“Reason has ultimately prevailed in favour of life, health, nature, biodiversity and food sovereignty.”
After a four-year legal battle on multiple fronts with Mexico’s AMLO government, Monsanto has finally thrown in the towel. Last Tuesday, Mexico’s National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (Conahcyt) announced that two Mexican divisions of Monsanto — now subsidiaries of German chemicals giant, Bayer, which in 2018 acquired Monsanto in arguably the worst ever corporate merger — had dropped their law suits against the Mexican government over its intention to ban genetically modified corn.
As readers may recall, Mexico’s outgoing President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador signed a presidential decree in 2020 seeking to ban all use and importation of GMO corn and the toxic weedkiller, glyphosate. His government has also placed import restrictions on white corn, which is generally used for human consumption in Mexico. The reasons cited for doing so include protecting the health of the population, the environment and Mexico’s genetic diversity of maize.
But this is not just about biotech. It is about increasing Mexican food sovereignty by reducing the threat of unfair US competition in the global corn market. As even the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, an international affairs think tank, recently conceded, US corn has dominated Mexico over the past three decades for one main reason: thanks to NAFTA, the scales have been stacked in the favour of US growers:
[T]he main reason US corn dominates the market is because the federal government heavily subsidizes corn production, to the point where American corn can be sold at prices well below the cost of production. Mexico has no such policies. In fact, the Mexican government eliminated nearly all price support for its agricultural sector as a part of NAFTA. As a result, US corn flooded the market, causing corn prices to plummet by as much as 66 percent.This drop forced many Mexican producers out of business.
In response to the AMLO government’s proposed ban on GMO corn, global agrochemical companies and seed manufacturers, including Bayer, and the Mexican lobbying associations that tirelessly represent their interests (Proccyt, AC and the National Agricultural Council) unleashed a wave of over 30 amparos (judicial protective orders) aiming to declare the decree unconstitutional. However, the vast majority of these trials have been concluded with rulings unfavourable to the companies involved or their lobbying associations.
A Rare Exception
But one of the cases filed by Monsanto/Bayer offered a rare exception. In 2022, Judge Francisco Rebolledo Peña ruled in favor of Monsanto with (in the words of the Mexican pro-government media outlet Regeneración) “a controversial, contradictory and partial ruling that ignored the evidence provided by the authorities.” That ruling was swiftly appealed by the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), the Federal Commission for Protection against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris) and Conahyct.
In the resulting trial, Conahcyt provided scientific and legal defences, presenting more than 250 pieces of evidence to support the government’s 2020 decree. The appeal ultimately resulted in Mexico’s Fourth Collegiate Court on Administrative Matters rejecting Monsanto’s arguments, citing human rights and environmental safety concerns.
In 2023, Monsanto filed another lawsuit, this time against AMLO’s modified decree which allowed the use of GMO corn in animal feed and the making of consumer products like cosmetics, textiles and paper while maintaining a ban on GM corn for human consumption, particularly in the use of making flour for tortillas, which are a staple of the Mexican diet. The changes to the law meant it would have limited impact on Mexican imports of US corn, at least during the short to medium term, since most of those imports are already used “for fodder and industrial uses.”
This later amparo was also shot down, this time by Judge Elizabeth Trejo Galán who in her ruling underscored the precedence of public over private interest (what a quaint notion!).
Last week, Monsanto’s owner, Bayer, finally threw in the towel altogether by withdrawing all of its legal challenges against the 2020 presidential decree. Conahcyt described Bayer’s retreat as a major legal victory for Mexico in which “reason ultimately prevailed in favour of life, health, nature, biodiversity and food sovereignty.” Noting that the legal victory over Monsanto highlights Mexico’s commitment to safeguarding public health and environmental integrity, Conahcyt pledged to continue working to ensure that GM corn and glyphosate are removed from the Mexican food supply.
A Four-Year Corn War
There is still plenty of work to do as Mexico’s four-year “Corn War” with its two USMCA partners, the United States and Canada, reaches a pivotal moment. As readers may recall, in August 2023 the US escalated its food fight with Mexico by calling for the formation of a dispute settlement panel under the USMCA North American trade deal to determine whether AMLO’s 2023 decree undermines the market access Mexico’s government agreed to provide in the USMCA.” Canada quickly joined the US’s dispute against Mexico.
We are now in the closing stages of this process…
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Nick Corbishley 