Environmental for Food Justice

Imagen de una protesta en el Centro de la Ciudad de México contra la trasnacional Monsanto. Photo by Pablo Ramos. Moderator’s Note: We have been waiting for news on this important case, the latest, and perhaps the last, in a ten-year campaign by Monsanto and its allies to impose transgenic maize products on Mexico. Due process in Mexico is a tangled and lengthy juridical process and Monsanto has exploited the ‘amparo’ rights clause of the Mexican Constitution to prolong and intensify its attacks on Indigenous and peasant farmers. These are the farmers who sustain the living seed libraries of the vital Mesoamerican Vavilov Center of Origin and Diversification of corn among more than three dozen other native crops that literally feed the world. This attack continued through the means of repeated challenges to successful court decisions and rulings verifying the legality of the ban on genetically engineered corn, soy, and other transgenic crops. The underlying rationale of the anti-GMO m...

Moderator’s Note: While Spain is not a center of origin and diversity of maize (corn), there is growing concern in that country over the threat of genetic contamination of the wild ancestors of the grain as a result of cross-pollination with genetically engineered (transgenic) maize. The proven threat of gene flow posed by transgenic corn has led a coalition of civil society organizations involved in agricultural and environmental advocacy in Spain to issue a letter urging their government to ban the planting of transgenic corn. The concerns expressed by the coalition are troubling indicators of an area of environmental risk that has been tragically underplayed in the USA movements to regulate the commercial planting of GE corn. This despite the fact that the USA has multiple bona fide centers of origin and diversity of maize, including the Culebra watershed in Costilla County, Colorado. In August of 2015, the Sangre de Cristo Acequia Association, which represents more than 300 acequi...