Chapter 7 of Eating Tomorrow, excerpted with permission
By the time I arrived in Mexico City in 2014, the corn issue on people’s minds wasn’t the ethanol-driven spike in tortilla prices, nor the apparent return to punishingly low crop prices for Mexican corn farmers thanks to NAFTA. It was the battle to keep GM corn out of Mexico.
In 2009, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont, Pioneer and other multinational agri-chemical companies petitioned the Mexican government for land in northern Mexico for the commercial production of genetically modified (GM) corn. The government reshuffled its bureaucracy and adjusted its laws to accommodate the agribusiness giants, quickly approving permits for experimental and trial planting, the precursor, they all assumed, for the quick issuing of commercial licenses. Indeed, those commercial license requests would be for nearly 7 million acres. But in September 2013 Judge Jaime Eduardo Verdugo J. issued a precautionary injunction on all further permits citing “the risk of imminent harm to the environment.” A group of 53 individuals and 22 organizations, in the name of a coalition of farmer, consumer, and environmental groups (La Demanda Colectiva), had petitioned for a ban on GM corn arguing that inevitable gene flow from GM to native corn would threaten Mexico’s maize diversity.[i]
When I arrived in Mexico six months later the injunction was still in place. It was difficult to imagine a more unlikely place to stop the biotech giants. The Mexican government, a fully subservient U.S. partner under NAFTA, fully backed their requests. Between the companies and the government, they had more than 100 lawyers working to overturn the injunction. The Gene Goliaths had already filed more than 60 legal challenges. Taking them on was a plucky little David of a public-interest law firm, and a strong and well-organized group of leaders who had been fighting for Mexico’s maize diversity for years. Armed only with legal slingshots, they had beaten back every challenge, relying on new powers that came with Mexico’s recognition for the first time of class action suits. Still, with Mexico’s well-documented history of government corruption, what chance did David & Co. LLC have of stopping a genetically modified Goliath? Yet another legal challenge, from Monsanto, was pending before yet another judge.
Since it was Easter Sunday, I attended mass at San Hipólito Church in the heart of Mexico’s historic city center. Locally, the 18th century church is known less for Saint Hipólito than for San Judas Tadeo, the “patron saint of lost causes,” according to the translation at the church entrance. I didn’t think the GM lawsuit was a lost cause, but it sure seemed a long shot. I lit a candle and said a prayer. I’m not Catholic, nor even very religious, but it seemed the least I could do. The next day, the judge denied Monsanto’s request, leaving the injunction in place.
I told René Sánchez Galindo, the public interest lawyer on the case, that I’d said a prayer to San Judas. He laughed a knowing laugh. He told me that he is not very religious, but when he was nine years old he fell off his bike, hit his head, and went into a coma. His family didn’t know if he was going to survive. He came out of his coma on October 28, the day the church devotes to San Judas Tadeo. “My aunt is a firm believer,” he said. “She told me that she had prayed to San Judas when I was in the hospital and that he had saved my life.”
Sánchez Galindo thanked me for my prayer but offered a different explanation for defeating the latest legal challenge. “The judge surely eats tacos,” he smiled. “Everyone here eats tacos. They know maize is different.”
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