“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
—Ronald Reagan
Somehow, Mexicans — the indigenous first and the Mestizos/Spanish after — have managed to grow corn just fine for thousands of years without the help of outside forces. But now, the U.S. government is here to help solve a problem that doesn’t exist in service to the corporations that influence it.
To set the scene, back in December 2020, according to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, “Mexico published a final decree that calls for a phase-out of use of both glyphosate and genetically modified (GE) corn for human consumption in Mexico.”
From the translated version of the Mexican president’s decree:
With the objective of achieving self-sufficiency and food sovereignty, our country must be oriented towards establishing a sustainable and culturally adequate agricultural production, through the use of agroecological practices and inputs that are safe for human health, the country’s biocultural diversity and the environment, as well as congruent with the agricultural traditions of Mexico…
In recent years, different scientific investigations have warned that said chemical has harmful effects on health, both in humans and in some animal species, and has been identified as a probable carcinogen in humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer…
Various countries have banned the use of the aforementioned substance in agrochemicals and many others are evaluating the implementation of similar and other measures to protect the population
In such circumstances, our country must maintain an active participation in the search for instruments that allow it to have sustainable agricultural production through the use of inputs that are safe for human and animal health and the environment.
(Whether GMO corn and glyphosate are actually dangerous for human health is not the point of this article; if you are so inclined, do some of your own research. For what it’s worth, 25 countries and numerous localities within the United States have either outright banned or restricted the use of glyphosate.)
In February 2021, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) obtained emails between government officials at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), the EPA, related agencies, and the corporation that produces and sells glyphosate, Bayer AG, following FOIA requests. The emails show these entities strategizing with one another to circumvent the ban.
One email from the USTR calls Mexico’s health agency involved with the ban “a big-time problem” and another between the USTR and the EPA discusses “using the [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement] USMCA to work through these issues.”
(This, by the way, is why multinational corporations love trade deals such as the USMCA; it provides a convenient in to bypass national sovereignty — not just that of Mexico, but also of the United States and any signatory.)
As of August 17, the USTR has made good on its threat to use the USMCA to try to subvert Mexico’s ban.
Via USTR:
United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai today announced that the United States is establishing a dispute settlement panel under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) regarding certain Mexican measures concerning biotech corn. The United States is challenging measures set out in Mexico’s February 13, 2023 decree, specifically the ban on use of biotech corn in tortillas or dough, and the instruction to Mexican government agencies to gradually substitute—i.e., ban—the use of biotech corn in all products for human consumption and for animal feed. Mexico’s measures are not based on science and undermine the market access it agreed to provide in the USMCA.
If, for example, via a trade deal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) sort proposed and supported by both political parties, the Chinese government were to begin undermining the decisions of duly elected members of the American government by directing sketchy lawyers to sift through provisions in labyrinthine trade deals, I imagine most Americans would be appalled. The whole point of national sovereignty is that locally elected leaders get to make local decisions — you know, that whole “self-governance” thing that the Founding Fathers envisioned.
But beyond that, and perhaps even worse, this isn’t even U.S. government officials interfering of their own volition in the private affairs of Mexico on behalf of the population they govern. These are agencies wholly under the influence of multinational corporations — what RFK Jr. calls “corporate capture” — that have commandeered the gears of government to pursue their own interests, independent of the interests of either the average Americans or Mexicans — the sickest, perhaps, of any political arrangement.