By Lauren Gilger
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.
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