Mexico: A growing maize disaster?

Scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico state that recent donations from billionaire philanthropists have taken them significantly closer to “providing poor farmers with more productive, nutritional and resistant varieties of wheat and maize at a critical time”, The Guardian reports. Thomas Lumpkin, director of the centre, says the new laboratories and greenhouses will double research capacity. CIMMYT's revamped facilities, however, are said to be designed to increase the centre's capacity for transgenic research.

Mr. Lumpkin claims that transgenics will remain a relatively minor part of the Mexico programme, probably reaching about 10% in the next five years and that when delivered by non-profit organisations such as CIMMYT, GMOs can help tackle rural inequality by spreading technology that is currently largely limited to the developed world. The centre is already working with experimental GMO maize crops in Kenya and several other African countries. In Mexico, CIMMYT's GM research is limited to wheat so far, but the new facilities open the possibility of expanding this to even more controversial research with maize. The full article is published in The Guardian
 

Mexico has been on high alert following the attempts of agribusiness multinationals to win the government’s approval to plant 2.5 million hectares of transgenic maize in Mexico, ETC Group reports. The country is the centre of origin and diversity of maize. While the former government did not approve the applications before leaving office on 30 November 2012, its last-minute changes to regulatory procedures removed obstacles that could have hindered the new administration’s ability to grant the companies’ requests.

The Mexican government quietly changed its regulatory procedures so that the Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources is no longer legally bound to take into account the advice of its own and other government agencies’ experts on biosafety, according to Greenpeace. Three government bodies had made critical, extremely cautionary or explicitly negative recommendations when previously consulted about the release of GM maize in Mexico. More information is available from the ETC Group.