OPINION

Photo: Google

By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS

After four years of diplomatic cajoling, seemingly endless consultations, a barrage of scientific arguments and legions of not-so-veiled threats of potential consequences, the gloves are finally off and the United States has decided to take Mexico to task for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) unfounded ban against genetically modified (GMO) corn.

On Friday, June 2, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai filed for formal dispute settlement consultations with Mexico under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) regarding the ban, which would prevent the import of GMO yellow corn for human consumption.

Given that the United States currently exports more than 20 million metric tons of corn to Mexico — 95 percent of which is yellow corn — and the fact that about 90 percent of all corn grown within the United States is genetically modified, it is a measure that has U.S. farmers up in arms.

“The United States has repeatedly conveyed its concerns that Mexico’s biotechnology policies are not based on science and threaten to disrupt U.S. exports to Mexico to the detriment of agricultural producers, which in turn can exacerbate food security challenges,” Tai said.

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) supports success for all farmers, and that means embracing fair, open, science- and rules-based trade. In this spirit, the USMCA was written to ensure that producers in all three countries have full and fair access to each other’s markets,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack added.

“We fundamentally disagree with the position Mexico has taken on the issue of biotechnology, which has been proven to be safe for decades. Through this action, we are exercising our rights under USMCA while supporting innovation, nutrition security, sustainability and the mutual success of our farmers and producers.”

Mexico’s protest regarding the consumption of GMO corn is based on nothing more than AMLO’s mumbo-jumbo pseudo-science beliefs that eating genetically modified produce will somehow turn people into biological zombies or cause them to grow fish scales.

Mexico’s protest regarding the consumption of GMO corn is based on nothing more than AMLO’s mumbo-jumbo pseudo-science beliefs that eating genetically modified produce will somehow turn people into biological zombies or cause them to grow fish scales.

Championed by self-proclaimed “in-the-know” anti-GMO celebrities who couldn’t discern the difference between a test tube and a petri dish if they tried, and politicians who exploit consumer fears and want to come off as nutritional Don Quixotes defending the public from the abiogenic poisons of modern agriculture based on their own highly misinformed biases (read AMLO), GMOs have become the Big Bad Wolves of “organic” grocery stores and vegan-centric food promoters worldwide.

But the fact of the matter is that there is NO scientific evidence that GMOs are in any way dangerous to human health.

And virtually every urban-legend thaumaturgy argument about the evils of so-called “Frankenfoods” has been debunked by real scientific research and peer-review evidence.

In fact, GMOs have numerous agricultural and health advantages, including being more sustainable, more resilient in droughts, more herbicide resistant, more profitable for farmers (due to less tilling demands) and richer in vital nutrients like vitamin A and iron.

GMOs are not going to make you fat (it’s the four Twinkies you had after lunch and the six carbonated sodas you consume each day that are doing that), not going to make you grow green scales, and not going to alter your offspring’s genetic development with bovine DNA.

GMOs are not going to make you fat (it’s the four Twinkies you had after lunch and the six carbonated sodas you consume each day that are doing that), not going to make you grow green scales, and not going to alter your offspring’s genetic development with bovine DNA.

As Belgian Ghent University biotechnology professor Stefaan Blancke pointed out in his Scientific American magazine publication, “negative representations of GMOs are widespread and compelling because they are intuitively appealing.”

By tapping into deep-rooted intuitions and subconscious emotions, Blancke said such trendy phobias of scientific advances “capture our attention and are easily processed and remembered, thus standing a greater chance of being transmitted and  becoming popular, even if they are untrue.”

Another article in Scientific American by prominent plant geneticist Pamela Ronald noted that after more than 20 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of more than 2 billion acres planted, “no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops.”

The most comprehensive review of GMOs — a 2014 study published in the Journal of Animal Science and compiling nearly 30 years of health data on more than 100 billion food-producing animals, both before and after the introduction of genetically engineered feed in 1996 — serves as scientific proof that genetically modified foods are safe for human consumption.

And as far back as 2012, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science, concluded that foods containing genetically modified ingredients “pose no greater risk” than non-GMO foods, and that slapping labels on genetically modified foods would only “mislead and falsely alarm consumers.”

Now that the United States is taking its case to a USMCA mediation group, the Mexican government will no longer be able to hide behind its pseudoscientific arguments the GMOs are dangerous to human health.

In the end, science will win out, and Mexico will have to drop its ban against GMO corn, or face the commercial consequences of violating the USMCA.