“Both the USMCA and this ruling issued by the trade dispute panel are designed primarily to protect the interests of transnational corporations.”
Note to readers: This is a particularly depressing story for Christmas Eve, for which I apologise, but it is, I believe, an important one that is presumably garnering little coverage in the US and Canada.
As we warned would happen a few weeks ago, Mexico has lost the dispute settlement panel brought by the US and Canada over its attempt to ban imports of genetically modified corn for direct human consumption. On Friday (December 20), the arbitration panel ruled in favour of the United States, asserting that Mexico’s 2023 decree banning the use of genetically modified (GM) white corn for human consumption violated the terms of the trade agreement.
It wasn’t even a close run thing: the panel’s three judges agreed with the US on all seven counts in the case. The panel has given Mexico 45 days to realign its policies with the ruling. Failure to do so could result in stiff penalties, including sanctions.
As we’ve noted before, this case may be an important battle for Big Ag lobbies and biotech companies but it is an existential one for Mexico, for whom corn is the cornerstone not only of its cuisine and diet but also its culture.
The dispute panel argues that Mexico’s provisions against GMO corn cannot be applied as they are not based on an adequate risk assessment, scientific evidence or relevant international standards.
This is despite the mountains of evidence from peer-reviewed literature the Mexican government provided showing ample cause for concern about the risks of consuming GM corn and the residues of the herbicide glyphosate — most commonly known as Roundup — that often come with it.
By contrast, as Timothy A Wise, author of Eating Tomorrow and senior adviser at the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy, documented in a recent piece for TruthDig, “when Mexico challenged the US to show that its GM corn is safe to eat in the far greater quantities and forms that Mexicans consume it, it received no response”:
“As a Reuters headline put it in March: ‘Mexico waiting on US proof that GM corn is safe for its people.’ No such proof was forthcoming as the U.S. government flailed in its attempts to counter the hundreds of studies Mexico identified that showed risk. A U.S. filing claiming to rebut the evidence did no such thing.”
As Wise put it, “the emperor has no science.” But that hasn’t prevented it from winning on every count!
US Celebrations
Washington is thrilled with the outcome. The US trade representative, Katherine Tai, said the panel’s decision reaffirms long-standing concerns of the United States about Mexico’s biotechnology policies and their detrimental impact on U.S. agricultural exports.
US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, claimed that Mexico’s measures contradict decades of evidence demonstrating the safety of agricultural biotechnology, backed by science- and risk-based regulatory review systems
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This, of course, will be news to all the 165,000 people who have filed lawsuits against Bayer for cancers caused by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide whose use goes hand-in-hand with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GMO corn. Bayer has already set aside a whopping $16 billion to cover the costs of litigation, and there are still many more lawsuits pending. Its shares continue to slide, having already lost roughly 80% of their value since 2018, when they made the disastrous decision to buy Monsanto for $60 billion.
Glyphosate is banned or has been restricted in 18 countries, as well as in several cities in Spain, Argentina and New Zealand, in 80 percent of the regions of Canada and even in three US cities, as an editorial in La Jornada notes. Yet according to the panel, there are no issues. In most countries, including Mexico, Roundup is still the most widely used herbicide. Worse still, a recent study by Friends of the Earth suggests that the chemicals used in Bayer’s new Roundup formulations were significantly more toxic to humans experiencing chronic exposure than glyphosate-based Roundup.
In reaching its decision, the trade panel also appears to have completely ignored the environmental damage caused by widespread, persistent use of GMO crops. From La Jornada:
[A]ll GMOs are planted in huge monoculture fields because that is the only way to make patented seeds profitable. This has devastating consequences for the environment: as the name implies, monocultures involve the complete destruction of biodiversity in an area to install a single plant species. Also, this overcrowding of plants of the same type creates perfect conditions for the spread of pests, which is why GMOs require extensive use of pesticides and herbicides that wipe out flora and fauna, represent a risk to human health and, when they seep into the water tables or are discharged into bodies of surface water, can devastate entire ecosystems.
The potential health risks posed by GM corn — painstakingly documented by the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies cited in Mexico’s defence, including indications of serious kidney and liver ailments in adolescents after even low-level exposures to glyphosate — are magnified in Mexico, where the national diet revolves around minimally processed white corn, in particular tortillas. Cornmeal provides more than 60% of the average Mexican’s daily calories and protein, which is around 10 times the US average, putting Mexicans at 10 times the risk.
Perhaps the most nonsensical part of this whole process is that Mexico’s 2023 corn ban has so far had a barely perceptible impact on US exports of corn to Mexico. The reason for this is simple: Mexico’s 2023 ban, which replaced a much tougher earlier ban, only applies to the use of GM white corn for human consumption and does not restrict imports of GM yellow corn for animal feed or industrial uses, which account for almost the entirety of US corn imports from the US.
In fact, both last year and so far this year Mexico’s imports of yellow corn from the US have continued to grow despite the ban. As Wise notes, “at a time when the US president-elect is threatening to levy massive tariffs on Mexican products, a blatant violation of the North American trade agreement, it is outrageous that a trade tribunal ruled in favour of the U.S. complaint against Mexico’s limited restrictions on genetically modified corn, which barely affect U.S. exporters.”
To all intents and purposes, NAFTA 2.0 appears to be consolidating what NAFTA 1.0 set in motion: the near-total dependence of Mexico on US producers for its most basic staple crops, including corn, beans and rice. When NAFTA was signed in 1994, Mexico imported $5 billion worth of agricultural products. By 2023 that figure had increased almost sixfold, to $29 billion.
The reason for this was simple, as Wise explains in the interview below with the Real News Network: while the US and Canada continued to heavily subsidise agricultural producers, Mexico’s neoliberal government cancelled its farm subsidies, making it impossible for the country’s small and medium producers to compete with producers from Canada and United States.
Fast-forward to today, the Biden administration’s decision to launch the trade dispute appear to have been driven by two main goals: to nip in the bud any threat to the US’ corn and biotech sectors as well as set an example for other countries. Imagine what would have happened if Mexico had imposed the ban and was able to gradually ween itself off GM corn by buying the grain from elsewhere and expanding its domestic production?
What kind of example would that have set for other countries, particularly those in Latin America that are among the world’s biggest buyers of GM seeds?
If allowed to proceed, it would have eventually harmed the financial interests not only of the four companies that control 85% of the corn seed market but also the few giant farms that dominate the US’ corn sector. More important still, it would have set a very dangerous precedent. By launching this dispute settlement and winning it, the US and Canada have sent a clear message to governments worldwide: think twice before adopting measures to protect public health and the environment, if those measures threaten in any way the economic interests of a major exporter with whom you have signed a “free trade” agreement…
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Nick Corbishley 