stands to reason that the United States wants to dictate the characteristics of the corn consumed in Mexico.

Or does it?

Disagreement at the dinner table

Corn is at the center of a storm brewing between the United States and Mexico. The gist of the disagreement is this: Mexico is wary of GMO corn, and wants to eliminate it within their country for both human and animal consumption. The United States, which currently exports about 27% of its corn production to Mexico, of course wants to continue this lucrative export business. However, 85-90% of the corn produced in the U.S. is GMO, and the U.S. has no intention of switching to growing non-GMO corn. So Mexico wants to end corn importation from the U.S. But the U.S. is saying "not so fast - see, there's this thing called the USMCA..."

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is the successor to the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The USMCA, which went into effect in 2020, establishes trade agreements between Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Without going into boring detail on the trade agreement, the upshot is that the U.S. believes that the agreement obligates Mexico to purchase a certain amount of bioengineered foodstuffs; but Mexico's president - Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, colloquially) - believes that clauses in the USMCA related to protecting the health and safety of a nation's population release Mexico of its obligation to purchase biotechnology corn products from the U.S.

AMLO holds strong anti-GMO food beliefs, especially where it relates to corn. And he is not alone: many indigenous leaders in Mexico share the belief that GMO corn is not only unhealthy for humans and animals, but that it will dilute Mexico's rich culinary heritage as it relates to the many and ancient varieties of corn produced and consumed there. The U.S. (specifically, the National Corn Growers Association), meanwhile, characterizes the idea that GMO corn is unhealthy as being based on unsound science.

So what is the science?

Allow me - a non-scientist - to explain it:

GMO food products is a highly polarizing topic. For many people, the idea of natural food sources being biologically manipulated by man is offensive and should be rejected outright.

However, one can argue that all agricultural products have been genetically modified. Before the advent of modern biological techniques, genetic modification took place through trial and error cross-breeding over timescales measured in centuries. Maize is a canonical example of farmers manipulating plant species to derive new forms that are larger and more nutritionally rich.

By comparison, modern GMO techniques are nearly instantaneous. They rely on direct gene targeting and introduction of foreign DNA and viruses intended to create a specific desired response (or trait) in the plant. For many GMO agricultural products today, the desired traits include:

• Resistance to pesticides (so that the plant can be treated with pesticide without it or its fruit dying)

• Resistance to herbicides (so that the plant and/or its growing environment can be sprayed with weed killers such that the unwanted weeds die but not the plant that is being cultivated)

• The inclusion of pesticidal bacteria within the plant itself

• The ability to grow in various soil and climate conditions

• Longer shelf lives

• The addition of other nutritional elements, such as vitamins that human and animal diets require

GMO corn in the U.S. has typically been modified to resist the herbicide Roundup (it has been genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup; Roundup being the most common herbicide used in agriculture) and it has been modified to include the pesticide Bt (it has been genetically modified to incorporate Bacillus thuringiensis genes; Bt is a naturally occurring bacteria that is toxic to a narrow range of insects commonly found in corn crops).

To date, no scientific published and peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that GMOs in general - or Bt in particular - are harmful to humans (one study was published demonstrating a correlation between GMOs and higher risks of tumors and early death in mice, but that study was retracted due to design flaws in the tests backing the study). On the contrary, there is evidence that the presence of the pesticide Bt in crops actually reduces the overall amount of pesticide on those crops, due to the fact that not as much pesticide is needed if Bt is engineered in.

Some GMO foods have been engineered for purely (or seemingly purely) philanthropic purposes. Golden rice is a type of rice that has been engineered to contain high levels of beta-carotene; this beta-carotene is converted by the human body into vitamin A. The goal of golden rice is to reduce childhood blindness in populations that have been historically deficient in vitamin A.

And global warming, soil depletion, and a growing worldwide population almost guarantee that GMO food is here to stay. Crops are being engineered to grow in harsher environments, and to produce higher yields. A hot, starving world will choose food in the stomach over somewhat vague health risks every time.

So am I just a GMO shill?

Nope, just trying to offer a balanced perspective here. Personally, I think we go overboard with GMO foods - there is too much of it, and while there may be no studies directly linking GMO with health risks, there are likewise no longitudinal studies demonstrating that it isn't detrimental to human, animal, or soil health. And while plants engineered to include pesticidal toxins may reduce the overall presence of pesticide-related toxins, plants engineered to resist herbicides have been shown to contain more herbicides, since they can be sprayed freely on those plants, without the risk of killing them.

Likewise, the effects of GMO on the entire ecosystem are not understood. Some studies have shown that non-invasive insect, honeybee, and bird populations are negatively impacted by GMO crops. There are altogether too many unanswered questions related to the efficacy and dangers of GMO. I also believe that the majority of bioengineering of crops today is about capital and profit, and not about human welfare.

So while I believe that GMO is here to stay, and that human intervention into the internal biology of plant life will likely be necessary to sustain consumers in the future, I also believe that consumers should have some agency in deciding what they will consume.

More than anything else, corn - maize - is the food that sates Mexico's hunger. Maize was born in and of Mexico. To force Mexican's to purchase corn that has been bioengineered to contain pesticides and other non-plant DNA is a position that is at odds with the agency of an entire civilization, and with the customs and traditions of the people who built it.