Mexico is phasing out imports of glyphosate and GMO corn
thecounter.org
thecounter.org
>On December 31, 2020, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed a decree that could enable Mexican farmers to reclaim their livelihoods within their home country. The order calls for the phase-out by 2024 of two pillars of American agribusiness: glyphosate and genetically engineered (GE) corn
The problem that US corn grown using high yielding strains is too cheap, so the solution is to ban growing high yielding strains domestically? I'm not sure how that's going to work.
The actual text of the decree is here: https://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5609365&fecha...
The google translated version says nothing about banning genetically engineered corn, just banning glyphosate? The second order effect is that nobody buys RR corn seed, since you wouldn't bother spending more for it if you can't then use glyphosate to knock down weeds. But that's only for corn grown in-country. All the media coverage seems to think it's banning corn imports, which I believe would require repealing NAFTA.
It isn't sweet corn, which is essentially a mutation variety from hundreds of years ago eaten like a vegetable instead of a grain.
All field corn (dent corn, lots of names) is perfectly edible. There are varieties with different characteristics like protein, oil, or starch content, or varieties grown to grind up and feed the whole plant to animals.
Regulation approves only certain genetics and grain millers will have certain approved varieties that mill well, and in general lots of extra care must be taken for human food corn. Ultimately though, it is extremely similar to all other corn.
So, it's edible?
So, non-glyphosate herbicides aren't really relevant to the goals of the program.
I really enjoyed this episode of Planet Money that tells the story of some of the original NAFTA negotiators: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/epis...
I hate to say this... but, why are you commenting if you don't know the legal details of NAFTA? The legal details of NAFTA are thorny, often surprising, and extremely relevant to this issue. Just search for the case history of the "tantamount to expropriation" phrase from NAFTA, and the crazy way these court cases have played out over the years under NAFTA.
NAFTA is practically the poster child for "trade deals with weird language, that should probably have never been approved by congress, with far-reaching consequences."
They've given a good hypothesis. Are you expecting commenters to only contribute to topics they can claim to be specialized experts in?
And wouldn't someone with a passing familiarity with NAFTA at least know about the "tantamount to appropriation" clause? I know this much, and that's just from a half-remembered required social studies class I took in public high school in the US, some twenty-odd years ago.
Of course I see a lot of wisdom on HN threads discussing subjects I’m not familiar with … but only because I can’t tell the difference between cynicism and wisdom in those cases.
You’re frustrated that someone would comment on a thorny legal issue while having no understanding of the law or knowledge of the specifics of NAFTA. But that’s how it is on every thread not related to software. See the hundreds of threads where software engineers suddenly became expert epidemiologists overnight for an example of this phenomenon.
I’m not sure what the alternative is. Certainly it isn’t just keeping quiet and not discussing anything we’re not experts in. Maybe sometimes it’s ok to speculate just for fun.
The last decades of politics have shown all over the world that modern politicians act primarily on the whims of those who line their pockets, which is way too often contrary to the best solutions for their constituents or the ability of the planet to support human life.
That cynicism, itself a symptom of the erosion of trust in democracy, as well as populist tendencies, doesn't come from nothing.
There was never an era where politicians didn’t prioritise their self interest above all else.
I think there is nothing wrong with saying your thing, if you do it in a humble way and you don't pretend to be an expert. It's called having a conversation.
Maybe the US gov't should stop subsidizing it? I assume that brings the price down quite a bit.
Which is because the US restricts cheap sugar imports from Mexico, to make US sugar cane farming profitable.
My first thought when I saw the headline was that Mexico corn restrictions were retaliation for US sugar restrictions.
Cane sugar is cheaper than beet sugar.
Alas, the sugar beet industry is also just another creature of tariffs and subsidies.
See eg https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-spends-4-billion-a-... for the US. The situation in Europe was similar when I last looked, but that was at least a decade ago.
See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/White-Sugar-Prices-Euro-... to see that sugar is much more expensive inside the EU than on the world market.
And https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-sugar-prices-graphic-i... and https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/food-farming-f...
https://www.ragus.co.uk/tariffs-on-sugars-explained/ also seemed interesting. They say:
> The basic tariff for importing direct consumption sugar into the EU is €419 per tonne. So, every tonne of sugar imported from a non-EU country costs an extra €419. Raw sugar imported into the EU is to be further refined into white sugar attracts a tariff of €339 per tonne.
now imagine that it was actual food shortages because we outsourced farming for short term profit, food subsidies are a national security issue. Outsourcing food production to maximize(short-term) economic efficiency is exactly the type of short sighted decision that has resulted in China taking over global manufacturing
1. Topsoil loss 2. Mismanagement of surface water and subsurface reserves 3. Centralization and consolidation, decimating rural communities which would be producing more labor intensive food in a crisis 4. Lower biodiversity, increased risk of catastrophic loss 5. The whole system relies on global trade to make useful food anyway
If national security were the actual driving force, farm policy would look a lot different.
What exactly don’t you think I know about farming practices? I personally know both commodity farmers and sustainable vegetable farmers.
I intend to keep my car in operation for a long time, as a car for motorsport, so I converted it to E85 for performance and long term robustness of fuel supply. My guess is that as petroleum and diesel fuels go out of fashion, only niche consumers will need combustion fuels, and that will be motorsport and ethanol blends. Companies can already make ethanol racing blends work financially, so I expect it to stick around.
EDIT: Fuel lines? Are these things which one simply modifies for fun and profit?
Ethanol absorbs moisture. You cannot store gas that contains ethanol for as long as you can non ethanol gas. If you are putting your car in storage, it is prudent to flush out the ethanol. This can be as simple as running the tank down and filling up with regular gas, and then driving more so the lines don't have ethanol gas anymore.
Ethanol attacks rubber compounds in a different method than gasoline. You need to have special lines to run E85 gas. I presume he switched it out himself. Not sure what else is involved in the conversion.
For my setup I have an ethanol content sensor so I can run regular and ethanol based fuels, and I upgraded my fuel pump and injectors, as you need about twice as much fuel volume per combustion compared to regular unleaded.
To answer the "Why" of the parent post, typically it's because you can get more power out of a vehicle with ethanol.
The reason you can get more power out of ethanol fuels, is because the aforementioned increased volume of fuel cools the combustion temperature. Ethanol brings some of it's own oxygen, hence why you can combust that extra fuel without adding more air.
Lowering combustion temperatures reduces the tendency for an engine to "knock" or "ping". Knocking is when the flame front is uneven, which gives a poorly timed and high peak pressure combustion that can lead to catastrophic failure.
Most turbocharged or supercharged engines are "knock limited" meaning you could produce more power if you could eliminate the risk of knocking. This only gets worse as turbo/superchargers increase intake air temperatures, which increases combustion temperature, increasing the tendency to knock. So by using ethanol fuels, you decrease combustion temperatures and get back the ability to push the engine further using other parameters.
That can be generalized and of course is not limited to farming.
a) our agricultural sector isn't diverse or strong enough anyway, if we get cut off from imports we are fucked even with subsidies
b) ramping up basic agriculture doesn't seem that hard, as in that's an easier crisis scenario to handle
c) on the market if global food prices jumped (has happened in the past) the subsidized farmers were quick to export to richer markets at a higher price, I believe US also saw similar price jump effects when China was affected by pork shortages IIRC
Best case scenario is government just increases the emergency supplies they already have to cover the period it would take the production to ramp up
In case you missed it, this entire discussion here is about the US situation. The "U.S:" even is in the article's subtitle (once you click on the article) and the US and NAFTA are all over the article and this discussion.
And apparently, see the current topic, Mexico too thinks having a functioning farming sector is more important than having access to the cheapest goods. Other wise they would welcome that the US pays for them being able to import the products more cheaply because of the subsidies.
So, given that, I'm not sure why you think pointing to Mexico refutes my point?
We should have a universal subsidy, not preferential subsidy for some food groups.
For instance, 87 cents of every dollar that a dairy farmer makes is from subsidy. That is ridiculous.
One reading (87% of gross income) is obviously problematic, and another (87% of profit) is exactly what you'd expect to get if you add almost any subsidy to a previously low-margin activity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/12/best-way-...
Well, when you ban people from raising prices when they prepared for an emergency better than others, that tends to disincentives preparing for emergencies.
(And, yes, the US and many state ban raising prices whenever they declare emergencies.)
In addition, the farmland in eg the US isn't going away, just because you drop subsidies and tariffs from corn. People will just grow something else there, when corn isn't as profitable anymore.
(Or the land might drop in value.)
>Artículo Quinto.- Las Secretarías de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, de Salud, y de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural, así como el Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, a más tardar en el primer semestre del año 2023, promoverán las reformas de los ordenamientos jurídicos aplicables para evitar el uso de glifosato como sustancia activa de agroquímicos y de maíz genéticamente modificado en México.
At the end: "...to avoid the use of glyphosate as active substance in agrochemicals and genetically modified corn in Mexico"
In Art. 6: > revocarán y se abstendrán de otorgar permisos de liberación al ambiente de semillas de maíz genéticamente modificado.
"... will revoke and abstain from granting permits to release into the environment genetically modified corn seeds"
The answer is in the headline: it's a decree from a populist. It might sound good to voters, but might even be harmful when it faces economic realities.
That's a question, right? The answer is no: articles 5 and 6 do talk about banning genetically modified corn.
Aren't they putting too many eggs in the same basket?
https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn
biofuel from corn was explicitly subsidized and protected as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...
At least that's the historical context. Today, the reason why America produces so much corn is because of government subsidies, and so she can always feed herself if WWIII ever breaks out and all the borders shut down (unlike many modern first world nations).
As a result of government policies, rice monoculture ended up replacing the the diversity of grains that people actually consumed.
It wasn't the only one, but along with wheat and millet, poor Chinese were definitely eating rice.
I don't know recent it is but isn't there a rice-wheat divide in China too?
> The staple native grain of Europe is wheat, rice in Asia, and corn in the Americas.
Not sure what you mean by native? The predecessor of wheat was native to some parts of the Middle East, but until recently you couldn't even grow that stuff well in eg most parts of Germany. (Hence Germany's enduring love affair with rye bread.)
Rice only grows in some parts of Asia. (Eg Northern China relies on other grains.)
All those crops are human interventions in their wide spread, they aren't native to entire continents.
> In the late Roman Empire in Europe the most important crops were bread wheat in Italy and barley in northern Europe and the Balkans. Near the Mediterranean Sea viticulture and olives were important. Rye and oats were only slowly becoming major crops.[1]
The article does mention Rye was important and the most common crop in the Northernmost regions and in France. Due to its winter tolerance.
See Crops[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Middle_Ag...
So eg you can't really economically grow the durum wheat you need for (non-egg) pasta.
Yes, barley and rye grow just fine. Potatoes, too. But they are a New World import. Germans love potatoes. (Just like Chinese cuisine loves peanuts. Another New World import.)
And, of course, Germany has different regions. Some parts are warm enough for wine, others not so much.
He said Europe, not Germany specifically.
https://www.world-foodhistory.com/2018/10/history-of-wheat-i...
> He said Europe, not Germany specifically.
My point was that continents are not a naturally unit here. (Especially since Europe isn't even a proper continent.)
You may wonder why I don’t count HFCS- that’s because it’s a sweetener composed of simple sugars whereas most staple carb sources are starches. It’s very common in processed foods, which Americans and Mexicans unfortunately consume way too much of, but is not exactly a staple most people have or use in their home cooking.
>I would bet those don’t even form a plurality of starchy carb sources in the American diet
That's good. I was mildly concerned about the situation because others mentioned corn farms subsidised by the government - relying too much on them for food would be risky, in the case of a plague.
(and the insect apocalypse, but that’s an indirect effect on human health)
In areas where BT-Maize gets planted, Corn Ear Worm has been observed to evolve resistances in as few as 5 or 6 generations. You might think you've deployed a pest-free plant, but in reality all you've done is deploy an evolutionary pressure on the target population, and nature has had like 800-million years' practise out-evolving bad shit happening.
Viewed in a systems light, the whole notion is little more than a grift; at best a temporary solution that takes longer to develop than ecosystems take to out-evolve.
1. I used to keep bees for ~20 years. Saw a gradual decline in population ~5 years ago and now they are all dead. Same for most of the people in my community, except a few of them that do kind of "industrial" beekeeping, which requires lots of attention and is not feasible for a hobbyist.
2. When I asked some of the smaller farmers in the area why this is happening, they told be about the illegal imports that many are doing to stay competitive.
3. Tried complaining to authorities several times in the past. Whether out of negligence or corruption, they simply don't care.
However, in terms of potential for unforeseen catastrophe, I'd leave GMO in the list. Our understanding of how small genetic changes can affect ecosystems in unintended ways is far, far from thorough. W don't even understand how small genetic changes affect us, never mind a biome filled with biomes.
Also while Round Up is probably (over)used, particularly in corn harvesting where it's sprayed to ease harvest and thus is more likely to end up in food products, in normal use it seems to be as safe as a chemical can be. Banning it is very likely to result in other chemicals being used, and they're unlikely to be as safe.
Wait, neither of those are actually true, are they?
Let's have a goo at the top three search results for "round up effect on insects"...
> "The chemical compound glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide, can weaken the immune systems of insects, suggests a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health"
> "The active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, does not affect insects in the same way it impacts plants, but it does kill insects, either directly -- as in the case of a small number of honeybees in Monsanto's research -- or as a consequence of killing weeds."
> "Glyphosate—the most widely used herbicide globally—inhibits melanin production, which could have wide-ranging implications in the health of many organisms, including insects. ... Glyphosate also increased the burden of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum in A"
This doesn't seem like such an "unlikely" candidate to be playing a role to me.
The harm to insects comes primarily from the lack of biodiversity and lack of flowering plants.
It's a Gish-gallop of codswallop.
It's laughable, and I scorn the author with all my heart. He's a stooge.
Since it's rude to say things like that without examples - and I resent you for making me spend more time on that article - he says things like:
> While Sánchez-Bayo was claiming that “almost half of the [world’s insect] species are rapidly declining,” the data documented declines for about 2,900 species, a tiny fraction (less than one-10th of one percent) of the insect species on Earth.
Jeeze, he only documented a decline in _2,900_ of the insect species on Earth. How could he not document all 3 billion +, what a lazy guy [/s].
Seriously?!
In the next paragraphs, you can see how differently he treats research that supports his view, praising it's author's for "welcoming criticism", even though their paper was criticised for the very same issues and more.
At times he criticizes researchers for not using more data, at times he admits that more data is needed, and then he says that there's "no evidence" of decline based on one study that he admits was widely criticised - for the same issues, and more, as he berated Sánchez-Bayo for.
I had a quick look at this guy's Twitter and he's abusing Greenpeace and organic farming, while defending the use of pesticides and in particular glyphosate.
SO I LOOKED INTO THAT, AND GUESS WHAT:
"Jon Entine is the founder and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, a key partner in Monsanto's public relations efforts to ..."
The guy is a fucking stooge. A straight up Monsanto stooge: https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/blog/2019/september/jon-entin...
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyp...
One of the significant problems with earlier pesticides and herbicides where the chemical in question would stay in the environment for decades (DDT, an insecticide, had a half life of 10-15 years and tended to accumulate in biological tissues). Glyphosphate is also not very acutely toxic.
I would have to eat an entire pound of pure glyphosphate to have a 50% chance of survival. (I consume many things every day much more toxic)
There are some questions about long term carcinogens but the signal there is not particularly strong.
As opposed to some other, especially older agricultural chemicals, many of which got their start as actual chemical weapons used in war.
I'm glad we are using it and not older chemicals, but unless you are actually in the habit of eating it recreationally, maybe don't use that example.
The point of the example is that it is not acutely toxic unless you ingest a sizable amount while dealing with concentrations only available to certified farmers. The lethal amounts come up to around how much you would apply to half an acre of cropland.
Glyphosphate is also biodegradable.
Can you get pure glyphosphate? Yes, but it requires a license. It comes in about a 50/50 mixture with water usually.
It is much too difficult to distribute the pure substance in such small quantities so it is diluted with water to varying degrees (down to a few percent concentration) for safety, accuracy, and to avoid burning plants with unavoidable variations in application.
A small amount of a attractant is also added so the chemical better applies to leaves and doesn't just bead up and drip off onto the soil.
https://labelsds.com/images/user_uploads/Roundup%20Pro%20Con...
Apparently there's blends intended for use in water that are more or less just diluted with water, but they aren't the usual mix either.
https://alligare.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/glyphosate-5...
I would be extremely interested in the research that validates that because it is not consistent with my experience.
280 million pounds of glyphosate used per year
It's actually not glyphosate that can be harmful to aquatic animals. It's the accompanying surfactants, added to help glyphosate to enter the plants. You put too much of any kind of surfactant (basically, a soap. A chemical that lowers the surface tension of water) to a small volume of water, and it will be harmful to aquatic life.
Note that the original Roundup Ready patents expired in 2014, so you can buy generic glyphosate tolerant GMO seeds https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/generi...
You know why we use selective herbicides?
Because they improve yield.
Farmers are practical people.
Italy did something similar to target the cheap (high yield) canadian grain imports, but using labelling instead of an outright ban on glyphosate.
There are no varieties of Wheat, Oats, or Barley registered in Canada that a resistant to glyphosate.
I dislike this being spelled out in terms of "increasing yield" as it is actually more about managing quality. Pre-harvest applications of glyphosate are mostly a thing of the past in wheat anyway, the varieties dry down better now - it was mostly a artifact of the Canadian transition from drying crops in windrows to leaving them stand. The genetics have caught up now.
You want wheat (and other grains) to be dry before harvest. Harvesting when wet increases losses due mold growth. Wet stems cause sticking and blocking in the harvest machinery. In many countries it's common to apply a defoliant: You kill or half-kill the foliage of the crop plants, and wait a small number of days, so grains and stems get drier before the harvest.
This use of glyphosate has nothing to do GMOs (there is no GMO wheat in markets anywhere). In a small number of countries, it's forbidden to use chemicals (plant poisons) to force desiccation.
Roundup is a lot cheaper than Axial Extreme + MCPA or Velocity M3 or Tandem or Rexade.. and, TBH, Roundup isn't tha good at killing a lot of the weeds that those other products kill very well. It's just not as simple as you might think.
If farmers don't want to grow GMO/glyphosate resistant crops they have options, I personally grow mostly non-GMO crops and make plenty of money doing it. Basic economics applies to GMOs like like it applies to microchips or flip-flops and the capital owners (in this case land owners) have agency in this process.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883649/
Only you know how far this rabbit hole goes
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00451...
To put it mildly, Monsanto has been very aggressive at enforcing their patents.
Farmers can plant roundup-ready corn without paying any royalties to Monsanto, and keep + redistribute the seeds as they wish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Plant_Variety_Office
So the vendor lock-in is that... it's a better product? If that's what your idea of "vendor lock-in" is I can totally get behind that.
Frankly, I don’t know how common this is with corn, or are the farmers all buying hybrid seeds each year anyway.
Edit: there's some infornation here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_co...
Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process.
This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved.
Edit: there's a very good critical essay from Lewontin on the politics of hybrid corn: https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-o...
This is absolutely not plausible. It's also not plausible that high-yield broiler chicken would outcompete local birds, and it's not plausible that high-yield cows would outcompete local moose, elk and deer.
It is interesting that with animals, people intuitively usually understand that high yield food producing breeds would not outcompete anything in the wild nature. But with plants, people are ready to believe scifi horror movie stories.
There are several varieties of insect-resistance traits, multiple brands of herbicide resistance (off the top of my head there’s Roundup Ready and Liberty Link), drought resistance, and several more. I was last deeply interested around 2008 so my knowledge is stale.
I found this USDA data sheet that lists a bunch of varieties for corn; others exist for the other GMO crops: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/BECornCro...
Watching the path-dependent nature of technology is fascinating. It seems Monsanto has largely given up on GMOs, due to public backlash, just as crispr and the like are set to make the whole endeavor a lot more precise. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-techno...
The hot new thing these days (as I understand it, I am not a farmer) is precision ag - better use of maps, sensors, drones, robotics, etc to make better use of resources and better target chemical application. Bayer’s marketing site is probably a good place to get the farmer’s perspective: https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/d...
The article linked does highlight a very important point without really enlightening readers about the history, GMOs were never about higher yields. Higher yields have always come from conventional plant breeding. The common misconception is that plant genomes are simple and we can manipulate them at will but the truth is that plant genomes are way, way more complex than animal genomes and we mostly have no idea how plants work.
GMO's are about specific pathways that we can understand that dictate the reactions is specific conditions, very narrow manipulations of a plant's metabolism, that we mostly discovered by accident.
The incredibly complex genomes of plants coupled with the incredible variety of plants out there to cultivate means that it will take a giant leap of technology geared towards understanding plant genomes that will in turn allow the effective application of technologies like CRISPR for manipulating plant genomes.. and that is decades away at best. I hope to live to see it!!
This is mostly done with breeding and hybridization as opposed to genetic engineering, though there have been some transgenics where anti-pest genes from other organisms have been spliced into corn.
There have been more herbicide resistance genetics recently.
Last time I looked, Monsanto was not using terminator genes and promising they would never use terminator genes while the green press was running stories that were precision-engineered to give you the impression that Monsanto was using terminator genes.
Has that changed? Did Monsanto start actually using terminator genes? Or is the story still, uhh... "speculative"?
Sovereign countries don't trade territory for money any more. The days of the Alaska Purchase are over.