Most of the headlines about the U.S. and Mexico may be about the border and immigration these days, but there’s another fight going on between us and our neighbors to the south. And it’s about tortillas — or at least the corn that goes into them.
Last year, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador banned the use of genetically modified corn in tortillas, which the Mexican people eat a whole lot of. He also phased out the use of the commonly used herbicide glyphosate. The World Health Organization has said it probably causes cancer.
But the U.S. was not happy with this decision and, now, the two countries are locked in an official trade dispute over the decision.
Timothy A. Wise, a senior research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University and author of the book "Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food," joined The Show to discuss.
The Show also reached out to the U.S. Trade Office for comment on this story, but did not receive a response.
Full conversation
TIMOTHY A. WISE: The reason he took that action was because there's a lot of concern about the potential health effects of consuming genetically modified corn and the herbicide residues that it comes with. Because they're genetically modified in part to tolerate the application of roundup or glyphosate herbicides. So it was to restrict both the exposure to glyphosate and the exposure to genetically modified traits in their corn.
And that is partly because Mexico consumes 10 times the amount of corn that we do in the United States. And they consume it, not, not in processed foods like you and I do mostly in the U.S. But in minimally processed forms like ground corn and tortillas. And that also elevates the risk from exposure, right?
LAUREN GILGER: So you mentioned Round-Up there and some of the concerns I think probably come to people's minds that, that have been publicized about lawsuits against that particular product. But talk a little bit about what are the health concerns related to this specifically for people in Mexico who do consume that much?
WISE: The, the concerns, which have now been in the course of this formal dispute process that the United States initiated. There's a raft of published evidence now of the ways in which some genetically modified traits may cause damage to the intestinal tracts of mammals. There's been inadequate testing of a lot of these products.
And so what Mexico is saying is we need to take precautions, given the amount of corn that we, we consume and the way we consume it. And the glyphosate residues, as you said, have been the subject of lawsuits, more than 100,000 lawsuits in the United States alone. Those are pretty well documented. They do come in as residues on the crops because again, what Mexico is eating is just kernels of corn that are ground. And if they come straight out of the field and the fields have been sprayed with glyphosate recently, then there are residues on that corn and it gets into the, into the tortillas. And academic studies have actually shown the presence of these transgenic corn varieties and glyphosate in their tortillas.
GILGER: Interesting. So tell us why the U.S. was not happy about this move. Like what's the concern from our end?
WISE: The concern from our end, depending on who you listen to, is arguing essentially that there is no scientific basis for Mexico to raise these alarms to raise these concerns. The U.S. has argued all along that Mexico has no science on its side and that the US produces corn that is entirely safe to consume and regulations provide adequate safety measures to guarantee that.
And because the U.S. exports, and this is why it's a trade dispute, $5 billion worth of corn right now to Mexico and rising levels since the two signed a trade agreement 30 years ago, a lot of U.S. corn goes into Mexico. Very little of it goes into tortillas because we mainly export yellow corn for animal feed.
And so one of the things Mexico argues is, why is this a trade dispute? We're not restricting trade and we're not restricting the access to the tortilla chain of much of your corn U.S. exports, about 3% of our corn exports are white corn.
GILGER: So tell us more about this official trade dispute and how it works. Like you said, it is kind of like a trial with arguments on both sides from either country. Who decides who's right, who wins?
WISE: There are three arbitrators. There's sort of a list of arbitrators associated in the trade world who hear these cases. The parties nominated and had to agree or agree to disagree on who the three trade panelists are. It's one Mexican, one person from the U.S. and, and another from another country. They are not experts in science. Generally, they're generally trade lawyers. So this is a stretch for them to kind of make sense of the arguments about the potential risks. But they've done that. I mean, the indications are that they're taking Mexico's claims and evidence very seriously.
GILGER: So let's talk about the potential consequences here because this decision will come out at some point here in the next couple of months. It sounds like if these arbitrators decide in favor of Mexico, does that have any major impacts here in the U.S.?
WISE: No, on an actual trade front, it doesn't. I mean those restrictions have been in place and U.S. exports of corn to Mexico have soared because there's been a drought in Mexico and they need the, they need the corn for feed. So even though they're not allowing it into tortillas. It's a trivial percentage of what we export. So nobody would notice there are a few corn farm, white corn farmers in the United States who grow GMO corn, who've had to look for other markets.
So it would be a very trivial effect on trade if the U.S. loses that case.
The real takeaway from this is that we all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mexico for defending good food, good, clean, healthy food and bringing to light the inadequacies of the U.S. regulatory process, which allows a lot of unhealthy stuff to get through in order to allow the companies to make their money. And Mexico standing up to the U.S. on this could well come back to us in the form of the U.S. having to come up with better standards.
