Excellent article on the Mexican maize contamination scandal, bringing the issue bang up to date.

For articles from the press on the Monsanto dirty tricks ("neo-viral") campaign referred to:
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=25&page=1

For links to profiles of individuals and organisations involved:
http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=166
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Transgenic contamination of Mexican corn adds insult to NAFTA injury
PAN-AMERICAN ADVENTURE: Oaxaca, Mexico
http://www.newfarm.org/international/pan-am_don/aug04/oaxaca.shtml
In his second of two stories on Mexican corn, Don Lotter traces the history of carelessness - and cover-up - that threatens the heart of the world's corn biodiversity.
By Don Lotter

Native varieties of corn near Guelatao de Juarez, Oaxaca, where genes from genetically engineered US corn have been found contaminating the native corn.

Posted August 31, 2004: Small-scale Mexican corn farmers were expected by experts to abandon fields all over Mexico, due to the near-complete loss of farm subsidies combined with the opening of the Mexican market to heavily subsidized US corn. Subsidies for Mexican farmers have dropped, at the behest of US "free market" proselytizers, from 33% of farm income to less than 13%, while during the same period subsidies for US farmers have grown and now make up 40% of US farm income. Cheap corn from the US is flooding the Mexican market and competing with the locally grown corn.

But against all predictions, corn acreage is up in Mexico, despite the economic disincentives. Different theories are tossed about as to the reasons. Remittances (money sent from Mexicans in the US), a $13 billion industry, larger than Mexico’s agricultural economy, are believed by some to currently subsidize small-scale corn production. Some farmers must keep cultivating land in order to maintain rights to it, so they plant what they are accustomed to growing: corn.

These small-scale corn farmers, now almost completely abandoned by their government, as well as by the market system, are also the guardians of most of the world's corn biodiversity -- the approximately 60 major land races, as Mexico is the major center of origin and diversity of corn. The fact that the Mexican government, along with the NAFTA administration, willfully designed an economic policy to drastically reduce the number of small farmers who are the keepers and original developers of such a valuable resource, is unconscionable.

On top of the loss of corn as the economic base of rural Mexican communities is the problem of contamination of indigenous corn by transgenes, genes from genetically modified US corn.

Mexico's shift to the "free market" directly underpins the contamination of the native varieties corn by transgenes: Mexico imports about five million tons of corn a year from the US. On the average, 30% of the US corn is transgenic, which has been mixed with non-transgenic corn. While the cultivation of transgenic crops is not yet permitted in Mexico, their import as food and feed is. It is now believed that the transgene contamination came from Mexican peasant farmers buying corn from local stores and, as is common here, planting it as part of their corn crop.

According to Aldo Gonzales of the Uníon de Organizaciones de la Sierra Juarez Oaxaca, a group dedicated to the welfare of indigenous farmers, the most likely channel of entry of transgenic corn was via the local government stores which sell grain in rural areas all over Mexico. Transgenic corn that was imported from the US was mixed with corn for sale via the government stores, named DICONSA. Farmers often plant the seed sold at DICONSA stores. The distinction between corn as feed or food and corn as seed for planting has never traditionally existed in rural Mexico.

Guelatao de Juarez, the town where Gonzales' group is based, is one of the communities where transgenes were found in the corn crops of indigenous farmers. Samples from the local DICONSA stores were transgene positive as well.

The controversy first broke when Ignacio Chapela and David Quist of UC Berkeley published a paper in the journal Nature in December 2001 showing that transgenes from Bt and RoundUp Ready corn contaminated the local corn in Oaxaca. The evidence showed that the transgenes had "introgressed" into the local corn, meaning that, mostly likely via pollen transfer from transgenic corn plants, the genes had been transferred to the local corn. The next year, Mexican government scientists showed the same result, concluding that 3% to 60% of corn samples were contaminated with transgenes. Furthermore, it was stated in the Chapela article that the promoter gene, known as the 35S promoter, originally from cauliflower mosaic virus, was probably one of the polluting genes. The function of the promoter gene is to turn on the target transgene. Much is unknown about what the promoter gene would do in the native corn plants.

Transgenes in corn are independent entities so that when they introgress into populations they can be more or less hidden. In other words, if pollen from transgenic yellow corn (all commercial transgene corn is yellow) fertilizes white corn, the kernels that were pollinated will develop into yellow grains where the transgenic pollen fertilized, but not necessarily in subsequent generations. Subsequent generations of corn can be yellow with transgenes, white with transgenes, yellow without transgenes, or white without transgenes.

Different transgenes can end up mixed in one plant. No testing has ever been done on such mixes, and no one knows what effect this kind of mixture may have on human or animal health.

A storm of controversy, created by the biotech industry PR machine, followed the findings of Quest and Chapela. For the first time in its 133 year history, Nature, considered the top science journal in the world, published an "apology" (short of a retraction) stating that they should not have published the paper, even though it had been reviewed by scientific peers. It turns out that they were under intense pressure from the biotechnology community, reportedly facilitated by a PR firm hired by Monsanto, to retract the paper.

When scientists from the Mexican government submitted to the results of their study, which verified the Quist and Chapela results that there is transgenic contamination in Mexican corn, the two peer reviewers for Nature turned it down – one stating that the results were already common knowledge (!) and the other rejecting it saying that the percentage contamination was too high to be believable.

The possible reasons behind the Nature editors' questionable decisions came out via some aggressive investigative journalism by a writer for The Guardian (UK), George Monbiot, who uncovered a surreptitious, neo-viral type PR campaign whose goal was to attack and undermine the work of Chapela and the Mexican scientists. The PR firm, the Bivings Group, was reported by Monbiot to be a client of Monsanto and other biotech firms. The attacks were carried out, using the names of individuals who were supposedly scientists, via postings on the main pro-biotech Internet discussion group, AgBioWorld.

The Guardian quoted the following from the Bivings Group's website about their "viral marketing" strategy:

"There are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organization is directly involved ... it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party ... Perhaps the greatest advantage of viral marketing is that your message is placed into a context where it is more likely to be considered seriously."

Incredible is the fact that, despite