Genetically altered corn worries Mexican farmers
By DINA CAPPIELLO
Environment Writer
Houston Chronicle, Feb 22 2004
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/2414312

CAPULALPAN, Mexico -- The villagers knew that the corn stalk growing in Olga Maldonado's garden was different. It stood taller than a man, and the husks holding the ears dangled in bunches, like bananas.

"The way it grew, it was amazing," said her brother, Javier Toro Maldonado.

Many of the people who stopped to gawk had grown corn in this mountainous community for generations, swapping seeds and fine-tuning the genes so the crop would flourish on the steep slopes.

But they hadn't seen anything like this.

"People were curious," Javier Maldonado recalled. "They would say, 'Olga has such big corn, and she doesn't even take care of it.' But Olga never told anybody where she got the seed from."

The corn growing in Olga Maldonado's back yard was not some quirk of nature but a laboratory mutant -- a relative of the genetically modified crops that have been banned in Europe because of health and environmental concerns and that once caused food to be taken off American store shelves when corn approved only for animals turned up in taco shells and tortilla chips.

But its detection in the peasant fields of Mexico, where all the corn varieties in the world had their origins 5,000 years ago, has farmers fearing that the altered gene could infect native plants, creating strange but beneficial traits like the ones that caused villagers to line up along Maldonado's fence six years ago.

Over time, these traits could be preferentially selected by local farmers, slowly phasing out the corn diversity that their culture has nurtured for millennia and that the world has depended on to restock corn fields wiped out by disaster or disease.

In Mexico, some corn varieties grow in drought, another can grow on frigid slopes near mountain summits, and others can be sustained in the dry heat of valleys.

"It's a hot spot for biodiversity. For every little patch of land there, you have different conditions," said Ignacio Chapela, a University of California microbial ecologist who first discovered that Maldonado's plant was genetically modified, containing DNA from bacteria that enables the plant to produce a toxin that kills the European corn borer -- a pest that does not exist in Mexico.

Since his discovery was made public in 2001 in the journal Nature, Mexico's environmental agency has detected traces of genetically altered corn in native plants in 14 villages in the Sierra Juarez mountains, despite a 1998 ban on the planting of such corn in Mexico to protect native genes.

Mexico's agriculture department acknowledged the contamination for the first time just last week, although it said the problem was diminishing and did not pose a threat to traditional corn, public health or the country's seed banks. It said genetically modified corn will continue to be imported for food.

Local farmers fear this genetic "pollution."

"What worries us is that it is an unknown word," said Reinaldo Ruiz Vasquez, 50, a farmer from the village of La Trinidad, referring to "transgenics," another word for genetically altered food. "We worry that our seed will be polluted, and if it is, how it arrived."

Despite the agriculture department's statement, some scientists and local activists say that unless Mexico halts the importation of corn containing transgenics, it puts at risk not only the 50 or so corn varieties unique to the country -- including teosinte, the weedy ancient ancestor of corn -- but also a way of life.

Nowhere is the discovery more unsettling to corn experts and local farmers than in the southern state of Oaxaca, home of Maldonado's village. Indigenous people there have cultivated maize organically, and in isolation, for 5,000 years, creating a diversity unparalleled in any other part of the world -- evident in the seeds, which come in every color of the rainbow.

A foreign gene is viewed as a trespasser.

"At the level of the region, we are worried," said Fausto Martinez, the head of La Trinidad, a hillside village whose 180 farmers grow four separate varieties of corn -- yellow, white, red, and mixed red and white.

"We use what we farm," he said. "We never get corn from outside."

Ruiz Vasquez, who had his corn tested, added: "We like the corn here because it is organic. We don't need chemistry here. The corn is a guarantee because it lasts."

The discovery also has implications for the world outside Oaxaca.

For corn growers the world over, Mexican corn is like a genetic safe-deposit box, tapped when crops are wiped out by storms or disease. Even the country's seed stock could be contaminated by modified genes, Chapela said, because it has to be replaced every six years with seed from the fields.

"Corn is the base of this country," said Aldo Gonzalez, an activist for indigenous rights and the newly appointed leader of Guelatao, another village in the Sierra Norte, about 60 miles north of the city of Oaxaca. "Our towns are made of corn. Without it we are nothing."

Gonzalez gathered recently with about 30 other local leaders and rural farmers in the public library in Ixtlán to discuss the latest chapter in the controversy -- a report due out next month by the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, a group set up by NAFTA and comprising Mexico, Canada and the United States.

Although the meeting was supposed to start at 9 a.m., farmers from nearby villages wandered into the building until 11. Their sun-baked faces studied a screen projecting images from a laptop computer, including a diagram of corn's genetic map.

"It's not going to be easy for them to digest," said Jorge Larson, the biologist leading the meeting, one of five that was scheduled in the region before