A furrow of just five centimeters breaks through the earth and opens a path. A group of seeds are deposited at a proportional distance and the farmer covers them again with the soil. Between the next two and three months the milpa will grow, then the cob will come out. The corn will be white, yellow, pink, red, purple, blue or black; it all depends on the seed chosen by the farmer, as well as on the climate, the region and the technique.
Growing corn in Mexico is a primary activity that thousands of people depend on. The federal government estimates that a Mexican consumes an average of 196.4 kilos per capita per year, mainly white and tortilla. Beyond gastronomy, economy and food security, it is also culture and history. If there are more than 60 varieties of native corn in the country, it is because the selection of seeds comes from a knowledge of agriculture from the native peoples that has been inherited for generations.
The problem is that climate changes, industrial monocultures and genetic modification through the introduction of transgenic corn are factors that put this diversity at risk.
What has Mexico done? To attend the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP16), which takes place between October 21 and November 1 in Cali, Colombia, the Mexican delegation prepared a plan of 48 goals for achieving conservation by 2030. One of them focuses on the traceability of genetically modified organisms, focused solely on identifying where the transgenic corn is.
The main objective is to track its entire journey through the supply chain to keep it out of agricultural systems and consumption among the population. A point that relates to one of the most relevant conversations for States parties to this COP16 on Biodiversity: genetic resources.
A topic from COP16
To understand what is happening today at COP16 on Biodiversity, it is necessary to take a look two years ago at COP15, in Canada, when the Kunming-Montreal Global Framework for Biodiversity (GBF) emerged with four objectives for 2050 and 23 goals for 2030 focused on conserving the world's biodiversity.
To reach COP16, countries committed themselves to developing their goals based on the GBF so that each country would have a comprehensive plan of action. However, of the 196 nations, only 35 submitted such plans, representing only 17% of the total. Mexico is part of this percentage.
“I think there will be a wake-up call to the relatively low compliance of countries with the commitment to raise the targets,” Andrea Cruz Angón, director of Cooperation in Biodiversity, of the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio), explained a few days before COP16, in an interview for this coverage.
For Mexico, it was a task of almost two thousand hours with more than 200 public servants. One of them is Adelita San Vicente Tello, general director of natural resources and biodiversity, of the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat).
Not only has San Vicente Tello been part of this process, it also has experience in research on native corn and participated in the decrees that banned transgenic corn during the recent six-year term of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. One in December 2020 and one in February 2023.
These two presidential decrees prohibit the use of GM seeds for agricultural crops. “This ban prevents transgenic corn from contaminating native corn in Mexico and putting its biodiversity at risk,” the government said in an official statement.
“Since the first decree, we have seen that traceability is a complex issue because the shipments of corn that arrive in Mexico are dispersed and we don't really know where genetically modified corn is arriving. It is imported and has its authorization permission from the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks (Cofepris), but we don't know its follow-up,” San Vicente Tello explained in an interview for this publication.
With the prohibition decrees, a Cofepris label was established that indicates that imported transgenic corn should not be intended for human consumption. Among the problems studied with transgenics is the genetic contamination of biodiversity. A speech that has been denied by the United States, a country from which Mexico imports transgenic corn, and some specialists.
The current president Claudia Sheinbaum has also followed the politics of the previous six-year term. From the beginning of his term of office, he included in number 62 of his 100 commitments that food sovereignty would be an axis of politics for the countryside. “We will guarantee the self-sufficiency of GMO-free white corn, from production to consumption,” he said in his demonstration on October 1.
Mexico's position
In the early days of COP16, the Mexican delegation was present at conversations related to climate finance, forest conservation and mechanisms for the participation of indigenous peoples, according to information shared by Semarnat and Conabio through their social networks.
For this publication, more information was requested from both agencies regarding traceability goals. At press time, there was no response.
However, director San Vicente Tello, from Semarnat, pointed out that one of the major debates of the COP16 on Biodiversity relates to digital sequencing systems (DSI) of genetic resources, which are sets of data that store and transmit information from the DNA of biological diversity without the need for physical access.
For the official, this is “the green gold of emerging technologies”.
“What is being debated at the COP is whether these sequences will have a mechanism for Access to Genetic Resources and Fair and Equitable Benefit Sharing (ABS) because these gene banks are free, they are open to developed countries that access the digital sequence and, not that they can generate life from there, but very valuable information is obtained with the possibility of patenting that information,” said San Vicente Tello.
The researcher worked on goal 13 related to access to genetic resources of biodiversity, which has its origins in the Nagoya Protocol, which seeks to promote the sovereignty of countries over their genetic resources to promote conservation and not the private interests of third parties.
“Mexico has donated a lot of genetic resources to the world, it is the basis of many technologies and we want it to be recognized... There is a very clear position in terms of the fact that as a megadiverse country, traceability is required, knowing where that sequence came from and, as far as possible, establishing ABS conditions for fair and equitable participation,” added San Vicente.
The voices of peasant communities
While the COP16 on Biodiversity is taking place, in western Mexico, in Jalisco, one of the main producing states, more than 100 rural families that make up the Network for Sustainable Agricultural Alternatives (RASA) are preparing for the free exchange of corn seeds that they have organized every November for 20 years. One of its main drivers is Jaime Morales, a small organic farmer and researcher of the network.
“From the beginning, we have been committed to the free exchange of seeds. We have a training center in Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos with a local seed fund that we have been improving. We keep local corn seeds,” Morales explained.
For these farming communities, conserving maize diversity is not new. They have been ready before the decrees and negotiations between countries. And they consider that talking about conservation in agriculture has other questions about the regulation of agricultural industries and their environmental impacts. A topic that is still pending in international dialogues.
“What seems much more serious to me is the advance of large agro-industrial crops such as avocados, agave or red fruit greenhouses because they are ending corn agriculture. It doesn't matter if corn is hybrid or native, (large industries) are ending all types of agriculture because they arrive, occupy, rent land for 20 years...”, said Morales.
However, for Morales, the defense of native corn will not be possible if it falls only on farmers. To achieve this, consumer participation is necessary. “The contamination of maize agrobiodiversity in Mexico is also an issue for consumers and they have to fight it,” says the RASA research farmer.
In a country where the average consumption of corn is 196.4 kilos per capita per year, the conversation should go beyond the COP16 on Biodiversity.
This article is part of Climate Tracker's COP16 Biodiversity stories program in collaboration with FES Transformation.
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