Food Tank, March 30, 2023
Mexican and United States trade officials are meeting this week in Mexico City in the first negotiations since the U.S. government filed a formal complaint March 6 against Mexico’s policies restricting the use of genetically modified (GM) corn and the herbicide glyphosate. Science is at the center of the agenda.
Since December 2020, when Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador first announced the restrictions, U.S. government, industry and commodity groups have demanded that Mexico produce scientific evidence to justify what the U.S. government claims are illegal trade restrictions under the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement (USMCA).
The United States Trade Representative (USTR) took the action despite a more flexible new decree, issued February 13, which exempts feed corn, the overwhelming majority of U.S. exports, from restrictions. As U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stated March 6, “we remain firm in our view that Mexico’s current biotechnology trajectory is not grounded in science, which is the foundation of USMCA. We remain unequivocal in our stance that the science around agricultural biotechnology has been settled for decades.”
On March 29, the Mexican government laid out the science in an impressive virtual conference organized by CONACYT, the government’s highest science body. Hopefully, the USTR delegation was watching. The U.S. stance may be unequivocal, but the science is anything but settled. Particularly the science of precaution.
As scientist Alejandro Espinoza Calderón, director of Mexico’s biosecurity agency Cibiogem, explained, “Mexico has a rich store of exceptionally healthy varieties of corn. It is alarming to find that 90 percent of tortillas were shown to have traces of both glyphosate and transgenics. The biosecurity of Mexico is of utmost importance.”
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