Ultimate Weapon in Existential Struggle: Using the TPP for Hostile Takeover of Mexican Agriculture

Monsanto & Friends are already rejoicing.

By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET.

Resisting Monsanto, the world’s largest, most influential GMO giant, is an almost impossible task. The corporation boasts more back channels and revolving doors with national governments and regulators than just about any other company on the planet, not to mention a fearsome army of corporate lawyers and lobbyists.

Few countries are more aware of this fact than Mexico, where a small collective of activist groups, scientists, artists and gourmet chefs have been engaged in a titanic legal struggle with Monsanto. Although they keep winning crucial battles, the war is still likely to be won by Monsanto, thanks to one key weapon in its arsenal: the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

An Existential Struggle

For Mexican smallholders and consumers, the struggle with Monsanto & Friends is an existential one. In a 2013 ruling banning the cultivation of GMOs in Mexico, Judge Manuel Zaleta cited the potential risks to the environment posed by GMO corn. If the biotech industry got its way, he argued, more than 7000 years of indigenous maize cultivation in Mexico would be endangered, with the country’s 60 varieties of corn directly threatened by cross-pollination from transgenic strands.

In the last two years scores of appeals were brought against Zaleta’s ruling by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dupont as well as Mexico’s Ministries of Agriculture and Environment. All of them were quashed. But then in August this year, a judge with a more sympathetic ear overturned Zaleta’s ruling [read… Mexican Gourmet Chefs Sharpen Knives in Global Food War]. The resistance, it seemed, had finally crumbled.

But a lot can happen in three months. In early November, federal judge Benjamin Soto Sánchez “upheld a provisional suspension prohibiting federal agencies from processing and granting the privilege of sowing or releasing into the environment of transgenic maize in the country.” In other words, Monsanto & Friends were back to square one.

Not only that: on Wednesday, in a separate lawsuit brought by Mayan beekeepers, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled to block a move to allow the planting of genetically modified soy seeds in the southern Mexican states of Campeche and Yucatan, arguing that indigenous communities that had fought the move should be consulted before it was approved. In other words, Monsanto & Friends will have to directly ask indigenous communities in Southern Mexico – communities that are on the whole fiercely opposed to GM cultivation – for permission to sell and grow their produce.

The Ultimate Weapon

For a company that is long accustomed to getting its way in just about every jurisdiction on planet Earth, the constant obstructionism of the Mexican justice system is beginning to wear thin for Monsanto. But the company and its rivals still have one ace up their sleeves, a weapon that has the potential to obliterate Mexico’s judicial resistance in one fell swoop: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the world’s biggest trade agreement that was recently signed by the governments of 12 Pacific-rim nations, including Mexico.

Buried deep within the 5,000-plus page deal is the Intellectual Property Rights charter which, among many other sinister things, requires all 12 TPP countries to join a number of global intellectual property treaties. One of those treaties is the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants 1991 (UPOV 91), an agreement that elevates the rights of seed companies over farmers’ rights.

UPOV91 requires IP protection to be provided for all plant varieties; it requires protection for 20 to 25 years; and it stops farmers and breeders from exchanging protected seeds, a timeless practice in many countries around the world.

Of the TPP countries, Brunei, Malaysia, Mexico and New Zealand are not yet members of UPOV 91. To join the convention, these countries will have to apply to the Geneva-based UPOV91 Office of the Union, which then reviews the country’s laws on plant variety protection and declares which laws need to be changed, or added, in order to come into compliance and join the convention. As Ben Lilliston of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy warns, changes in plant patent laws could be particularly controversial in Mexico:

Farm groups in Mexico, considered the birthplace of corn, are leading a campaign called “Sin Maíz, No Hay Paíz” (Without corn, there is no country) that advocates for a ban on GMO corn… Farm organizations argue that the country’s biodiversity and genetic resources are at risk from contamination of GMO corn.

The Privatization of Seeds

It would not be the first time that the world’s biggest agribusiness corporations had tried to use so-called free trade agreements to consolidate their stranglehold over a nation’s food chain. As I reported in Corporate Colonialism – Winners and Losers of Global ‘Free’ Trade, one of the conditions that former US President Bush and then President Obama put on passing the latest trade agreement with Washington’s closest South American ally, Colombia, was the passage of a law to privatize the nation’s seeds:

The Colombian government was more than happy to oblige, decreeing in the now infamous Decreto 970 that only certified seeds could be sown. The problem for Colombian farmers is that only big capital – i.e. multinationals like Monsanto – can afford the certification process. As a result, only their seeds could be grown.

Within months of the passage of Decreto 970, 64 tons of uncertified rice seeds had been confiscated and destroyed in Columbia’s Huila region. According to the farmers, the government hadn’t even informed them of the new law.

The response of the Colombian campesinos was to mount a collective resistance struggle that brought large swathes of the country’s rural heartland to a crunching standstill and resulted in direct, bloody clashes with government and paramilitary forces. Two campesinos were killed and many more injured.

In the face of the public backlash, the country’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, decided to suspend the law. Then, at the tail end of 2013, Colombia’s Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional since indigenous communities had not been consulted before its implementation.

Colombia’s recent experience could well be a potent portent of things to come. According to Alejandro de Coss, a Mexican internationalist who teaches at the London School of Economics, the new generation of trade agreements like TPP could herald a recolonization of Latin America – no longer through the actual physical possession of the land, but through the seeds grown on it.

For the people of Mexico, the TPP could be the ultimate kick in the teeth. They have fought their own government, industry and some of the world’s largest, most powerful corporations tooth and nail to preserve their food sovereignty — the basic right to grow and consume their own food the way it has been grown and consumed for millennia, using ecologically sound and sustainable methods .

If TPP is passed by the U.S. Congress and all the other TPP signatory governments, including Mexico’s, they will almost certainly lose that right. Instead the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta and Dupont will be granted a new right — the right to sue the Mexican government (or any other signatory government) in front of private U.S.-based arbitration panels for billions of dollars if a single judge dare to put the needs of the people before the interests of foreign corporations and investors. By Don Quijones, Raging Bull-Shit.

But who is the governments’ strongest ally in their War on Cash? Read… “First They Came for the Pennies…” in the War on Cash

Enjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? You can donate. I appreciate it immensely. Click on the beer and iced-tea mug to find out how:

Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.

  8 comments for “Ultimate Weapon in Existential Struggle: Using the TPP for Hostile Takeover of Mexican Agriculture

  1. Paulo says:

    Monsanto is a vampire squid, much like Goldman Sachs. Evil and way too powerful.

    As for Mexican produce for export, luckily we grow and preserve most of our vegetables in order to avoid pesticide laden Californian and Mexican produce. Industrial ag is not very good food, although it is certainly productive and cheap enough for the average pocket book. After watching Food Inc many years ago we doubled down on our own production growing chicken, eggs, and vegetables.

    I cannot believe how grasping and heartless Monsanto is in attacking small independent farmers. If there is a hell, surely Monsanto execs will be the gatekeepers.

  2. Dan Romig says:

    The Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 (USA) was a needed safe guard for Universities with plant breeding programs and private companies as well. It was designed to protect those who’d develop new varieties, which in my family’s business was wheat, from black market thieves.

    At Trigen Seed LLC of Minneapolis, we took commercially available varieties of winter wheat and spring wheat from around the globe and made crosses to produce new genetic lines to test and retest for many generations until we had a new variety. This was done the old school way with no GMO or chemical manipulation. Just grow two different seeds beside each other, and with a tweezer, pollinate one to the other – as had been done for decades.

    The PVP Act stipulated a few conditions before being granted:
    1) The breeder must account for everything done along the way to develop a new variety. The two parents must have been from in house crosses, from publicly available varieties and/or from other sources with a MTA documentation.
    2) The varieties must be new, distinct, uniform (this can be quite tricky) and stable. They then can be produced as foundation seed by licensee partners to be sold as registered or certified, but they need to be inspected and approved by state Ag agencies such as the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association while still in the field before harvest.

    Now that Trigen has a new variety, our dealers grow it and sell it to their customers and pay us a royalty per bushel sold. Registered can be grown, inspected by the MPCA and resold a year later as Certified, but again, a royalty is due to Trigen. But here’s the catch: under the PVP Act, a farmer who buys and grows Trigen wheat can replant it himself on his own land for as long as he wants, but he can’t sell it to his neighbor without paying Trigen a royalty. Farmers do this frequently and it is pure theft.

    This was not the same as what Monsanto and others are doing now with their lawyers, and GMOs are not safe or beneficial. Damn the TPP, President Obama and those in Congress that approved it. Viva Mexico!

  3. Petunia says:

    In a country run by drug cartels, I have no doubt Monsanto executives will receive the welcome they deserve.

  4. walter map says:

    Rentier totalitarianism here we come.

    “For the last two and one half centuries wealth and power have been concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer men and women. This wealth is now being used to construct and maintain the World Empire that is in the last stages of development.”

    Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. Macmillan:New York (1966)

    The TPP and the New Global Corporate Government

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/19/the-tpp-and-the-new-global-corporate-government/

  5. Jonas Richert says:

    The same is happening in Argentina, but that country is fighting back. MON recently tried to extract damages from soy bean growers there who used their saved seed; the government fought them.

    But not all GMO companies are as ruthless as Monsanto. I recently read an article about RKDA on seeking alpha. Rkda is a company with GM tech to make plants more resistant to drought, salinity etc.

    I don’t want to proselytize so I’ll just mention that they are having big problems with Monsanto too. But they’re working with a local Argentinian company where they are well received, so not all international seed companies or their research is detrimental to farmers.

    Theirs is a late stage worldwide portfolio of traits, so they would be Monsantos, syngentas biggest competitors. But their ipo went horrible and now they are being shot down. If that was Monsanto responsible, then it’s another sign how monopolies are bad overall for new inventions and social progress

  6. Jerry Bear says:

    I’d like to quote, if I may, from the 14th chapter of John Stein beck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”. I do so under the fair use provisions of the U.S. copyright laws.

    “This is the beginning—from “I” to “we”. If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I”, and cuts you off forever from the “we”.

  7. TPP says:

    Good article. I wrote about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and about how companies like Monsanto will use the Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism to subvert local environmental laws if anyone wishes to read it on my site. TPP will be even worse for Mexico (and everyone else) than NAFTA was.

  8. Red Flag says:

    If we all gave up wheat and corn, soy and white sugar, game over. TPP is slavery. Food is life. Monsanto will never give up. But we can still choose what eat —right now.

Comments are closed.