With talk of terrorist “pals” and melanoma prognoses, can this presidential campaign get worse? Probably. But maybe meaner and scarier is not the way to reach the undecided — still somewhere between 5% and 18% percent of us. (Whatever their numbers, they will choose our next president.) If they haven’t decided by now, could it be because they feel put-off, confused, and downright insulted by the barrage of emotional, narrow, lie-tainted charges? If I’m right, there’s opportunity as never before in these precious remaining weeks. That’s why my colleagues and I have relaunched UDecide.org , to help you reach out to friends, in-laws, classmates, co-workers, neighbors, email contacts — and strangers — to create our own barrage: one of essential, factual contrasts between the candidates, presented in a respectful way. On the UDecide site you’ll find clear fact-flyers — with complete, credible sources — to email, download, photocopy, share, and post. Everywhere! We did this during the ‘04 race, and two million UDecide flyers got out there. We can do it again. UDecide flyers can turn up quickly in doctors’ waiting rooms, on school cafeteria walls, on coffee-shop bulletin boards, and on car windshields in church parking lots. We can use the web to reach Americans who don’t live on the web. In these last weeks, it’s something we can do wherever we are. Frances Moore Lappé P.S. Also, please check out these two sample quotes below from folks who took this strategy and ran with it 2004. UDecide Users : * “I’m taking a big stack of the Women’s issues flier with me today as I run my errands. I’m leaving stacks at the gynecologists’ office, the foyer of the daycare, and the yoga center. Hopefully another woman will read one and be enlightened!” — Lynda * “I own a tattoo studio in Oregon. I have a large number of clients that are undecided on just how they are going to vote. I’m putting the flyers in a binder on the coffee table for them to see and discussing the topics while I tattoo them. I am also going to make up waterproof posters and tack them to to utility poles around town.” — Donald Originally published by Huffington Post on 11/06/2008

What a weekend to be hanging with the guys from Farm Aid : historic financial meltdown, plus, breaking news — ignored by virtually all big media — that by the beginning of this year the food price crisis had pushed 75 million more people into hunger and that as many more could join them by year’s end. That would be 150 million more hungry people in a world of food plenty! For me this crisis has felt like one of the most egregious human rights disasters ever. While we’re told that big agribusiness will save us, it’s a system centralizing their control of our food system that got us here. So it’s been my honor to be asked to join Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young —as well Maine farmer Brenna Chase and Duwan Grant from The Food Project — at a pre-concert Farm Aid press meeting. Together, we’ll show that sustainable, local family farming isn’t “quaint.” It disperses power, protects the soul and water, and can help avert climate catastrophe. If family farms are not our future, we have no future. See the concert on on DirectTV’s The 101 Network or online here on Saturday, starting at 4pm. There’s a lot that should be said, and there’s not time to say it all. But below are talking points I’ve worked up to prep myself for the Farm Aid press event. Please: read them, let me know what you think, and pass them on — especially to anyone who might think that Farm Aid is old news. My thanks to Mark Schultz of the Land Stewardship Projec t and John Crabtree and the good people of the Center for Rural Affairs for their great ongoing work and their assistance in preparing me for this event. “Keep on rockin’ in the free world!” WHAT ALL AMERICANS NEED KNOW ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THEIR FOOD >>> We hear it’s a food crisis but ours is really a democracy crisis. Democracy is about people having their say, but how many regular citizens would say “yes” to a farm system that so tilts the playing field that our best farmers — family farmers — are driven under while the price of food climbs? >>> Farm Aid can help us turn the week’s scary lesson about what happens to us when financial power is concentrated and unaccountable into a loud wake-up call: Concentrated, unaccountable food power may even be worse, and only family farming can reverse it. >>> What does concentrated power look like? In agriculture, it is — to pick one example — three giant corporations controlling most of the world’s grain trade; in food, just ten corporations controlling half the products on supermarket shelves. If that were healthy, our economy and our people would be, too. But one in nine private health dollars goes to treat food-related illness. >>> A system consolidating agribusiness control — and subsidized by tax dollars — is pushing under 10,000 U.S. farms a year, while it erodes soil and pollutes water. It results in over three-fourths of our food dollars now going to everybody but the farmer. >>> The good news? We know how to fix it. * Family farms are typically more productive than the biggest operations, and are more effective in protecting topsoil, groundwater, and communities; not to mention farmers. * More and more farmers are creating farmer-owned marketing cooperatives that keep vastly more of the return from farming in rural communities. * Though President Bush’s science advisor Nina Fedoroff claims that organic farming could support “maybe half” the current world population, in fact, if organic farming went worldwide food availability could increase by 50 percent, reports a 2007 University of Michigan study. * Family farms make economic sense, community sense, and ecological sense, so they’re gaining where smart families, communities, and states see the writing on the wall. They’re relinking farm and city; farmer and eater. The most recent Minnesota farm census, for example, recorded a gain in the number of new farms. >>> Americans are told family farming is passe, but what’s really passe is believing we can continue with a chemically dependent, fossil-fuel addicted farming model. Our inefficient food system is a big contributor of greenhouse gases, and its concentrated power is what has led us into this food and farming crisis. Family farmers are our future, without them we don’t have a future. Originally published by Huffington Post on 10/23/2008

Farmers and eaters around the country and the world are watching the Nov. 6 election in California with bated breath. Will Proposition 37 — requiring labeling of GMOs in our food — pass? Note that even China requires labeling! But here in the U.S., GMOs took off in the 1990s with no public debate, and today they’re in most processed foods, making Americans the world’s GMO guinea pigs. We know it’s easy to get sunk by “information overload” and agribusiness advertising. So far the largest GMO maker, Monsanto, and other industry giants have plowed at least $35 million into keeping us in the dark. To help us think straight, we’ve prepared seven points to consider and share with your friends — all backed by authoritative studies. Here’s what they reveal: 1. GMOs have never undergone standard testing or regulation for human safety. And now that they’re in 70 percent of processed foods, it’s extremely difficult for scientists to isolate their health risks . 2. But we know that GMOs have proven harmful in animal studies. A 2009 review of 19 studies found mammals fed GM corn or soy developed “liver and kidney problems” that could mark the “onset of chronic diseases.” Most were 90-day studies. In a new two-year study , rats fed GM corn developed two to three times more tumors — some bigger than a quarter of their total body weight — and these tumors appeared much earlier than in rats fed non-GM corn. Among scientists, the study has its defenders and critics, but even the critics underscore that we need more long-term studies. 3. And the most widely used GMOs are paired with an herbicide linked to serious health risks. GM crops — Roundup Ready soy and corn — are treated with the herbicide glyphosate, which in exposed humans has been associated with DNA damage . In the lab, it’s proven toxic to human liver cells. 4. The consequences of GMO technology are inherently unpredictable. Inserting a single gene can result in multiple, unintended DNA changes and mutations . “Unintended effects are common in all cases where GE [genetic engineering] techniques are used,” warn scientists . One such environmental consequence — genetic contamination of other plants — is already documented. Note that unlike food, once released into the environment, seeds can’t be “ recalled “! 5. GMO makers intimidate and silence farmers and scientists. GMO corporations use patents and intellectual property rights to sue farmers , block research , and threaten investigators . “For a decade,” protested Scientific American editors in 2009, GMO companies “have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research,” so “it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised.” 6. GMOs undermine our food security. Within the biotechnology market, Monsanto alone controls 90 percent of GE crops worldwide. And Monsanto is one of three GMO companies including DuPont and Syngenta that control 70 percent of the global seed market, reinforcing monopoly power over our food. GMO seeds are costly and must be purchased every year, so they worsen farmers’ indebtedness, dependency, and vulnerability to hunger. 7. GMOs aren’t needed in the first place, so why would we take on these risks and harms? Studies show that safe, sustainable farming practices applied worldwide could increase our food supply as much as 50 percent. And keep in mind that the world’s already producing 2,800 calories for every person on earth every day — more than enough. And that’s just with what’s left over after using half the world’s grain for feed, fuel and other purposes, and wasting one-third of all food. So the urgent question isn’t about “more” anyway. It is, How can all of the world’s people gain the power to secure healthy food? And a good start is knowing what’s in our food. For a cool, just-released animated video devouring the myth that we need industrial ag, see foodmyths.org . Shopping in the Know (Not GMO) • Avoid processed foods! It’s a simple way to reduce exposure to the four most common GM ingredients: non-organic forms of soy, canola, cottonseed and corn, including high-fructose corn syrup. • Look for the voluntary “non-GMO” label. • Buy “certified organic,” which ensures that no GMO ingredients were used. • Visit www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com for a list of thousands of GMO products and brands. To sort more food myths from facts, visit the new Food MythBusters: the Real Story About What We Eat website at FoodMyths.Org . And, if you live in California, vote Nov. 6 for Proposition 37 to require GMO labeling. Speak out, wherever you are. Demand federal GMO labeling and work to end GMOs. Originally published by Huffington Post on 10/25/2012

“We’ve hit the limits of a finite Earth!” Ever heard this environmentalists’ call to action? If you have, it’s probably made intuitive sense. After all, aren’t ecosystems in collapse everywhere? The message warns us that we’ve crossed the line, and the obvious takeaway: Pull back just as fast as we can. Not only is the message common, it is passionately felt. Barely off the podium after delivering the opening address at a conference of campus sustainability leaders, I was hit by a blast of anger. I’d outraged a professor of ecology by questioning the usefulness — even the accuracy — of this oft-heard battle cry. He didn’t buy my critique, and I winced and wriggled as I tried, and failed, to explain. So I’m using this venue to clarify what I wish the professor had heard. “Hit the limits” is a lousy construct of our crisis for a bunch of reasons. First, most people hear “hit the limits” and understandably assume it means that we’ve hit the limits of nature to meet human needs, period. Persistent messages of food and water scarcity and “overpopulation” seem to tell us just that. “Scarcity is the new norm,” wrote Lester Brown a few years ago. And from there, a lot of us might well conclude that, having hit the limits of nature’s capacity to provide for us, we must do one better than nature. Yes! We must quickly go beyond nature with genetically engineered seeds and geo-engineering of the climate. We must make whatever intervention is necessary to extend Earth’s limits. Is that the response sought by those using the slogan? I don’t think so. Second, “hitting the limits” is bound to heighten fear. It’s hard to imagine solutions to absolute scarcities, and all of them seem to involve painful cutbacks reducing the quality of our lives. Yet, psychologists tell us that fear, especially of our own mortality, typically makes people more materialistic and self-centered. Not exactly the desired response, either. But there’s a deeper drawback to the message of quantitative overreach: It doesn’t accurately define the problem, and thus leads us away from real answers. Take hunger, for example. Is it the result of hitting nature’s quantitative limits? Not when a third of all food is literally wasted and we waste vast food potential by devoting three-fourths of all agricultural land to animal food production that supplies only 16 percent of our calories. In fact, of all the calories livestock consume, humans get only 3 percent in the animal flesh we eat. Or consider energy: In the U.S., it’s estimated that from 55 to 87 percent is wasted. And nature’s potential supply? The sun brings us 15,000 times the daily dose of energy — mostly untapped — relative to what we currently consume in fossil fuels. And beyond waste, just one example of destruction: Every year unsustainable farming practices result in a loss of topsoil equal to seven pick-up trucks’ full of topsoil for each person on earth each year; yet it takes 200 years, at least, to generate one inch of this resource essential to our survival. Diagnosing the problem as quantitative overreach doesn’t lead us to think systemically, which is the only way we’ll get to the root of our crises. We’re not encouraged to see that, for example, we could cut the plastic garbage in the oceans by half and we’d still have a plastic soup the size of Texas . We could cut by half the rate of depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer and still be running out of groundwater in major areas of the farm belt in a few decades. Cutbacks alone can’t succeed. As a slogan, “Hitting the limits of the Earth” can be heard as blaming the skimpiness of nature, or blaming greedy, over-consuming humans, when most of us are experiencing real lack: One in four children is stunted by malnutrition. Instead, we can learn to think systemically. Doing so, we see that, yes indeed, we have crossed a limit. It is this: We’ve exceeded the destruction of nature that humanity can wreak without causing horrific, irreparable loss and suffering. We’ve disrupted nature’s regenerative powers. We need new metaphors that ignite our curiosity about the underlying human-made economic and political systems that cause this waste and destruction of nature; as well as make what we do produce unavailable to those who most need it. We need messages that point to underlying, failing systems, not mere quantities. We need messages suggesting that life will be much better — not bleaker — as we learn to align with nature’s laws and our own commonsense. How about? “We’ve broken the laws of nature,” so “let’s learn from nature.” How about? “We’re actively creating scarcity out of plenty, so let’s align with the laws of nature, and there is more than enough for all.” We can break free of the fear-inducing message of scarcity. We can take a deep breath, use our common sense, and find the courage to recreate democratic, fair economies in which we produce food and energy for all in ways that regenerate nature’s richness. I sure hope my antagonist reads this. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons Article originally published by the Huffington Post on March 12, 2014

Originally published by Al Jazeera on 08/01/2014 This past weekend, biotech giant Monsanto paid bloggers $150 each to attend “an intimate and interactive panel” with “two female farmers and a team from Monsanto.” The strictly invitation-only three-hour brunch, which took place on the heels of the BlogHer Conference, promised bloggers a chance to learn about “where your food comes from” and to hear about the “impact growing food has on the environment, and how farmers are using fewer resources to feed a growing population.” Though the invitation from BlogHer explicitly stated, “No blog posts or social media posts expected,” the event was clearly designed to influence the opinions — and the writing — of a key influencer: the mommy blogger. Another invite-only event in August will bring bloggers to a Monsanto facility in Northern California for a tour of its fields and research labs. Again, while no media coverage is expected, the unspoken goal is clear. Stealth marketing techniques, such as these by Monsanto, reveal how the food industry — from biotech behemoths to fast-food peddlers — is working surreptitiously to shape public opinion about biotechnology, industrialized farming and junk food. We’ve come a long way from Don Draper’s whisky-infused ad concepts meant for old-style print publications. As our media landscape has changed, Big Ag has changed along with it, devising marketing to take advantage of this new terrain and influence the people and platforms — not just journalists and newspapers — that shape our understanding of farming and the health impacts of biotechnology and junk food. Sean Timberlake, who has been blogging for nearly a decade, characterized industry’s move into the social media space as “sweeping and vast.” He explained that back when he started out, “I don’t think the Monsantos of the world understood what blogs were — or cared,” but now, “companies develop entire budget lines for social media programs. They build it into their whole ad budget.” Ad networks such as BlogHer and Federated — two of the biggest — facilitate companies’ advertising and outreach on blogs by aggregating blogs to sell as a bigger package. These networks, Timberlake explained, “can be leveraged and used as a bullhorn for their marketing.” Sure, PR is an old game, but Big Ag is giving the age-old techniques of shaping public opinion a new, sneakier spin. Much of today’s marketing happens behind the scenes and off the printed page — on the Web pages of blogs, on Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, through sponsored content and industry-funded webisodes and on the stages of big-ideas festivals. Monsanto is not the only food company engaging with the blogosphere. Mommy bloggers are the food industry’s newest nontraditional ally. McDonald’s has been wooing them aggressively too, offering sweepstakes in partnership with BlogHer for the company’s Listening Tour Luncheon , an exclusive event with the head of McDonald’s USA — framed as a two-way conversation about nutrition, but more likely a gambit to garner the support of a powerful group of influencers. And in Canada, McDonald’s offers All-Access Mom, behind-the-scenes tours of the company’s inner workings. It’s not just through blogger meet-and-greets that industry is attempting to sway opinion. Video is an increasingly popular (and shareable) medium for PR disguised as content. This summer, for example, Monsanto is funding a Condé Nast Media Group film series called “A Seat at the Table.” According to a casting call, each three- to five-minute episode will cover questions such as “Are food labels too complicated?” and “GMOs: good or bad?” and will feature “an eclectic mix of industry and nonindustry notables with diverse viewpoints.” It’s hard to imagine truly free-flowing discussions resulting, paid for as they are by a company with a definitive take on — and stake in — the food-labeling wars. The U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, meanwhile, funded the documentary “ Farmland ,” described as a “look at the lives of farmers and ranchers,” but whose narrative — as critics have been quick to point out — “glorif[ies] the trend toward larger, more industrialized farms.” No surprise, given that the film’s financing comes from an agribusiness front group . Big Ag is putting its communications dollars toward big-ideas events too, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, where underwriters such as Monsanto are celebrated — and get a voice. Monsanto executives got to share their opinions onstage about GMO labeling (surprise: they’re not in favor of state-based labeling initiatives) and how best to feed the world (again: their chemicals and genetically engineered seeds are key to combating hunger). And past years have seen Coca-Cola , DuPont and Syngenta executives all touting their companies’ sustainability onstage. The uptick in these stealth-marketing strategies coincides with growing popular outcry about agricultural chemicals, soda and junk food and genetically modified ingredients. Consider that despite millions spent on marketing over the two decades since genetically engineered seeds were first commercialized, 93 percent of Americans still think GMOs should be labeled and 65 percent are either unsure about the technology or believe it to be unsafe. Last year, when Monsanto retained the PR firm FleishmanHillard , known for its work with social media and agribusiness, to develop its new marketing initiatives, it did so “amid fierce opposition to the seed giant’s genetically modified products,” noted the Holmes Report , a PR industry publication. The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, might never have dreamed up the age of Twitter and Facebook, but he likely wouldn’t be surprised to see food-industry tweets and Facebook ads dressed up as news. Bernays knew the importance of constant PR innovation. If the public “becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it,” he wrote in his 1928 book “Propaganda,” then we must simply present our “appeals more intelligently.” Or, as we’re seeing with Monsanto and its food industry counterparts, if not exactly intelligently, then at least more surreptitiously: on the podium, the Twitter feeds and the mommy blogs.

Originally published by Al Jazeera on 07/24/2014 McDonald’s isn’t having a very good week. On Monday it made the news for expired meat turning up in as many as a quarter of its restaurants in China. And on Tuesday it released its second-quarter earnings report, which revealed stagnating profits and falling same-store sales, continuing an eight-quarter losing streak. Is the fast-food behemoth in trouble? This news is only the latest in a string of bad publicity this year. Back in April, when McDonald’s announced its iconic clown mascot’s new presence on social media and unveiled its makeover , the blogosphere flooded with mockery of the missteps. A “whimsical” red blazer? Yellow cargo pants? One blogger said the unfortunate look came “ straight out of 1998 .” The hashtag #NotLovinIt trended on Twitter. Then in May, when McDonald’s launched its next big makeover — this time of its Happy Meal mascot — the Twittersphere erupted again. “Congrats #McDonalds, first you fatten our kids, then you haunt their nightmares” was one of the many taunting tweets. The company defended its bizarre redesign — a smiling red box with big, creepy teeth and spindly arms, named “Happy.” “We are not unhappy about [the response],” McDonald’s senior marketing director told CNN at the time. “Happy is not for everyone. He’s about having fun. Really for kids and families.” The makeovers seemed to be part of the company’s broader strategy to regain footing in the face of eight quarters of stagnating returns and the rise of competitors like Starbucks and Chipotle. It’s a move all the more salient given McDonald’s announcement of its returns this week: Profits fell again, by 1 percent, and same-store sales continued their slump, dropping 1.5 percent. In its Tuesday call with reporters , the company’s CEO, Don Thompson, said this poor performance was expected: McDonald’s is focusing on “strengthening the foundational elements of our business,” he said. The company also blamed “ongoing broad challenges” (i.e., the problem isn’t McDonald’s, it’s the economy). Meanwhile, though, one of its biggest competitors, the burrito giant Chipotle, saw a whopping 17 percent jump in same-store sales — and is being dubbed a “ market star ” for its ability to woo customers with fresh, good-quality ingredients. While McDonald’s is still the world’s largest fast-food chain, its profit struggles are just another indication of its bigger identity problem. (The only reason stock prices didn’t dive further in the face of these results is that they were basically in line with expectation.) As the fast-food sector’s leader in sales, McDonald’s has repeatedly come under fire for being a key driver of the epidemic of diet-related illnesses sweeping the planet, especially among children. It’s time the company took a hard look at what it could do to turn this around. Groups such as Corporate Accountability International, with which I work, have called on the industry giant to take the lead in curbing its predatory marketing of kids, asking the company to, for instance, shut down HappyMeal.com, its flagship Web portal that targets preschoolers. In the face of mounting public pressure, McDonald’s needs to implement much more than mascot redesigns. The new looks for Ronald and “Happy” were supposed to give the company a boost with a rebrand of its signature target-the-children features, but what’s on the menu and in the box remains just as concerning to parents. A typical Happy Meal configuration I tried out on its online MealBuilder interface would serve half the calories my 5-year-old daughter should eat in a day and deliver more than half the recommended sodium and as much as four times the recommended sugar — a whopping 42 grams. As McDonald’s comes under fire by parents and educators around the world for targeting kids — and serving poor-quality food — its rebranding efforts seem even more out of step. This quarter’s poor returns might be further evidence of it. Seeking to explain its poor performance, the company presented a host of reasons, mostly factors outside its control, and its focus on long-term growth. But based on the success of Chipotle, a competitor focused on higher quality, it’s clear something more is going on here. On the heels of another poor quarter, I would hope the company would finally listen to the concerns of its customers who want better food and less marketing to kids. Doing so might just help it see that targeting children, whether with creepy, toothy boxes or creepy, dopey clowns, is out of step with popular opinion — and that serving up high-calorie, high-salt and high-sugar foods (not to mention questionable meat) is too. It might just realize the tide is turning against companies that ignore the impact of their junk food offerings. It might just realize it must change or continue to face returns like the ones we saw this week, or, worse, see its market share slip into the hands of companies delivering better food with less of the ick factor.

Originally published by Triple Crisis Blog on 05/12/2014 On April 21, a Mexican judge dealt a blow to the efforts of agricultural behemoth Monsanto and other biotech companies to open the country to the commercial cultivation of genetically modified (GM) maize. The ruling upheld the injunction issued last October that put a halt to further testing or commercial planting of the crop, citing “the risk of imminent harm to the environment.” In a fitting tribute to Mexican surrealism, Monsanto had accused the judge who upheld the injunction of failing to be “impartial.” I don’t know if the presiding judge smiled when he denied Monsanto’s complaint, but I did. I had just arrived in Mexico to look at the GM controversy, and I could tell it was going to be quite a visit. The original injunction came last October as the result of a class action suit filed by 53 citizen plaintiffs, including farmers, environmentalists, and consumers. They claimed the Mexican government’s approval of permits for planting genetically modified maize violated the country’s laws guaranteeing the protection of native varieties. The legal case is complex, but the core issue couldn’t be simpler. Mexico is recognized as the “center of origin” for maize, and is home to many diverse strains of the crop’s seeds. Each of these core strains—known as landraces—evolved over thousands of years in Mexico to adapt to both local environmental conditions and human tastes and desires. Each landrace has evolved further into a rich array of local varieties. Southern and central Mexico have long been known as the homes of maize biodiversity. Every year, indigenous communities there select their best seeds for planting the next crop cycle. That simple process, and the free exchange of seeds with other farmers, has produced the complex diversity that we find today. A recent study by Mexico’s National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (known by its Spanish acronym CONABIO) identified 65 distinct landraces of maize in the country, including several that had never before been catalogued. From those 65 confirmed landraces, the CONABIO study identified more than 22,000 different varieties of maize in Mexico. Experts fear that if genetically modified maize comes into the mix it could alter these landraces by pollinating native varieties and undermining the genetic integrity of the crops. This isn’t just a question of conservation. These maize varieties are the living, evolving base for modern plant-breeding, a resource drawn on by conventional maize breeders (and GM breeders like Monsanto) when they look to create hybrid varieties that can increase yields, resist drought, or provide other useful adaptations to changing climates and cropping environments. The native varieties are of such high value that samples of them are stored in ultra-secure locations around the world in the event of a catastrophe. For people from the United States—who tend to be familiar only with sweet corn on the cob and the yellow dent corn (unfit for human consumption) that feeds our animals and, through ethanol, our cars—this diversity is striking. One Mexican variety, for instance, is used almost exclusively for pozole, a subtly spiced soup with large whole kernels of white maize. Others are used for local tamales, which can be found in different forms throughout the country. Many are used for a rainbow of tortillas—white, blue, green, red. Mexican law recognizes this diversity. Its biosecurity law, approved in 2005, includes special protection for maize. GM maize, the law stipulates, is not to be sown in proximity to any area known to be a “center of origin” for maize. With no legal definition of this term, the Mexican government in 2009 approved biotech company requests to begin experimental trials in six northern states where maize diversity was considered negligible. The government was set to approve large-scale commercial planting of GM maize there when the injunction put a stop to all GM permits. To the naked eye, northern Mexico does not look like a center of diversity. It is dominated by huge irrigated farms that look like they could be in Iowa. These farms use hybrid white maize seeds developed either by national maize breeders or foreign multinationals. Their high yields provide a significant share of Mexico’s production of maize for direct human consumption, which totals more than 20 million tons a year. About 10 million additional tons a year come from the United States, but nearly all of it is yellow maize, and nearly all of that is genetically modified. Mexico’s industrialized white maize is the market Monsanto wants, even though field trials have been limited to yellow varieties. Mexico is one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of white maize. In an interview at the company’s high-rise headquarters in Mexico City, Jaime Mijares Noriega, Monsanto’s Latin America Director for Corporate Affairs, was surprisingly frank. “In order for the penetration of biotechnology crops to be successful, it will have to be for both white and yellow corn,” he said. “If it was only yellow, we would not be investing.” I was surprised. Wouldn’t Mexicans rebel en masse at the prospect that biotech companies were planning to put GM maize into their beloved tortillas and tamales? I asked him if he didn’t think it might be a harder sell, since consumers even in the United States are skeptical of directly consuming GM maize. He acknowledged that it “would take some time.” He dismissed concerns about gene flow, saying that their field trials had shown minimal pollination beyond 25 meters from the field. That’s not good enough for José Sarukhan, director of CONABIO. Gene flow is gene flow, and once a plant is contaminated with GM maize pollen it will then pollinate other plants. Sarukhan said that CONABIO researchers found a surprising number of native varieties in northern Mexico, precisely the regions where experimental GM plots were authorized. Sarukhan told me the strong presence of native seeds in the north made him rethink his previous support for limited GM maize trials in those states. According to Antonio Serratos, a researcher involved in CONABIO’s recent maize study, the entire country should be considered a center of origin. “You can’t just isolate the communities where you find native maize,” he said. Serratos also reminded me that the most pervasive form of gene flow isn’t pollen on the wind, it’s kernels of maize in people’s pockets. Peasant farmers are relentless experimenters, trying every type of maize they get their hands on to see if it produces something useful. They can’t know from looking at a kernel of maize whether it’s genetically modified or not. They assume it isn’t. If they plant it, its pollen will flow to neighboring plants. This is precisely what happened in the southern state of Oaxaca in 2002, when a farmer presumably took grains of maize from a food distribution, which contained imported GM maize, and planted them in his fields. Serratos says this kind of contamination was already prevalent in Mexico, even before the recent GM field trials. His own study found a surprisingly rich diversity of maize even within the borders of Mexico City itself. But he also found transgenic contamination. “We’re creating something new: transgenic native maize,” he warns. I asked Monsanto officials how they expected to control this more pervasive form of gene flow. “We can’t really ensure how grains are transported and where they end up,” said Oscar Heredia, the company’s Agronomic Regulatory Affairs officer. For CONABIO’s Sarukhan, that is the final straw. “I don’t believe this country has the capacity—nor the will—to regulate transgenic maize,” he said. The injunction put a stop to the expansion of transgenic maize, for now. Monsanto and other biotech companies have joined with Mexico’s agriculture and environment departments to file a blizzard of legal challenges, 62 different appeals and legal complaints so far. Up to now, Mexico’s notoriously corrupt judicial system has refused to overturn the injunction. Observers expect the legal proceedings to take a year or two to resolve. When the class action suit on the danger of genetic contamination is finally heard, the plaintiffs will have the opportunity to present a raft of evidence, from governmental, non-governmental, and university sources, on the history and the presence of GM contamination of Mexico’s native maize. “We look forward to that opportunity,” says Adelita San Vicente, one of the spokespeople for the plaintiffs.

Originally published by Triple Crisis on 08/04/2014 Can land grabs by foreign investors in developing countries feed the hungry? So says the press release for a recent, and unfortunate, economic study . It comes just as civil society and government delegates gather in Rome this week to negotiate guidelines for “responsible agricultural investment” (RAI), and as President Obama welcomes African leaders to Washington for a summit on economic development in the region. At stake in both capitals is whether the recent surge in large-scale acquisition of land in Africa and other developing regions needs to be better regulated to ensure that agricultural investment contributes to food security rather than eroding it by displacing small-scale farmers. The recent study paper will not advance those discussions. It is the kind of study that gives economists a bad name. Economists like the one in the oft-told joke who, shipwrecked on a deserted island, offers his expertise to his stranded shipmates: “Assume we have a boat.” In this case, these seemingly well-intentioned Italian economists came up with the dramatic but useless estimate that global land grabs could feed 190-550 million people in developing countries. The heroic assumptions they needed to get there should have stranded them on a deserted island, because they make no sense in the real world. • Assume land grabs produce staple food. (Mostly, they don’t.) • Assume such assumed food is consumed domestically. (Overwhelmingly it’s exported.) • Assume the calories they might produce go to hungry people. (They don’t, they go to people who can afford them.) • Assume calories are all that’s needed to nourish someone. (They aren’t.) • Assume productivity-enhancing investments on such land would be made for an assumed market of hungry consumers. (They wouldn’t, the hungry are no real market at all because they have no effective buying power.) • Assume the grabbed land didn’t displace anyone from producing food. ( According to the same data relied on by these economists , most projects have displaced farmers.) Perhaps the most absurd assumption, though, is that the governance mechanisms exist, at the national, international, or corporate levels, to manage the surge of investment we’ve seen since the food price spikes of 2007-8. Trust me, they don’t, which is why the UN’s Committee on World Food Security is meeting in Rome this week to negotiate the RAI guidelines . Those negotiations have proven contentious, with developing countries and civil society groups demanding that land rights be included in the guidelines. Some rich country governments, such as that of the United States, resist such measures saying they interfere with the development of markets, which they see as the ultimate solution to … well … everything. In Tanzania, those land markets are going fast and furious, fueled by government programs to make large tracts of land available to foreign investors. Many have gone for biofuel crops like sugar and jatropha, the oilseed tree that has proven to be a spectacular failure all over Africa. The governance failures include not just the taking of 20,000-acre tracts of good land, based on false promises to local villagers, but then the failure to return the land to those villagers when the project collapses. In Kisarawe, Tanzania, that land instead was simply subleased by the bankrupt Sun Biofuels to Mtanga Farms, a Tanzanian company that has disavowed any responsibility to fulfill the promises made by Sun Biofuels when it secured the land in the first place. (See my previous article .) This is the kind of irresponsible investment that has negotiators in Rome trying desperately to plug the yawning land-governance gap in order to protect the rights of small-scale farmers, most of whom lack formal titles to their land. In Zambia, the government has taken the same proactive approach to attracting foreign land investors, securing good land and promising infrastructure development as part of the new wave of “public-private partnerships” that are supposed to stimulate agricultural development. Mostly, investors don’t wait for the national government. They go straight to local leaders, who have traditional authority over “customary lands” farmed by small-scale producers. They cut deals that displace local farmers for the large-scale production of sugar cane or some other cash crop, often for export. At best, you get a managed process to attract investors to one of the Zambian government’s “farm blocks” – 250,000-acre tracts intended to bring in a foreign investor to establish a “nucleus farm” of 25,000 acres around which other large, medium, and small farmers can get land to grow crops for the investor’s processing facility. Such schemes have had some economic success in rice farming in some countries, but the issue of displacement of small-scale food producers, generally for export agriculture, remains. So does the limited involvement of small-scale farmers and the overwhelming export orientation of most projects. Zambia has one such farm block project going in Nansanga , but this land is neither idle nor unoccupied, as proponents of such schemes often suggest. Some 2,500 farmers live on the Nansanga land and they do not want to be moved or swallowed up by the larger project. It is certainly difficult to see how such projects address the desperate needs of the 80% of rural Zambians who are poor and food-insecure. They are food-insecure in part because they are land-poor ; they do not have enough decent land to support their households. While the government auctions off the country’s best land, these villagers are dividing their small landholdings among their children, resulting in smaller plots and greater poverty. Which begs the question: If the goal is to address the urgent issue of food security, why not give some of those good agricultural lands to land-poor smallholders? In Zambia, I saw one very small project that did just that. The Chanyanya Smallholders Cooperative Society of 126 households in Kafue, south of Lusaka, got secure title to about 1,250 acres of land, irrigated it with European donor support, set up small garden plots for themselves on some of it, and sublet the majority to a commercial soybean and wheat farming business in which they retain significant equity shares. They get more food, with year-round production of cash and subsistence crops from their garden plots, thanks to the irrigation. The land gets developed through capital-intensive investment, with cooperative members sharing in those profits and retaining title to the land. They seemed enormously better off, though they might do even better if they each had 10 irrigated acres and they were shown how to become mid-size commercial farmers. Instead of touting the imagined food-security benefits of land grabs, why not look at the real-life food security benefits of giving good land to the hungry? And irrigating it? Interpreting the data from that flawed land grab study a little differently, the researchers show, in effect, that in Tanzania 3.1 million people additional people could be fed by just giving the land to small-scale farmers. Or, more realistically, one could increase by 25% the caloric intake of 12.4 million people who don’t get enough to eat now. Invest in the land and, according to these researchers, one could do the same for 20.4 million people. That would go a long way toward wiping out rural poverty in Tanzania. It doesn’t look anything like a “land grab.” But it sure looks like “responsible agricultural investment” to me.

Originally published by Food Tank on 12/20/2014 What if you threw a lavish party for foreign investors, and no one came? By all accounts, that is what’s happening in Mozambique’s Nacala Corridor, the intended site for Africa’s largest agricultural development scheme – or land grab, depending on your perspective. The ProSavana project , a Brazilian-and-Japanese-led development project, was supposed to be turning Mozambique’s fertile savannah lands in the north into an export zone, replicating Brazil’s success taming its own savannah – the cerrado – and transforming it into industrial mega-farms of soybeans. The vision, hatched in 2009, but only revealed to Mozambicans in 2013, called for 35 million hectares (nearly 100 million acres) of “underutilized” land to be converted by Brazilian agribusiness into soybean plantations for cheaper export to China and Japan. In my two weeks in Mozambique, including one week in the Nacala Corridor, I had a hard time finding evidence of any such transformation. It was easy, though, to find outrage at a plan seen by many in the region as a secret land grab. That resistance, which has evolved into a tri-national campaign in Japan, Brazil, and Mozambique to stop ProSavana, is one of the reasons the project is a currently a dud. The new face of South-South investment? I came to look at ProSavana because, out of all the large-scale projects I studied over the course of the last year, this one sounded almost plausible. It wasn’t started by some fly-by-night venture capitalist, growing a biofuel crop he’d never produced commercially for a market that barely existed. That’s what I saw in Tanzania , and such failed land grabs litter the African landscape. ProSavana at least knew its investors: Brazil’s agribusiness giants. The planners also knew their technology: Brazil’s soybeans, which had adapted to the harsh tropical conditions of Brazil’s cerrado. And they knew their market: Japan’s and China’s hog farms and their insatiable appetite for feed, generally made with soybeans. That was already more than a lot of these grand schemes had going for them. I was also compelled by the sheer scale of the project. When first announced, ProSavana was to encompass 35 million hectares of land, an area the size of North Carolina. That would have made it the largest land acquisition in Africa. ProSavana also interested me because it was not the usual neo-colonial megaproject promoted by the Global North. It was a projection of Brazil’s agro-export prowess. This was South-South investment, the new wave of development in a multipolar world. Wouldn’t Brazil do this differently, I wondered, with the kind of strong developmental focus that had characterized the country’s ascendance under the leadership of the left-leaning Workers’ Party? ProSavana’s premise was that the soil and climate in the Nacala Corridor of Mozambique were similar to those found in the cerrado, so technology could be easily adapted to tame a region inhospitable to agriculture. Someone should have gone there before they issued the press releases. It turns out that the two regions differ dramatically. The cerrado had poor soils, which technology was able to address. That’s also why it had few farmers, and those that were there could be moved by Brazil’s then-military dictatorship. The Nacala Corridor, by contrast, has good soils, which is precisely why it is the most densely-populated part of rural Mozambique. (If there are good lands, you can bet civilization has discovered them and is farming them.) Mozambique also has a democratic government, forged in an independence movement rooted in peasant farmers’ struggle for land rights. So the country has one of the stronger land laws in Africa, which grants use rights to farmers who have been farming land for ten years or more. The disconnect between the claims ProSavana was making to its investors and the reality of the situation reached almost laughable proportions. Agriculture Minister Jose Pacheco led sales visits to Mozambique, organized by Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation, which had put together the agribusiness-friendly draft “ Master Plan ” that was leaked to Mozambican civil society organizations in March 2013. Brazil’s biggest farmers came looking for thousands of hectares of land, only to find three disappointments: they couldn’t own land in Mozambique; what land they could lease was by no means empty; and it was far from the ports, with no decent roads to transport their soybeans. Brazil’s soybean mega-farmers packed up their giant combines and went back to the cerrado, where there are still millions of hectares of undeveloped land. A kinder, gentler ProSavana There are a few large soybean farms in Gurue, producing for the domestic poultry industry; but nothing like the export boom promised by ProSavana. According to Americo Uaciquete of ProSavana’s Nampula office, Brazilian farmers came expecting 40,000 hectares free and clear. He told me no investor could expect that in the Nacala Corridor. The only foreign investors who will farm there, he said, are those willing to take 2,000 hectares and involve local farmers. To me, that sounded like a very quick surrender on the ProSavana battlefield. Couldn’t the Mozambican government open larger swaths of land? “Not without a gun,” Uaciquete said, clearly rejecting that path. “We are not going to impose the Brazilian model here.” He went on to describe ProSavana as a support program for small-scale farmers, based on its two non-investment components: research into improved locally adapted seeds, and extension services to improve productivity. In Maputo, the ProSavana Directorate did its best to polish up the new, development-friendly ProSavana. Jusimere Mourao, of Japan’s cooperation agency, had it down best. She lamented that ProSavana was “poorly timed” because its “announcement” (a leak) “coincided” with international concerns about land grabbing. Hmmm…. After taking civil society concerns into account, she said, the program had issued a new “ concept note ” and the Master Plan is under revision. “Small and medium producers are the main beneficiaries of ProSavana,” she said. “We have no intention of promoting the taking of their land. It would be a crime.” It’s not about promoting foreign investment, she assured me; that is up to the Mozambican government. The turnaround was stunning, and welcome, if not quite believable. It certainly had not quieted the coalition calling for an end to ProSavana until farmers and civil society groups are consulted on the agricultural development plan for the Nacala Corridor. Luis Sitoe, Economic Adviser to the Minister of Agriculture, smirked when I told him I’d been in the region researching ProSavana. “Did you find anything?” For him, ProSavana had failed. But lest I think anything profound had been learned from that experience, he reassured me that the Mozambican government remains firmly committed to relying on large-scale foreign investment to address its agricultural underdevelopment. He pulled out a two-inch-thick binder to show me he was serious. It was the project proposal for the Lurio River Valley Development Project, a 200,000-hectare irrigation scheme right there in the northern Nacala Corridor. Was it part of ProSavana? Absolutely not. Had the communities been consulted on this ambitious project along the heavily populated river valley? “Absolutely not,” said Vicente Adriano, research director at UNAC , Mozambique’s national farmers’ union, which had just presented its own agricultural development plan, based on the country’s three million family farmers. The ProSavana directorate is still promising a new Master Plan for the project in early 2015. So it would be a mistake to think that ProSavana is dead. Large-scale land deals certainly aren’t, however they are branded. Investors may just be waiting for the Mozambican government to bring more to the table than just promotional brochures. Things like land, which turns out to be rather important for a successful land grab. In the Nacala Corridor, that land is anything but unoccupied.

At the 92nd Street Y , I got to interview Jane Goodall on stage about her new book Seeds of Hope . Honored to be asked, a bit anxious about my role, I started cramming well beforehand. I expected Seeds of Hope to be “interesting.” I didn’t expect it to create a powerful shift inside me. But it did. I began by jumping around in the book, mining for nuggets that I might incorporate into my questions for Jane. But I kept getting slowed down, caught by a thread that intrigued me, and then slowed down even more to scribble in margins and memorize what I wanted — oh so badly — to share. Here is just a taste... That plants communicate with each other through their root systems. Why didn’t I know this? They can share information. When pea plants experience water shortage, they send a chemical message through their roots warning surrounding plants to begin preparing themselves to better withstand the drought. And they do. They help each other out. Established trees serve as “mother trees” for surrounding youngsters; sending nutrients out through their roots — and through thread-like fungi that cling to them — to help the little ones get going. (So I guess I’d gotten it backwards. I’d assumed big trees would hog nutrients young-uns need.) I found myself deep under the earth’s surface imagining trees’ intricately patterned messaging. Then I got stuck on what tells a seed it’s time to jump. Lodgepole pine seeds only germinate when their cones go through fire. Turns out the intense heat is required to melt the cone’s hard resin. Why didn’t I know this? Almost half of the entire world’s biodiversity exists in the canopies of trees. What? And only recently have we begun to explore them. (Could this be one reason that we’ve not yet named 86 percent of species? Imagine now so many species disappearing before we’ve even met them.) Trees started appearing about 385 million years ago, playing an increasing role in absorbing C02 and cooling temperatures of the Devonian period enough to enable animals like us to proliferate. Really? Today it’s common to thank trees for helping mitigate climate heating, but how many have a clue that we might never have appeared without them? Plants can clean up toxins. Well, I’d visited “living machines” where organic waste is purified as it passes through selected plants, in all-natural sewage treatment. And I’d heard about plants remediating oil spills. But a species of fern that can remove arsenic? Yes, turns out there are twenty other plants native to America that can clean up lead, copper, nickel, and more. Orchids north of the Arctic Circle? Yes, thirteen species, while Hawaii is home to only three. And a forever-tree? The root system of a single tree on a cold, harsh mountainside in Sweden has survived almost 10,000 years. Yes, dear “Old Tjikko” goes on. Here’s my point. It’s commonly recognized that beauty touches our hearts; and that interacting directly with plants and animals can stir our emotions. In fact, my evening with Jane closed with a video of one of the most heart-rending scenes I’ve encountered: A chimp — who’d been orphaned by violence, found near death, and then revived — holds Jane in a long, most-tender embrace before sauntering off into the forest leaving humans behind. But what I’d never fully gotten before this book is how knowledge could awaken feelings of intimacy. As I read Seeds of Hope , again and again I felt appreciation, gratitude and awe. And are these not feelings we associate with intimacy and even love? Reading Jane’s new book, I actually found myself loving our earth more. It became even more precious to me. And why should I be surprised? After all, we’re aware, of course, that the deeper we get to know a friend or spouse, the more love arises. Knowledge changes how we experience life. Knowledge — not only direct experience or awesome beauty — opens the heart to intimacy, I am convinced. So, thank you, Jane Goodall, for bringing to my consciousness the truth that knowledge itself is a seed of intimacy. P.S. And, why would anyone be surprised that Jane could awaken feelings of intimacy via plants? After all, you’ll learn in this book that she once received a single rose tossed from a low-flying plane as a prelude to a proposal of marriage — which she accepted. Originally published by the Huffington Post on April 11, 2014

Originally published by Civil Eats on 09/21/2014 Today, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will take to the streets to fight for our lives. People’s Climate Marches are being organized in dozens of U.S. cities and a whopping 158 countries , from Burundi to Brazil to Nepal. Marchers are demanding international leaders to commit to serious emissions reductions and polluting industries to clean up their practices. Climate-impacted communities–from Hurricane Sandy survivors in New York City to indigenous peoples displaced by rainforest destruction in South America–will put a face on the urgency of this call to action. We all know the bad news—melting ice caps, rising seas, mass extinctions—but here is the good: We actually have solutions at our fingertips; we just need the political will to embrace them. New data from Cornell, Univeristy of California at Davis, and Stanford University shows that we have enough clean energy sources to power our country. The Solutions Project is using that data to help all Americas access to clean energy, across all economic, demographic, and political divides. We also have a blueprint for how to reshape the global food system so that instead of being one of the key drivers of the climate crisis, food becomes a central solution. Embracing a “low carbon diet” can help us both reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and survive on a hotter, less predictable planet. Consider the worst culprits of global warming and you might think of dirty coal-fired power plants or gas-guzzling SUVs. While its true that the majority of current human-produced GHGs come from the fossil fuel industry, the global food system—from agricultural land use to processing plants and food waste in landfills—contributes to as much as one third of these emissions. Finish Your Peas, the Ice Caps are Melting While nearly one billion go hungry every year globally, we waste as much as half of all food we produce. That’s a tragedy for the hungry; it’s also tragic for the climate. Not only are GHGs produced in the process of growing and making that food, but the landfills where much of it ends up belch methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if food waste were a country, it would represent the world’s third largest GHG emitter, after China and the United States. Around the world, folks are tackling the food waste problem with creative solutions. Urban Gleaners in Portland, Oregon is taking extra food going from restaurants and grocery stores and connecting it with food banks and other institutions in need. Love Food Hate Waste out of the UK has been pioneering education for reducing home and institutional food waste for years. And the Food Waste Recovery Network on U.S. college campuses has already saved more than 350,00 pounds of food since it was founded just two-and-a-half years ago. Don’t Panic, Go Organic Even when feeding billions, agriculture need not contribute to the climate catastrophe. One solution is to promote sustainable farming like organic agriculture that uses ecological strategies to manage weeds and pests and promote soil fertility. Organic farms use far less energy than those that rely on petroleum-based chemicals and synthetic fertilizer, which requires enormous amounts of energy to produce. In one long-term study comparing organic and non-organic corn production, the Rodale Institute found that the organic fields used 30 percent less energy. A Canadian life-cycle analysis found that organic farmers use less than half of the energy conventional ones do. Healthy soil also retains water and withstands extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, more effectively than soil from conventional operations. A University of Minnesota study also found that organic farms lost 41 percent less water. Rodale Institute’s long-term field trials research shows that organic farms produce much better than conventional ones in drought years, delivering yields up to one third higher. Moreover, healthy soil stores more carbon, meaning it stays out of the atmosphere. Andre Leu, from the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements , has estimated that organic agriculture practices could enable the earth’s soils to capture as much as 20 percent of current total emissions; add in agroforestry practices and that number could jump to as high as 36 percent. Stir Your Peanut Butter Multi-syllabic ingredients are red flags for your health, for sure, but one of them—palm oil—is a big red flag for the planet. In Indonesia and Malaysia, carbon-rich peatlands are being drained and destroyed to make way for giant palm oil plantations. Food processors’ are increasingly buying up this oil, no matter the ecological cost. And the cost is huge. One study by Rainforest Action Network (on whose board of directors I sit) found that deforestation for palm plantations in Indonesia causes 80 percent of that nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, making the country one of the world’s leading contributors to global warming. You can now find palm oil in most processed foods, from cookies and crackers to granola bars and peanut butter. It’s cheaper than other vegetable oils and it’s often used to increase shelf life or create the right consistency. You can thank palm oil for peanut butter than doesn’t need mixing. I would guess many of us might be willing to stir our own peanut butter if we knew it meant keeping Indonesian rainforests intact. The Meat of the Matter The United Nations estimates that livestock production is responsible for 14.5 percent of all GHG emissions, in large part because of the deforestation driven by global demand for feed as well as the emissions from intensive animal operations. But not all livestock is equally to blame: Think of beef as the Hummer on your plate. One study looking at emissions by animal type found that sheep accounted for nine percent of global livestock-related emissions, pigs five percent, and goats only four percent; whereas beef and dairy cattle account for a combined 71 percent. One reason is that beef is a major user of farmland: It requires about three-fifths of the world’s agricultural land for either pasture or feed, yet the production delivers less than 5 percent of the planet’s protein and less than 2 percent of global calories, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists . And there’s water to consider, too. You don’t have to live in drought-stricken California to know that water will become even more precious as weather becomes weirder. And beef production is water-intensive, extremely so. Producing a pound of beef uses almost 50 times more water than a pound of vegetables; about 40 times more than potatoes and other root crops; and about nine times more than grain. As participants in today’s climate march in New York City head home, spreading back out to Queens and Brooklyn and across the country, they’ll take with them the knowledge that these moments of popular expression are key to sparking real change in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies. But whether we take to the streets or not, we can all take action in our own communities—and our own kitchens.

Originally published by Food Tank on 05/21/2014 To listen to the current debates over the controversial requests by Monsanto and other biotech giants to grow genetically modified (GM) maize in Mexico, you’d think the danger to the country’s rich biodiversity in maize was hypothetical. It is anything but. Studies have found the presence of transgenes in native maize in nearly half of Mexico’s states. A study of maize diversity within the confines of Mexico’s sprawling capital city revealed transgenic maize in 70 percent of the samples from the area of Xochimilco and 49 percent of those from Tlalpan. Mexico is the “center of origin” where maize was first domesticated from its wild ancestor, teocinte. The country is arguably the last place you’d want to risk the possibility that its wide array of native seeds might be undermined by what indigenous people have called “genetic pollution” from GM maize. Last October, a judge issued an injunction putting a halt to all experimental and commercial planting until it can be proven that native maize varieties are not threatened by “gene flow” from GM maize. The precautionary measure comes more than a decade too late. In 2001, US-based researchers discovered the presence of transgenic traits in native maize varieties in the southern state of Oaxaca. A formal citizen complaint brought an exhaustive study by the environmental commission set up by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The researchers acknowledged that “gene flow” had occurred, warned, as other studies did, of more widespread contamination, and called for precautionary policies, including restrictions on imports from the United States. The Mexican government buried the study and promptly passed a biosafety law that opened the door to GM maize. “It is Orwellian that this history is unknown,” said Antonio Serratos, one of the researchers on the NAFTA-commissioned study, as well as the studies on Mexico City native maize. He said he was surprised by two things in Mexico City. “First, that we found so much diversity. In an area so small, so urban, it was so unlikely,” he said. “The other surprise was finding transgenics.” “In Mexican fields,” Serratos warned, “transgenic native maize is being created.” That possibility did not seem to concern representatives of Monsanto Mexico, beyond a passing mention. “We are very sensitive to Mexico being a center of origin, to the cultural significance of maize,” Jaime Mijares Noriega, Monsanto’s Latin America Director for Corporate Affairs, said in the company’s Mexico City office. “But if there is pollen flow to native maize, what happens? There are very few pure landraces in Mexico today. Many have already gotten genes from hybrids, and the native seeds are preserved in gene banks.” According to Oscar Heredia, the company’s Agronomic Regulatory Affairs officer, the company-funded field trials in northern Mexico showed minimal gene flow from GM maize to non-GM maize in bordering plots, dropping to less than 0.5 percent of plants. I asked if the company’s goal was to achieve zero percent gene flow. He said that would be unrealistic. Indeed it would, which is why people are concerned. Serratos told me that maize pollen has been known to travel more than one kilometer. He explained the danger: A hectare will have about 40,000 plants. One-half a percent of that is 200 plants. Each plant has about 400 grains on a few ears of maize, with each grain pollinated separately through the plant’s silk threads. If 200 plants get some level of contamination, that can mean up to 80,000 grains. And, if any of those grains are planted as seed, they will produce pollen, even if they don’t produce usable ears of maize. That pollen travels the winds, further spreading the transgenes. Serratos pointed out that wind-borne gene flow isn’t even the most pervasive source of contamination. Seeds travel far and wide, in farmers’ pockets. Small-scale farmers are relentless experimenters, trying every seed they get their hands on to see if it produces something useful. That’s how maize has evolved into the wide and useful range of varieties we see today. That is also how imported GM maize traveled to Oaxaca, got planted by an unwitting farmer, and spread transgenes to native plants. I asked Monsanto officials how they expected to control this more pervasive form of gene flow. “We can’t really ensure how grains are transported and where they end up,” Heredia said. Serratos stressed that this is precisely why precaution is warranted, why the entire country should be declared a “center of origin” for maize, with no permitted GM cultivation. Well-intentioned farmers could already be storing contaminated native seeds in their own community seed banks. ”If the seeds of maize are sold or exchanged, the contamination will grow exponentially,” he warned. “That is the point of no return.”