Right before the 2014 World Cup, US trade interests pressured Guatemala’s legislature to lift its national ban on genetically modified (GM) crops and criminalize traditional seed saving practices with up to seven years in prison. Maya elders responded to this “Monsanto Law” with coordinated community teach-ins, which led to mass civil disobedience. Risking their lives under a repressive regime, more than a hundred thousand Maya people joined demonstrations. They blocked highways and urban arteries, while Anonymous hacktivists took down government websites, until the Guatemalan Congress repealed this odious law on September 4th. Uniting rural and urban Guatemalans, their successful uprising brought civic hope to a country long ravaged by civil war. Ten years, later a new progressive political party, symbolically called the “Seed Movement,” won the presidency. Five hundred years after Spain invaded Guatemala, their food sovereignty movement has inspired a broader process of decolonization.
Across the border in Mexico, where maize was domesticated millennia ago, neoliberal governments initially welcomed field trials of GM corn. Then, a series of scandals about cross-pollination of GM corn into native maizes raised worldwide alarm because Mexico is the origin center of the planet’s maize agrodiversity. In response, diverse food movements led by women journalists, Zapatista seed selectors, Maya beekeepers, scientists, and legal strategists used science and the courts to win a ban on the cultivation of GM corn. Despite this moratorium, in 2017 a research team from Mexico’s illustrious public university found that a stunning 90 percent of tortillas contained transgenic sequences. More than a quarter these had measurable Roundup residues.
On New Year’s eve 2020, Mexico’s President López Obrador asserted food sovereignty on a scale previously unimaginably. Through a presidential decree, he banned the import of GM corn for human consumption and announced a phase-out of Roundup and other agrochemicals already banned or restricted in the US. The US responded by filing a trade lawsuit against Mexico. A tribunal appointed under the “new NAFTA” will be announcing its decision any day.
Buy local. Read labels. According to the dominant “educational” model of social transformation in the U.S., if "eaters" can be armed with better information (labels), we will become more socially-responsible consumers of local, organic, GMO-free, seasonal or even homegrown food. Popularizing these ideas with his bestselling 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, food journalist Michael Pollan almost single handedly transformed high fructose corn syrup into a meta symbol of all that's wrong with the industrial food system.
Just when the North American food movements were gaining momentum to demand regulation and corporate accountability, Pollan directed us to individually "vote with our forks.” Small farmers from the global South instead grabbed their metaphoric “pitchforks” and took to the streets to demand collective solutions.
Yet, other than a couple of breezy sentences about how “Mexicans” revere corn, Pollan paid scant attention to maize’s deep symbolism for millions of Indigenous Mesoamericans whose ancestors painstakingly domesticated Zea mays over thousands of years. Small maize farmers (“milperos”) in many different languages still describe themselves as being “people of maize.” Unlike the omnivore’s (singular possessive) dilemma to eat more ethically and healthfully through individualized dietary responsibility, the milperos’ (inherently collective) dilemma requires social struggle that goes beyond the local.
In critique of a “Pollanated” locavorism, this book chronicles how Indigenous-led coalitions in Mexico and Guatemala have, by necessity, wrangled with trade agreements, global patent regimes, and commodity dumping to resist corporate imposition of genetically modified (GM) corn. Despite long histories of state oppression, weak environmental agencies and little consumer information, Mesoamerican coalitions used direct action on a national and even international stage to ban genetically modified (GM) crops. Their plural defense of maize represents a botany of resistance, rather than a botany of singular consumer desire.
Over millennia, Indigenous peoples of the Americas have already adapted maize to thrive in the harshest of microclimates, from arid mountaintops to lowland rainforests. As a rain-fed crop, small farmers plant maize in regions with as little as ten inches of precipitation a year to rainforests deluged by two hundred or more inches annually. Maize can be planted with pointed “dibble” sticks at sea level in the tropics or it can be hoed into hillsides of the Andes. One variety called Puno is cultivated at 12,000 feet, near Lake Titicaca. In fact, Andean farmers have stewarded almost as many endemic landraces as Mexico has produced on either side of the Sierra Madre. North of Mexico, a blue Hopi maize can germinate through two feet of sandy, desert soils. A Nambé Pueblo white maize thrives at an altitude of 6,000 feet in New Mexico. Rarámuri Gileno maize also does well at similar desert altitudes.
As Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his “Ode to Maize,”
America, from a grain
of maize you grew
to crown
with spacious lands
the ocean foam.
A grain of maize was your geography.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas have developed and conserved drought-resistant maize varieties for millennia. Driven by Spanish colonizers into marginal lands, they continued to select varieties for survival during hard times, including an extraordinary olotón maize that makes its own fertilizer. Instead of sharing this maize freely, a corporation is now trying to patent the olotón genes that enable the plant to fix nitrogen from the air through its mucilaginous aerial roots.
Poor farmers have long parsed risk by planting many different varieties, so even if the weather is fickle, they can harvest something and save the seeds of the hardiest plants. Despite the brilliance of Indigenous agriculture, corporate agribusiness would like you to believe that GMOs are necessary to “feed the masses” in a climate altered world. Don’t be fooled. They are developing seeds that grow (and sell) well in northern climates, not the global South. With ever unstable rains, it seems foolish to gamble on fragile corporate monocultures or expect that some elusive future tech will save us.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent every year, it can be tempting to look for silver bullet technologies—but, as Vandana Shiva recently quipped, “Monsanto gets the silver” and “farmers get the bullet.” Climate solutions inherently must be plural and free for impoverished families struggling to survive.
The glass is half full. Small farmers still produce more than two-thirds of the world’s food from their own seeds. Across Mexico, thousands of communities continue to plant 11.5 million maize acres with native seeds that one research team calculated could cross-pollinate to create 138 billion genetically unique maize plants every planting season—a cornucopia of maize diversity adapting in real time to climate change.