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Alberto Gómez’s garden lives up to its name: The Pantry. In the hectare he has cultivated there are fifty varieties of vegetables, seeds that he inherited from his ancestors and others that he exchanges with his neighbors, such as coriander from María Úrsula Chauzá, cassava and pumpkin from Jesús Antonio Delgado or beans and peanuts. by Aura Lina Dominguez. The three varieties of corn are the crown jewel. He watches her as if a scientist were analyzing her. “If we sow Pira corn at larger spacings, we get a larger ear, better for flour,” he explains, holding a purple-yellow ear of corn in his hand. Imperfect and unique. The difference between this amateur engineer and one employed by Bayer is that his laboratory is located outdoors in a small Colombian farming town and that he does not use chemicals to domesticate his production. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.
Five years ago, the municipality of San Lorenzo in the Nariño department declared itself an area free of transgenic, or genetically modified, plants. The popular initiative has been developing since 2012 as a peaceful resistance against the agricultural industry and the chemicals that these seeds require, whose DNA has been manipulated. Aura Lina Domínguez has dirty hands and a gentle, permanent smile on her face. She is among the farmers who have led the movement, which, she emphasizes, aims to gain sovereignty over their crops. “We did not declare war on Monsanto. “We just want to know what we’re eating,” he says. However, that decision has cost them an ongoing lawsuit from the Colombian Association of Seeds and Biotechnology (Acosemillas) “for exceeding legal powers.” “We defend GMOs and freedom of choice,” Leonardo Ariza, the group’s general manager, said in a video call. “Who are they as a community to say whether it’s possible or not?” he asks.
Aura Lina Dominguez, seed keeper on her farm in San Lorenzo, Nariño. Video: CHELO CAMACHO
Meanwhile, in San Lorenzo, seed exchanges continue, such as the one held one March morning by a dozen farmers from the community, a tradition that has existed since agriculture was agriculture and is experienced as a local festival. “They told us that it was best to modify our seeds. that ours weren’t perfect,” says Domínguez, distributing dozens of colored beads as well as arracacha and turmeric roots on a mat. “But they are. They preserve the history of our ancestors and have fed the entire society. We don’t want them tainted with GMOs and glyphosate [un herbicida necesario en la mayoría de cultivos modificados]. If we could do it, why couldn’t others?
San Lorenzo is the exception in a region where agribusiness has been pushing its agenda for half a century and where native or Creole seeds are losing ground. Currently, all Latin American countries have laws that encourage trade in certified seeds and other biosecurity regulations that encourage the cultivation of genetically modified crops and the use of agrochemicals. This means that in order for them to be marketed, the health authority must certify which of them pass the filter based on several criteria that indicate biological safety.
Alberto and Aura Lina, seed keepers, organize corn on a farm in San Lorenzo, Nariño on March 6, 2023. Chelo Camacho
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agency (FAO), this has led to the loss of 75% of crop varieties over the last century. Experts predict that in less than a century there will be no crops left that have not gone through a laboratory. This means that agricultural biodiversity will only be a memory.
In Latin America, a continent that feeds the world with its raw materials, the question arises: is this the only way to ensure the nutrition of 8 billion people? For Norman Borlaug, yes. The American agronomist and Nobel Peace Prize winner found in genetic modification the way to produce more and faster, one of the main demands of the mid-20th century when scientists wondered how to feed a growing population. Under this pretext of the so-called Green Revolution and the interest in facilitating free trade between the global North and South, Latin America began to adopt a dozen international agreements and treaties regulating the most fundamental aspect of human nutrition: seeds.
In the 1980s, all Latin American countries signed agreements granting something like patents to improve seeds; what the farmer Alberto Gómez did in San Lorenzo, but in a laboratory. Currently, the fight, sponsored by the United States and Europe, is focused on regulations that go further and ban the saving, swapping or selling of seeds, with fines, confiscations and even prison sentences. The majority of Central American countries, Peru and Colombia, have joined this last very restrictive treaty, known as Upov 91. Only Colombia was able to repeal it in 2013.
San Lorenzo Mountains, Nariño (Colombia)Chelo Camacho
In other countries, such as Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia, these demands were passed not in a single treaty, but in small, teardrop-shaped regulations. Carla Poth, professor and researcher at the General Sarmiento National University (Argentina), criticizes the labeling of original seeds as “pirates”: “The laws favor homogeneity and impose many requirements that result in only a few owners Certification can be.” ” . “In addition, the agricultural industry ignores the historical contribution of communities to improving the seeds used for food today,” he explains. Ariza, managing director of Acosemillas, a group supported by Bayer, Syngenta and Corteva, among others, acknowledges that this contribution has not yet been paid: “We want to recognize the added value of farmers.” We are in discussions about how we will pay them royalties can so that they feel rewarded. But it hasn’t started yet.”
“You can’t patent the environment”
Argentina is an example of fighting the power of agribusiness through legal means.
An agricultural field in Cordoba, Argentina. Pablo E. Piovano
In 2007, Monsanto founded Technology LLC [que figura con su propio nombre a pesar de haber sido absorbida por Bayer] claimed in Argentine courts to be able to patent a double-stranded recombinant DNA molecule that makes a plant tolerant [no una semilla] to glyphosate. To put it more simply: They wanted to patent the system under the pretext that they had improved it. In 2019, the Supreme Court rejected the company’s petition in a landmark ruling. The court points out that it is offensive to patent a seed because it has been modified, “just as one cannot argue that the author of a book does not become the owner of the language.”
But a decade Monsanto later went back to court to claim rights to the genetic sequences, claiming that “the molecules were artificial.” In this case, the chamber approved it in 2021. “This is a legal scandal,” shouts Fernando Cabaleiro, lawyer and coordinator of Naturaleza Derechos, an organization that appealed the verdict. “The environment cannot be patented. If the decision is upheld, the company will have achieved in court what it could not achieve through the law in 25 years. It would establish a very dangerous jurisprudence that would perpetuate the loss of food sovereignty. We have to be vigilant.”
A huge mountain of soybeans, in one of the warehouses in the port of Rosario in Santa Fe Province, Argentina. From here the soybeans are shipped to China. Pablo E. Piovano
More and more hands are joining together in the fight against the agricultural industry. Germán Vélez, director of Grupo Semillas, criticizes the business strategy “at any price”. “The result of certifying GMOs is that both the producer and the consumer are setting aside what they have fed us for millennia, while a handful of companies line their pockets,” he says from his office in Bogota. Combined sales of seeds and pesticides from Syngenta, Corteva, Bayer and Basf reached $60 billion in 2020, an amount equivalent to Peru’s national budget.
Wixarika women at the XVI Niwetsika Native Corn Fair in the municipality of El Roble, Nayarit, Mexico. Video: Nayeli Cruz
“If we only eat two or three types of potatoes today [en la región se cuentan unas 4.000], in a hundred years we will subsist on six crops. If we don’t repeal this entire set of rules, we will lose the genetic inheritance. “That’s our story too,” he criticizes. Vélez has already presented three bills in Colombia to make GMOs illegal. “Biotechnology will never be democratized. And Bayer’s interests conflict with those of consumers,” he criticizes. That’s why he and a large number of farmers rely on alternative certifications, so-called participatory guarantee systems, to ensure food security. This is a sovereign certification specifically for farmers and cooperatives with the parameters and requirements of the field, which also meets biosecurity standards.
Are GMOs inherently bad?
The short and theoretical answer is: no. Why would it be negative if science developed seeds that were more resistant to drought or flooding, or if we added more nutrients to our diet? However, the nearly 30-year history of food biotechnology shows that more than 98% of improvements in food come from resistance to herbicides and insecticides sold by the same companies.
The first GMO production emerged in the 90s. Calgene, Inc., a California start-up, changed the genes of a tomato so that it ripened longer. A few years later, large crops resistant to herbicides such as glyphosate, which Monsanto had developed three decades earlier, were already on the market. And others tolerant to glufosinate, owned by Basf. Both pesticides, derived from substances used in the Nazi gas chambers, have been classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “probably carcinogenic” and “moderately hazardous,” respectively. The more than 15,000 lawsuits over cancer related to exposure to agricultural products and the multimillion-dollar, $11 billion fine against Bayer are increasingly calling into question the WHO’s prudence.
A worker fumigates with glyphosate to control weeds in a field in Córdoba, Argentina.Pablo E.Piovano
But the expansion is uncontrollable. There are currently more than 202 million hectares of GMOs in the world. And more than half of them are in Latin America. This is an area similar to that of Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Poland combined. In 2019, this is the region that produces the most GMOs in the world. The majority of these crops consist of just four species: soybeans, corn, cotton and canola; Products mainly used for agrofuels and animal feed. There are only 71,000 hectares of cultivated land in the European Union, in Portugal and Spain. The vast majority of European countries have complete moratoriums on the cultivation of these crops. For Ariza, executive director of Acosemillas, this is not a “double standard”: “It is that they have already produced, they have spent their land on it and now we have the opportunity to do it ourselves.”
David Castro Garro, Peruvian biologist and expert in biotechnology regulation and biosecurity, deplores the prevailing production model: “More and more farmers are giving up their chakras [huertas] There are monocultures and the impact on the country is enormous.” In addition, several international studies show that pests already have resistance to the products. More than 40 glyphosate-resistant weeds have emerged in the United States, and controlling them requires a larger arsenal of herbicides, resulting in the extinction of pollinators and progressive soil degradation. A similar situation exists with transgenic soy and corn plants in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Bayer declined to grant América Futura an interview, but assured in an email that genetically modified organisms “enable the preservation of nearby habitats.”
“Illegal GMOs are being sold on Facebook”
These three countries, which produce the most GMOs in the region, experienced a similar GMO contamination process as Bolivia is currently experiencing. Only one transgenic variety is permitted in the Andean country: RR soybeans from Bayer. However, Marín Condori, national director of the National Institute of Agricultural and Forestry Innovation (Iniaf), estimated in local media that 70% of agricultural fields in Santa Cruz use certified seeds and that the remaining 30% do so with genetic material from the informal and illegal market, from other varieties.
Ismael Elías, a corn producer, works his land with his son Matías Elías in the municipality of Coapan, Jala municipality, in the state of Nayarit, Mexico. Nayeli Cruz
Stanislaw Czaplicki Cabezas, environmental economist and value chain expert, assures that this is no coincidence: “It is the strategy of companies to secretly smuggle their seeds into the territory and then demand laws that allow them to market them freely.” The goals of large Companies are clear and the ways to reach them are diverse.” However, Bayer claims in the email that it “promotes access to different agricultural practices and the coexistence of different forms of production.” For the Argentine lawyer Cabaleiro, the solutions presented by the agricultural industry are “based on untruths”. “They can be refuted by organized people and independent science.”
“They are even sold on Facebook,” says Rita Saavedra, nutritionist and member of the GMO-Free Bolivia platform, by phone. “There is no control. The state turns a blind eye and allows production to proceed without any regulation. In the vegetables we consume, the genetically modified vegetables contain a higher proportion of glyphosate. “We eat poison and no one cares.”
The seed exchange in San Lorenzo (Colombia) breaks the entire logic of capitalism: time passes slowly and no notes or coins move. In what looks like an edible garden, neighbors spread out a mat of cattails and slowly place a handful of seeds of each variety into small basket containers. Turmeric, Pira corn, Patiano bean, cake bean, Yunga corn… “What’s lying around there?” María Úrsula Chauzá, the oldest of the group, barks at another farmer. He laughs loudly and puts several new seeds in his cloth bag as he asks for advice on planting and informs others about medicinal plants. “He has the pharmacy in the garden, son.”
A Wixarikas woman works with corn in the municipality of El Roble, Nayarit.Nayeli Cruz
Latin America is the region of the world with the greatest agricultural diversity. This is the center of creation and artisanal improvement of hundreds of crops such as corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, cotton… In Mexico there are 64 native varieties of corn; 34 in Colombia, from which more than 7,000 subtypes are derived. There are about 3,000 subspecies of quinoa and more than 4,000 varieties of potatoes in Peru; most in the Andes. For Alba Marlene Portillo, founder of the Network of Guardians of the Seeds of Life in Colombia, the contamination of native crops puts at bay “one of the most valuable treasures in the world”: “All our flavors and an ancient culture.”
Credits
Video editing: Montse Lemus