The establishment of a controversy panel against Mexico’s ban on transgenic corn under the T-MEC has demonstrated the United States and Canada’s intent to “alienate national sovereignty and food sovereignty” and the “imposition” of an agrarian-food model that “had serious consequences” such as increased migration, epidemics of obesity and diabetes, as well as “a strong crisis in the countryside that makes us dependent” on the importation of basic products such as yellow corn, which come from “an elite of producers benefited from multi-million dollar Subsidies,” claimed the National Campaign “There is no country without corn”.
Commenting on the request from the governments of the member countries of the trade agreement, he stressed that “it is important to support the Mexican government’s position,” as it is based on the “inalienable right to health” and the protection of a healthy environment and biodiversity of Mexico’s native corn.
The organizations that make up the National Campaign emphasized that the Presidential Decree, published in the Official Gazette on December 31, 2020, ordering the phasing out of the use of the herbicide glyphosate and the ban on genetically modified maize, “opened the historic opportunity to do so. “Bring about profound changes before the neoliberal model”.
However, as soon as the first decree appeared, “pressure from the US government and the agri-food corporations it represents began” and resulted in a request for technical consultations in June 2023, in which the scientific basis on which the decree was based was presented in question. Decree, he noted.
He mentioned that the US government had refused, even though the necessary evidence had been presented, and that the Mexican government had even proposed conducting a joint investigation to analyze the harm caused to human health by glyphosate and transgenic maize.
“This refusal shows that there is no will to move forward constructively, because the mere fact of accepting it would call into question what the United States and the transnational corporations wanted to present as the absolute truth: that the glyphosate/GM corn technology package does this. “Not be harmful to health,” he said.
In the document, the National Campaign indicated that it “wants to ignore the fact that large sections of the population in the United States and Canada oppose the use of this pairing,” for example, because of the accumulated evidence of harm to health that is being demonstrated “with lawsuits obtained from Americans who develop cancer as a result of glyphosate use”.
“Companies would rather pay the lawsuits than lose the multimillion-dollar business that this herbicide represents,” he said.
