It's difficult to conceive of anything more foolish and irresponsible, or with more serious consequences than the authorization of commercial cultivation of genetically-modified [GM] maize [corn].
Antonio Turrent showed their folly in these pages (La Jornada, 01/11/13). Where it is proposed to employ GM corn--on 3 million hectares [just shy of 8 million acres] of Mexico's best lands for cultivation of corn, GM corn does not raise production. Moreover, [air-born] GM contamination would destroy the productive capacity of 5 million hectares [12 million acres], on which only specialized native species--created over the course of millenia--can thrive, and on which millions of rural families and a good part of Mexican food depends.
The decision continues an irresponsible tradition that seeks to eliminate the country's campesino [often indigenous, small farmers] base. The Constitution of 1917 was a compromise. The anti-agrarian trends were felt immediately and culminated in 1928. Shortly after the founding of the first incarnation of the PRI [Party of the Institutional Revolution], Calles [President Plutarco Elías Calles, 1924-1928] announced land re-distribution. A brief period of time was set within which people could ask for land. After that, [Calles declared:]
"not another word on the subject. Then we will give guarantees to everyone, small and large farmers, in order that private enterprise and public credit might emerge."
According to Calles, land redistribution brought the campesinos to disaster, because
"they believe their demands, and we promote their laziness.
"If we are honest with ourselves, we--the children of the Revolution--have the obligation to confess that agrarianism, as we have understood and practiced it so far, is a failure (...) We have been giving land right and left, without these [campesinos] producing anything but creating a terrifying national commitment."
Such distribution "right and left" between 1917 and 1930 delivered only one-tenth of the land held by the haciendas [huge country estates of the landed elite] and often declined to recognize allocations made by the farmers themselves, especially the Zapatistas.
Calles's announcement did not go unanswered. The National League of Campesinos, which fought for the agricultural goals of the Revolution and spearheaded a radical confrontation with landlord-ism, led a movement to reconstitute the campesino ranks, which in 1934 forced a shift in government policies to take it up again, with Cárdenas [President Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934-1940] giving encouragement and support to the campesinos. The "green revolution" could not be stopped and, with its ups and downs, continued for several decades.
What is now being cooked up is even more grave than the neoliberal offensive unleashed in 1982. De la Madrid [President Miguel De la Madrid, 1982-1988] began to dismantle the apparatus of support for campesinos. In 1991 Hank [Carlos Hank González] cynically declared that his obligation as Secretary of Agriculture was to remove ten million campesinos from the countryside. [Javier] Usabiaga expanded this eviction goal to twenty million when he took office as Secretary of Agriculture under [President Vicente Fox, 2000-2006].
The decision [to authorize cultivation of GM corn] would be even more severe than the constitutional counter-reform of 1992, because the campesinos have always had the option to keep their land. With GM corn, they will not have this option.
Our corn, in all its richness, would cease to exist, and with it, literally, the campesinos and the country. The slogan, "Without corn there is no country," coined by Marco Díaz León, was adopted in 2003 by a national campaign that continues today. It is not merely a formal good move. It defines a history and two opposing political projects.
Despite efforts to get rid of the campesinos, their number is larger than ever (sic). Despite efforts to destroy the [corn] tortilla by replacing it with wheat-based junk food, it remains a central component of the Mexican diet. To declare ourselves as people of corn is not only a beautiful metaphor. Here we invented maize, and maize invented us. Meanwhile, the more we know of corn, the better we know ourselves.
Getting rid of the campesinos today isn't just the familiar search of those in the realm of domestic and foreign industrial agriculture. Now it is a condition of the plundering that is part of the global wave of territorial occupation, a condition for the savage exploitation with which they are trying to rescue capitalism from its current predicament.
A hundred years ago the Zapatistas directly carried out redistribution [of the land] that the governments derived from the Revolution wanted to postpone. In 1994 the new Zapatistas made possible land distribution in Chiapas in a dignified response to the counter-reform of 1992 and the enactment of NAFTA. With it [NAFTA coming into force in 1994] began the global struggles against neoliberal globalization.
What the government is trying today is not only the reverse of these Zapatista traditions. It would shoot itself in the foot, because the campesino base that it wants to eliminate has always supported the PRI. It would also be the path of national destruction, using the foundations for a false ceiling. And it would be the drop that would cause the glass to overflow: the aggression that the Mexican people would not be able to bear. Spanish original