ONE Maize Futures

Like chanting monks, howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra) greet the shivery gray dawn of the lowland Maya forests with a guttural concert that can travel three miles. In nearby villages this howler chorus makes for a free, reliable alarm clock. Their intimidating roar belies how small these mammals are: about twenty pounds and just two to three feet tall. In ancient Maya art the howler monkey figures as a deity of art, sculpture, and music. In the Maya calendar, it symbolizes divination and historical knowledge.

Half a world away, street traffic awakens another kind of primate in the Windy City. This one dons a gray suit and has a quick “breakfast of biodiversity”: coffee with corn-derived creamer, bananas, sausage, and a bagel smeared with a spread containing palm oil, which is responsible for most tropical deforestation today.¹ Using his opposable thumbs, he grabs these items from a street cart that is perhaps staffed by a Mesoamerican migrant displaced by trade agreements. After guzzling his cappuccino, this corporate capuchin dashes to catch a subway to the Chicago stock exchange—on lands that were once a trading nexus for many maize-based Native American tribes, including the Peoria, Potawatomi, Myaamia, Kaskaskia, and Kiikaapoi nations.

As Q’eqchi’ farmers walk to their milpas, the gray-suited corporate creature begins his monkey business, howling orders (“open-outcry trading”) on the floor of the stock exchange.² In a bizarre ritual dating back to the 1880s, he trades in “corn futures,” that is, speculation on the price of future harvests. With a push of a button, these subsidized corn prices set through the Chicago Board of Trade radiate misery around the world for small maize producers. Like the monkey characters with wooden souls in the Popol Vuh, this corporate trader is blissfully unaware of his sins against Mesoamerica.

This chapter deploys food regime theory to explain the entanglement of these two scenes and how “corn futures” threaten “maize futures.” As Raj Patel has brilliantly argued in his comparative book, Stuffed and Starved, the quandaries of global consumers (the omnivores, as it were) and the small producers (the milperos) are interconnected. As Patel notes, when analytically separated, “we are dissuaded from asking hard questions, not only about how our individual tastes and preferences are manipulated, but about how our choices at the checkout take away the choices of those who grow our food.”³ People enslaved to corporate cubicles make split-second decisions from a distance that affect the fates of millions of small producers around the world struggling to survive.

Although the corporate trader considers himself uniquely cosmopolitan, peasants have also become global actors in the fight against the financialization of food. They united in the 1990s to build La Vía Campesina (The Peasant Way), likely the largest and most diverse social movement in world history. Morphing from a “class-in-itself” to a politicized “class-for-itself,” that transition has been closely chronicled by and co-constructed with the field of critical agrarian studies.⁴ Like women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies, this new field is “politically-engaged, pluralist, and internationalist.”⁵ It aims to both understand and change societal trends and help assure a future in which small farmers, many of whom are also Indigenous, can continue to save seed as their ancestors have for thousands of years.

Protecting maize diversity for another millennia therefore requires us to know something about the corporate creatures who make short-sighted gambles based on quarterly profit reports. Although it may not be possible to overthrow capitalism writ large, civil society could work to reign in corporate corruption, collusion, and political profiteering by removing the recent rights corporations have acquired as “legal persons.” These bizarrely constructed legal identities unfortunately threaten the real futures of living people. Ergo, those who wish to revitalize “three sisters” agriculture (intercropped maize, beans, and squash) must also vigilantly monitor the changing kinship and corporate stratagems of what I call the “three evil [corporate] stepsisters.”

FROM COLONIAL TO CORPORATE FOOD REGIMES

Omnivores and milperos express different assumptions about social change. This chapter shows how the fates of these two groups became codependent through colonial trade—long before climate change began to threaten everyone’s mutual survival. Academic literature reviews typically cite a slew of case studies, creating a kind of “localism” within theory. However, this book is being released in 2024, which is 502 years after Hernán Cortés seized the Aztec Empire and exactly five centuries after Cortés sent Pedro Alvarado to lead a brutal invasion of Guatemala. Given this epochal timing, it seems more appropriate to take a wider lens and situate the story of Mesoamerican resistance to agribusiness within deeper historical transformations to a “world food economy,” or what Harriet Friedmann in a 1993 influential essay famously described as sequential “food regimes.”⁶

Later, when Friedmann began collaborating with Philip McMichael, this dynamic duo defined food regimes as “rule-governed structure[s] of production and consumption of food on a world scale.”⁷ Friedmann had initially divided food regimes into two periods, but McMichael added a third: European colonial empire (1870s to World War II), US hegemony (1940s–70s), and globalized corporate and market rule (1980s–present). They both emphasize how across the ages food trade has had one common denominator: the provision of cheap food for the masses to legitimize political order and pacify labor.⁸

While empire was fattening itself by moving commodities from point to point, mercantile colonialism disrupted Indigenous foodways, but foods from the Americas also fundamentally transformed the world economy.⁹ Maize spontaneously traveled the world as an “underdog” crop, helping to sustain colonized people as well as the Euro-American poor.¹⁰ Driving the early colonial food regime was trade in luxury goods.¹¹ By the nineteenth century, however, trade in staple grain crops like wheat reshaped patterns of colonial settlement.¹² When colonial mercantilism shifted to industrialization, what were once luxury goods (tea, sugar, coffee) became everyday staples for the working masses, entwining slavery with industrial capitalism.

A canonical text about this transition was Sidney Mintz’s ethnohistory, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.¹³ Originally domesticated in New Guinea, sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum) traveled through the Philippines, into India, then into the Arab world and the Mediterranean. When Christopher Columbus set sail the second time for “the Indies” in 1493, he carried with him sugarcane cuttings from the Portuguese-colonized Canary Islands.¹⁴ More preoccupied with mining precious metals than agriculture, the Spanish Empire never did grow much cane. When the British Empire seized control of the Caribbean, however, sugar became the “speartip of modern colonialism.”¹⁵

Besides describing the horrific labor conditions on sugar plantations, Mintz’s twist was to show how sugar also enslaved the new English working class to the time discipline of the factory.¹⁶ Before the eighteenth century, sugar was a novelty in Europe—used only in small quantities and prized as medicine, decoration, or a spice to enhance flavor, similar to the way Chinese cuisine incorporates sugar. European peasant diets prior to industrialization were not all that different from Mesoamerican ones or any traditional world cuisine. They consisted of a versatile carbohydrate staple, supplemented by small dishes that provided vitamins, protein, and umami flavor.¹⁷ Barley- and bread-eating English peasants lost this traditional diet when enclosures expelled them from the countryside.¹⁸

Forced into cities, British peasants had little choice but to join the working class. Sugar and colonial stimulants like tea and coffee helped adapt these new proletarians to the long hours of factory life. Sugar provided new “break” foods (bread with jam, pastries, etc.) that did not need to be reheated and could boost worker energy with quick calories. “By provisioning, sating—and, indeed, drugging—farm and factory workers, [sugar] sharply reduced the overall cost of creating and sustaining the metropolitan proletariat.”¹⁹ Soon the poor became the largest consumers of sucrose, and their health began to suffer.²⁰ By the opening of the twentieth century sugar contributed one-sixth of the national British caloric intake. In the British Empire, daily life, holidays, and life rituals began to revolve around sugar—from afternoon tea to elaborate wedding cakes. The shift to industrial modernity not only changed what and how much we ate, but also how and when we ate it.²¹ Mintz shows that food consumption is never simply a matter of individual choice, but an expression of social arrangements, cultural values, and inherited historical patterns.²²

With the collapse of British Empire after World War II, food power pivoted into a second regime dominated by the United States. After industrializing its own food system according to Henry Ford’s principles of production (both farming and mass food production), the United States began exporting technical aid to convince other developing countries to do the same.²³ Through the 1954 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, better known as Public Law 480 (PL-480), the United States also began selling its own surplus corn abroad as “food aid” to create “ship-to-mouth” geopolitical dependencies and allegiances during the Cold War.²⁴ This was a pragmatic, not philanthropic, decision. It cost less to ship surplus grain to the Third World than to store it in US facilities.²⁵ Just two corporations, which now control 65 percent of global grain trade, made out like bandits.²⁶ Dumping surplus grain abroad also helped protect farm gate prices at home. William Baud, USAID administrator, retrospectively called this a Green Revolution—green not in an ecological sense, but green as a force opposed to “red” communism or the “white” Iranian revolution.²⁷

For corporations, these food-for-peace programs proved to be more food-for-profiteering within the third “corporate food regime,” established in the 1990s and 2000s through new trade rules and institutions.²⁸ Many developing countries, which found themselves in arrears on bad development debts from the 1980s, abandoned state supports for food security and began producing high-value agro-exports at the expense of their own staples.²⁹ Once the 1996 US Farm Bill shifted all federal grain storage to the private sector, grain corporations acquired even more power in moving commodities south to north and north to south. By 2002 Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) and Cargill controlled 30 percent of all global grain trade and a whopping 75 percent of US food aid.³⁰ Today just four companies control two-thirds of global trade in grain and palm oil, of which the two largest, Cargill and ADM, are US firms.³¹

Under corporate pressure, the US government permitted gradual deregulation of the commodities sector in the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2000 US Commodity Futures Modernization Act codified this transition. The act allowed new corporate entities to speculate on food prices, and the commodities sector almost doubled between 2006 and 2011—from $65 to $126 billion. With this financialization of food, banks and commodity corporations began to sell investment products to hedge funds and pension funds. These included commodity index funds (CIFs), which allow investors to invest in commodities without assuming the risks involved with directly purchasing commodity futures contracts.³²

Since then, food prices have become frighteningly fragile, dependent more on the whims of the stock market than on the whims of the weather. War, climate, and political crises unrelated to food can quickly send ripples through the global food system. Many blame the 2007–8 food price crisis, for example, on financial speculation around ethanol. Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine has sent similar shocks through the global system.

Cargill’s history exemplifies these food regime transitions. Cargill is the largest private company in the United States and also consistently among the private companies with the highest revenues worldwide.³³ Some consider Cargill the “worst company in the world.”³⁴ Founded in 1865 by a white western settler, W. W. Cargill, the company began with one grain house sitting next to an Iowa railroad station.³⁵ After expanding and incorporating in the tax haven state of Delaware, Cargill was thrown out of the futures market for corruption eighty years ago.³⁶ But the company bounced back with the government contracts it won in World Wars I and II. In the 1950s Cargill dominated PL-480 food aid logistics. Instead of giving out Christmas cards to employees in 1957, it gave a Scrooge-ish donation to CARE, the nonprofit partner that distributes Cargill’s commodities as food aid.³⁷ More recently, after posting $165 billion in revenue, Cargill boasted a $14 million “donation” to CARE. Since the project was spread out over three years, Cargill’s largess represents a minuscule portion of its revenue (just 0.0028 percent). With 155,000 employees, the company probably spent more money on toilet paper than on helping alleviate hunger.

Cargill also happens to be one of the largest neocolonial salt processors and distributors in the world today—salt it poured on Mexico’s NAFTA wounds.³⁸ After two decades of dumping US commodity corn on Mexico that likely contaminated that country’s native maize, Cargill had the audacity to sue Mexico for trade barriers in 2009. The company claimed Mexico violated NAFTA when putting a tax on soft drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in an effort to both tackle its national obesity epidemic and support its own sugar industry. Amazingly, the company won the trade dispute and collected a cool $77.3 million from Mexico.³⁹ So, it had plenty of spare change when the Commodities Future Trading Commission fined Cargill $10 million in 2017 for cooking its books.⁴⁰

To give another example of the cruel ironies and interconnections of US trade agreements with Mexico (in the form of NAFTA) and Central America (DR-CAFTA), a disturbing number of small farmers who emigrated to the United States after being displaced by Cargill’s corn dumping find themselves laboring in Cargill-owned slaughterhouses to process livestock fattened by the same midwestern corn that decimated their village economies. Mexicans and Guatemalans only represent one-third of immigrant workers but a whopping 58 percent of meat-processing workers. When accounting for health costs and planetary harm, a burger from those midwestern slaughterhouses ought to cost something like $200, but because consumers pay only $4 or so for that invisibly subsidized mass-produced edible, they often eat to excess.⁴¹

Through companies like Cargill, the corporate food regime also brought about vertically integrated commodity chains, the expansion of supermarkets, and new country players in the global food trade like Brazil and Argentina, which now produce grain for industrial animal farming and vegetables and fruits for northern consumers.⁴² This created crazy food production circuits: pears grown in Argentina, shipped to Thailand to be canned in syrup, and then transported back across the Atlantic to be sold in the United States. Philip McMichael describes this as a transition of “food from somewhere” to “food from nowhere”⁴³—or, rather, food from everywhere. Extending McMichael’s metaphor, I would characterize the colonial regime as “food from over there” (see table 1). Should global food movements successfully use the crucible of climate change or the specter of mass cancer to motivate policy changes that could push us into a fourth food regime through ecological intensification, then food will have to come “from manywheres”—or plurinationally grounded in a multitude of places that have removed themselves from the corporate economy.⁴⁴

Continuing to use food regimes as food for thought, if sugar was the primary commodity that changed colonial dietary habits and wheat, the commodity that dominated the Cold War, then industrial corn clearly embodies the current corporate food regime. Should Mesoamerican movements to defend maize prove victorious, then perhaps the fourth regime will be about genuine sweetness and plenty. It is beyond the scope of this book to predict whether the climate emergency will transition us into a more sustainable fourth global regime or a global apocalypse. However, it is safe to say that climate adaptation will clearly require more than a switch to “local” consumption. It will also demand renewed state and international regulation to defend people and the planet from corporate plunder. Mexico’s dramatic decision to protect its national maize markets from corporate GM corn dumping is a sign of reengaged state leadership to provide more ecological and healthy food for all, not just elite consumers in global circuits.⁴⁵

I have also long pondered what in today’s world would be an equivalent symbolic action against corporate power to Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha (nonviolent truth-force) against the British Empire. A genius at illuminating British greed, Gandhi promoted simple methods (making salt, spinning thread) through which millions could participate in civil disobedience against colonialism. By encouraging people to grow their own gardens, the food movement similarly gives people a method and means to remove a piece of their lives from corporate markets and build community.⁴⁶ The home and community gardening movement cuts across the political spectrum and shows how the personal can be political. Like making salt, growing maize in polycrops from saved seed is a similarly humble and horizontal symbol of diversity and autonomy.

TABLE 1. Food regimes

Sources: Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power metaphor inspired the sweetness periodizations in this table. Philip McMichael’s “Political Economy” added the idea of food coming from “somewhere” and “nowhere” in the second and third food regimes. Gerardo Otero et al., in “Food Security,” suggested that certain food commodities were associated with different food regimes.

DIALECTICAL DIETS

Although prior global food regimes leveraged cheap food for power, that plenitude depended on imperialism, pesticides, and (bio)piracy.⁴⁷ Foods were cheap only because they externalized costs onto peasants, the poor, and the working classes. In the current corporate food regime, cheap industrial food, especially fast food, has created an obesity epidemic. As a causal percent of health spending, obesity has grown from 6 percent of medical costs in 1998 to 12 percent in 2006, and 21 percent today.⁴⁸ Such juxtapositions star in Raj Patel’s brilliant 2012 opus, Stuffed and Starved. For the first time in human history, more people go to sleep obese (1 billion) than hungry (800 million). Patel notes how these two categories oddly overlap among people who are overweight but also malnourished, due to their junky Western diets.⁴⁹ The Global South is passing through what public health experts describe as an “epidemiological transition” from dying from infectious diseases to being sickened from diseases associated with affluence and pollution, like heart problems and diabetes.⁵⁰

Besides Patel and Mintz, I have drawn inspiration from other dialectical stories of an interconnected world economy. Although academic discourse about “global flows” suggests that globalization covers the earth, corporate power tends to congeal in certain places. Anthropologist James Ferguson’s insight, that globalization “hops over” places more than it flows through them, got me thinking about how the mountains of excess midwestern corn must be dumped somewhere. If not converted into ethanol at an energetic loss, these caloric mounds land into people’s bodies or onto foreign markets.⁵¹

Hazardous waste disposal, the sale of pesticides, and other environmental justice issues share similar point-to-point problems, but also circular loops. An imperialist loophole in US and European Union policies allows agrochemical corporations to export pesticides to the Global South that the Global North banned.⁵² Journalists David Weir and Mark Schapiro evocatively depicted this as a “circle of poison,” because illegal pesticide residues return to northern consumers on imported fruits and vegetables.⁵³

Introduced to pesticides through US aid programs during the Cold War, Mesoamerican countries now supply many of our winter groceries by applying the highest per capita use of pesticides in the world.⁵⁴ The human consequences are horrific. With excruciating ethnographic detail, Angus Wright documented the death and poisoning of Mexican farmworkers like Ramón González.⁵⁵ Medical anthropologist and MD Seth Holmes followed the migration trail that produces “fresh fruit, [but] broken bodies.”⁵⁶ Guatemalan Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú shared her own tale of losing a little brother to the aftereffects of aerial spraying on a coffee plantation.⁵⁷ Ted Fischer and Peter Benson tracked the “bitter vegetables” that now connect Maya highland producers with US supermarkets (N.B.: those imported broccoli crowns are often laced with illegal pesticides).⁵⁸

For me the most haunting chronicle of how commodity circuits co-construct poisonous geopolitics was Bitter Fruit by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer.⁵⁹ Their diplomatic history of how United Fruit introduced pesticides to Guatemala and then lobbied the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s first democratically elected president in 1954 propelled me to devote my life to tracking (and countering) the many other ways the United States has continued to intervene in Guatemala’s agrarian politics through trade agreements, foreign “aid,” and other diplomatic pressures on behalf of corporations.⁶⁰ Guatemala’s crime in 1954? A modest land reform to support Indigenous people who had just been freed from de facto slavery in 1944. After the CIA’s puppet government gave this land back to the oligarchs, both peasants and Maya peoples joined guerrilla forces in the 1960s and 1970s to demand agrarian reform and began to realize they share similar class interests and blended identities.

PARADOXES OF THE PEASANTRY

Beyond Guatemala, civil wars over agrarian reform raged throughout Latin America and Asia during the second food regime. In the midst of this upheaval, Alexandr Chayanov’s 1925 Russian masterpiece, The Theory of Peasant Economy, was translated into English and reopened academic debates about agrarian modernity.⁶¹ Chayanov (1888–1937) was a pioneering statistician who assembled incontrovertible evidence that peasant agriculture was more efficient than large industrial farms.⁶² However, Josef Stalin preferred his omelets large and was willing to smash eggs to create his collectivization. In that process, fifteen million people starved to death from fabricated famines like the Ukrainian Holodomor. Stalin sent Chayanov to a Kazakhstan labor camp and eventually had him shot for the “crime” of showing why revolutionary Russia should sustain small-scale agricultural production. Stalin also imprisoned and starved to death the great Russian seed botanist Nikolai Vavilov, who championed crop diversity by collecting some two hundred thousand seed samples from around the world, including many maize specimens.⁶³ Having silenced these defenders of small-scale agroecology, the Soviets embraced large-scale agriculture and petrochemical poisons just like the United States had. But elsewhere peasants held on.

As Chayanov argued, peasants are paradoxical people: neither capitalist nor fully autonomous, but “self-exploiting.” As both owners and workers, peasants reside in an uncomfortable class limbo. They earn cash when needed but make decisions about their own labor. Their work is elastic. With the help of all family members, including children, peasants are willing to work impossibly hard to avoid starvation. Once subsistence needs are met, however, peasants have little incentive to continue accumulating because of the diminishing returns for their drudgery.⁶⁴ Put in more contemporary terms, peasants work to live, not live to work. This autonomous flexibility of peasant labor is what enables smallholders to intensify and innovate based on close observation of their crops.⁶⁵

As an in-between category, peasants provided fodder for many fusty academic debates in twentieth-century agrarian studies.⁶⁶ Are peasants victims or subjects of development? Are they plodding or skilled? Manipulable or cunning? Submissive or rebellious? Trenchantly backward or peculiarly progressive? Victims or survivors? Uncivilized or romantically close to the earth? Environmental destructors or saviors? These are false binaries that Native American scholars also critique. Just as white colonizers wrongly predicted Native Americans were doomed to disappear, agrarian scholars from the Cold War era also portrayed peasants as “rustics or relics of a rapidly vanishing past.”⁶⁷ Despite botched bureaucratic attempts at ethnocide and platitudes of their passing, both peasants and Indigenous peoples resiliently survived into the modern world.⁶⁸ In many (if not most) cases in Latin America—especially in Andean and Mesoamerican regions—peasants are also Indigenous peoples.

Although the world is now mostly urban, peasants still constitute two-fifths of the world’s population, and the absolute number of small farmers is the largest it has ever been in human history.⁶⁹ What’s more, on just 20 percent of the world’s land, small rural producers produce 70 percent of the world’s food, while simultaneously conserving humanity’s plant diversity in situ.⁷⁰ Small farms excel not only in total quantity of food produced, but also sequester the most health benefits, nutrition, and carbon per acre. Industrial farming only seems more productive because economists do not deduct the huge energy inputs that prop up this system nor subtract the cost of human and environmental health problems associated with chemical agriculture.⁷¹

In the United States, small family farms produce $15,104 of food per hectare, while large subsidized industrial farms make only $249 from the same land.⁷² Industrial farming is actually quite expensive—costing annually $22 billion in fertilizer, $12 billion in fuel, $22 million in seed, $13 billion in farm machinery, and $10 billion in loan interest, not to mention the cost of herbicides and pesticides.⁷³ On top of that, industrial farmers receive $700 billion annually in agricultural subsidies.⁷⁴ Another wild card is how much of the global cost of cancer can be attributed to industrial farming. Imagine if even a fraction of all those sums were redirected to agroecological research, extension, and peasant movements.⁷⁵

Although small farming is clearly more productive, due to inadequate land, commodity dumping, and rising cost of inputs, more than two-thirds of these small producers and agricultural laborers—especially women and children—unjustly experience hunger.⁷⁶ While just 8 percent of Latin America’s population is Indigenous, Indigenous people represent approximately 14 percent of the poor and 17 percent of the extremely poor in Latin America. However, in majority-Indigenous countries like Guatemala and majority-Indigenous states of Mexico, these disparities are even more extreme.

As James C. Scott once famously argued, “It was the smallness of what was left rather than the amount taken (the two are obviously related, but by no means identical) that moved peasants to rebel.”⁷⁷ Or, as recent Guatemalan protest signs have declared, “They stole so much, they stole our fear.” Peasants’ hunger and a hunger to remain farmers have inspired a formidable counterforce against trade liberalization.⁷⁸ Unlike localized peasant rebellions of yore, this global peasant movement recognizes the global sphere of corporate power as its real antagonist.

VIA CAMPESINA, THE PEASANT WAY

Established in 1993 as a movement of peasant movements, Via Campesina emerged from the prior Latin American network called the Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC). By 1996 Via Campesina had united forty-seven organizations from nineteen countries.⁷⁹ Through hard organizing against long odds, this transnational coalition has grown to include 180 organizations from eighty countries, representing some 200 million small farmers today. These are all genuinely grassroots, member-based organizations with relatively few staff compared to their memberships.⁸⁰ Despite shoestring budgets, Via Campesina groups have “projected a shadow much bigger than [they] really were” to take on global institutions and transnational companies.⁸¹

Long before the 1999 Battle for Seattle, Via Campesina had begun analyzing and formulating strategies of resistance to the globalization of agriculture, starting at its first international meeting in Mons, Belgium, in 1993.⁸² By necessity, peasant leaders became experts in trade agreements, intellectual property, GMOs, grain markets, farm subsidies, and toxicology of pesticides. Operating at global fora, Via Campesina peasant activists are among some of the most urbane, well-traveled, knowledgeable, policy-savvy, and theoretically innovative intellectuals on the planet. Yet, as “rooted cosmopolitans,” even Via Campesina’s most famous leaders, such as Rafael Alegría (a Honduran peasant who chaired the organization between 1996 and 2004), must remain connected to their rural places of origin to avoid accusations of being “kites” or high-flying globe-trotters. While juggling their own farming demands with international travel, they have transformed or thwarted global institutions through a sophisticated repertoire of multiscalar organizing, insider-outsider tactics, strategic alliances—and, when necessary, direct action.⁸³

Unlike Pollan’s omnivores, Via Campesina and its allies have excelled at thinking locally and acting globally.⁸⁴ In some cases Via Campesina leapfrogged into multilateral venues to use its international legitimacy to amplify small farmer power at home and pressure nation-states for reforms worldwide.⁸⁵ To defend peasant livelihoods, this grassroots coalition also realized it had to confront how institutions like the World Trade Organization (established 1995) or the World Bank were stacking trade rules and land policies against peasants. Via Campesina does not oppose global trade per se, but it does question how new rules enshrined in trade agreements favor transnational corporations. Most of its member organizations hail from previously colonized countries which were forcibly integrated into the world economy and which cannot exit from commodity markets overnight. To survive in a globalized world, peasants do “need to have the right to protect domestic markets and to have public sector budgets for agriculture that may include subsidies which do not lead to excessive production, exports, dumping, and damage to other countries.”⁸⁶ Another derivative issue for Via Campesina was control over seeds, which brought peasants’ struggles to the attention of the food and foodie movements concerned about the growing homogeneity of the world’s food system.⁸⁷

Although food regimes have long divided producers and consumers, Via Campesina brought them under one umbrella with remarkably tighter coordination, discipline, and structure than other international movements (feminist, environmentalist, human rights, etc.).⁸⁸ Although still disproportionately rooted in Latin America, Via Campesina is governed by a representative commission composed of member pairs (one female, one male) from each of Via Campesina’s nine regions: South Asia, Southeast and East Asia, Southern and Eastern Africa, Western and Central Africa, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America.⁸⁹ With a forward-leaning logo depicting peasant figures from every continent, the coalition’s diversity is a model for the “possibility of a plurality of movement organizations and alliances, scales, sites and forms,” including even farmer movements from the Global North.⁹⁰

Although “small farms” in the EU and North American regions would be considered “estates” for most peasants in the Global South, some northern family farmers recognize the mutual threat of the international trade system to their livelihoods.⁹¹ As Via Campesina’s first North American representative, Nettie Wiebe, a Canadian farmer, expressed it,

The difficulty for us, as farming people, is that we are rooted in the places where we live and grow our food. The other side, the corporate world, is globally mobile. This is a big difficulty for us. But our way of approaching it is not to become globally mobile ourselves, which is impossible. We can’t move our gardens around the world. Nor do we want to. The way in which we’ve approached this is to recognize there are people like us everywhere in the world who are farming people, who are rooted, culturally rooted, in their places. And what we need to do is build bridges of solidarity with each other which respect that unique place each of us has in our own community, in our own country. These bridges will unite us on those issues or in those places where we have to meet at a global level.⁹²

To unify organizational identity across its many disparate geographic regions, the coalition opens every meeting with a transcultural ceremonial “mystique” (mística): a ritual of seeds, soil, water, and fire that honors Via Campesina’s Indigenous members.⁹³ Also drawing from Indigenous wisdom and governance, Via Campesina conferences revolve around open-ended “dialogue of knowledges” (diálogo de saberes) that put UN diplomacy to shame. They offer translations into four official languages—English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese—plus whatever additional languages are needed such as Hindi, Nepali, Tamil, Bahasa, Thai, Korean, and Japanese. Working against leftist vanguardism that “there is only one correct analysis, organization, strategy and form of struggle,”⁹⁴ the coalition builds consensus by parsing and blending subaltern knowledge into something greater than the sum of its parts.⁹⁵ Sometimes this requires tabling difficult issues for resolution on another day, when member organizations are more ready “to build unity within the diversity of [its] organizations.”⁹⁶

Through difficult dialogues they have wrangled with internal labor, gender, and age conflicts to welcome landless rural workers, women farmers, youth, and even consumer organizations into the fold. The incorporation of peoples (such as nomadic pastoralists, fisherfolk, and Indigenous peoples) whose livelihoods depend on collective access to traditional territory rather than ownership of agricultural property, challenged Via Campesina to confront its own agrarian bias.⁹⁷ To reflect this inclusivity, Via Campesina now refers to “land and territory” as categories that are not always synonymous, especially for stateless people like Palestinians, who are among Via Campesina’s newest members.⁹⁸ As of late, this coalition has even begun to forge an alliance with the Vatican—“a startling reversal, considering the Catholic hierarchy’s historical ties to conservative rural elites.”⁹⁹

As a connective issue for all these constituencies, Via Campesina sounded an early alarm and educated its members about the threat of GMOs to farmers’ ancestral right to save seeds.¹⁰⁰ Although the coalition subsequently endorsed GMO labels, Via Campesina recognizes that consumers alone cannot fix the food system. Small producers need agrarian reform and other supportive state policies to defend their livelihoods. Thus the concept of “food sovereignty” emerged from its second global conference in Tlaxcala, Mexico, in 1996. While dominant state and international programs oriented toward “food security” might provide people a minimal number of calories, such programs avoid questions of who produces what, how it is produced, or where it is produced.¹⁰¹ The counterpoint concept of food sovereignty then took on a life of its own.¹⁰² At a 2007 meeting in Mali, Via Campesina released its Nyéléni Declaration, which defined food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”¹⁰³

Who and what is “sovereign” in food sovereignty remains evocatively ambiguous.¹⁰⁴ Sovereignty itself is a social construct of the “imagined community” of nation-states whose borders were shaped by colonial history.¹⁰⁵ Some, therefore, interpret the concept as the right of nation-states to develop food policies to protect the health, environment, and cultural contexts of their citizens.¹⁰⁶ Seven states—Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nepal, Nicaragua, Mali, and Senegal—have already incorporated food sovereignty wording and ideas into national law. Others imagine the sovereign at other scales (community, region, foodshed, tribal nation, and so forth). As Via Campesina intellectuals elaborated in a 2013 newsletter, food sovereignty “is as much a space of resistance to neoliberalism, free market capitalism, destructive trade and investment, as [it is] a space to build democratic food and economic systems, and just and sustainable futures.”¹⁰⁷ They later reflected that food sovereignty has become both “the territory and platform for our multi-sectoral convergence process” and has given the coalition “principles, a political framework, [and] methodologies.”¹⁰⁸

Even without direct coordination, the polycentric collective struggles of Indigenous peoples and peasants have opened spaces for one another. Although it took fourteen years of Indigenous mobilization within the United Nations to win the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Via Campesina piggybacked on this momentum, and in just six years secured a complementary UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) in 2018.¹⁰⁹ Bolivia, an Indigenous-majority country, chaired those latter negotiations and suspended the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) accreditation process to enable more direct participation by grassroots peasant organizations than otherwise would have been possible. Article 19 of UNDROP fleshes out seed rights that were previously mentioned in UNDRIP’s Article 31. Meanwhile, states that have incorporated UNDRIP into their constitutions opened legislative pathways to incorporate principles from UNDROP into national legal codes.¹¹⁰

In these and other ways, Via Campesina gave new life to the graying field of agrarian studies to ask fresh questions about the future of food for the twenty-first century and beyond. A relatively small group of thoughtful, committed academic allies and NGOs that are engaged in action-research like the ETC Group, GRAIN, Focus on the Global South, Food First, and the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies helped amplify Via Campesina’s theoretical frames, especially its germinal concept of food sovereignty.¹¹¹ Together they forged a blended “tradition of research, thought and political action … and an informal network (or various networks) that links professional intellectuals, agriculturalists, scientific journals and alternative media, and non-governmental development organizations, as well as activists in agrarian, environmentalist, agroecology, food, feminist, indigenous and human rights movements.”¹¹² They began organizing meetings and programs that were quite different from the soporific panels typical of most academic conferences by holding events that “also served as a reminder to the participants that the academy is not the only place in which important knowledge is generated; … the political trenches and agrarian movements are also sites and producers of knowledge.”¹¹³ Alongside the 1994 Maya Zapatista revolt, agrarian studies became hip again. The Journal of Peasant Studies catapulted from academic obscurity to become the most cited publication among eighty-one anthropological journals. Peasant and Indigenous studies became exhilarating spaces of political and theoretical praxis against neoliberalism both South and North.¹¹⁴

FOOD MOVEMENT

Like Via Campesina, the northern food movement is raucously diverse—including Christian homemakers who see Monsanto as Monsatan, doomsday preppers, Hollywood actresses, celebrity doctors, conspiracy theorists concerned about Bill Gates buying farmland, progressive urbanites, and even Britain’s King Charles III, who as prince broke the royal family’s apoliticality to speak against GMOs in his Reith lecture: “I happen to believe that if a fraction of the money currently being invested in developing genetically manipulated crops were applied to understanding and improving traditional systems of agriculture, which have stood the all-important test of time, the results would be remarkable. There is already plenty of evidence of just what can be achieved through applying more knowledge and fewer chemicals to diverse cropping systems.”¹¹⁵ Beyond kings and celebrities, peasant organizations have formed savvy alliances through fair and direct trade associations with other wealthy slow foodies, chefs, and geopolitical friends to help them revitalize age-old demands for land reform, integrated agrarian development, and food sovereignty.¹¹⁶ The potential of these transnational connections to critique corporate power is what originally inspired me to follow the food movement.

However, there are key differences between wealthy food movements and grassroots struggles for food justice. In the Global North, much ink has been spilled debating the personal health effects of genetically modified foods (aka the Frankenfood and farmageddon debates).¹¹⁷ Northern debates also often concentrate on the (religious) morality or monstrosity of transgenic seeds themselves, with less attention paid to the political-economic-cultural-academic landscapes in which the technology was developed.¹¹⁸ By contrast, peasant movements from the Global South have objected to GMOs from a clearer historic, contextual, and agroecological perspective. They recognize that a corporate-controlled gene revolution would extend and exacerbate the inequalities and impoverishment already induced by the Green Revolution.

Although Via Campesina incorporates small settler farmers from both the United States and Canada, it has yet to establish formal relationships with North American tribal governments. Yet even without these direct connections, Via Campesina’s concept of food sovereignty strongly resonates with Native American and First Nation struggles for self-determination.¹¹⁹ As Sugar Bear Smith (Oneida) once remarked, “You can’t say you’re sovereign if you can’t feed yourself.”¹²⁰ Although Native American seed-saving networks and organizations dedicated to revitalizing three sisters agriculture are blossoming independent of Via Campesina, one of the seeds I want to plant here is the untapped potential of tribal governments to legally test their own treaty sovereignty by countersuing corporations for contamination of their native seeds. Arthur Manuel (Secwépemc), the son of George Manuel, similarly suggested that First Nations of Canada could challenge logging corporations through the World Trade Organization.¹²¹ Winona LaDuke’s White Earth Reservation is primed to do so, having both banned the use of GMOs and given personhood to manoomin (the sacred wild rice and staple of her people).¹²² Tribal governments could also ratify both the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols and levy fines on corporation “people” that privatize and profit from collective knowledge of Indigenous peoples and other small farmers, based on a bizarre construction of legal personhood acquired in the United States from the late nineteenth century onward.

CORPORATE COLLUSION

When US settlers rebelled against the British Empire, they initially wanted to avoid the grotesque disparities of aristocratic wealth and privilege in Europe they had fled. During the first hundred years of the republic, states would grant short-term charters to form corporations for only a specific function, like building a road or a bridge. Corporations could not marry. They could not own another corporation. In the late nineteenth century, however, New Jersey and then Delaware began allowing corporations to buy other corporations in the hopes of attracting business to their small states. (In the United States, the fifty states, not the federal government, grant charters to corporations.) Among the young chemical and agricultural corporations incorporated in Delaware were DuPont and Cargill. Other states followed suit, leading to the flurry of mergers between 1895 and 1904 that produced the nouveau riche robber barons.¹²³ By the turn of the century, the families of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and other political and economic dynasties rose to unfathomable wealth. The Rockefeller Foundation (est. 1913) and the Ford Foundation (est. 1946) then became key actors in the Green and gene revolutions.

Today, US constitutional law considers corporations to be immortal “legal people,” often with greater rights than actual human citizens. Corporations now have psychological rights to free speech (won in the 1986 case PG&E v. Public Utilities Commission), religious rights to dictate their employees’ health insurance coverage (the 2014 case Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores), and even political rights to influence elections (the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). Through self-serving discourse about “social responsibility,” corporations now even pretend to be generous philanthropists.¹²⁴ If they were actually people, corporations would exhibit psychopathic characteristics—being utterly remorseless in extracting profits from the poorest of the poor or risking the loss of millennial lifeways.¹²⁵ Frankly, I will not believe a corporation is a “person” unless Monsanto gets cancer or Cargill loses some weight.

Since 1994, the World Trade Organization and regional trade agreements like the DR-CAFTA have forced other countries to accept the absurd rights of legal personhood that the United States has given to corporations. These trade agreements have essentially turned corporations into gringo mochileros (tourist backpackers) who, despite their relative wealth, haggle poor countries for the lowest wages and tax perks—or, in the case of shipping conglomerates, dump commodities below market prices. Where legislatively they are unable to secure market access, corporations have resorted to backdoor bullying and bribery to pry open the markets of developing countries. Against corporate claims to being a personified “stakeholder” at global food fora, peasant and Indigenous movements demand a different type of power as “rights holders.”

Corporate personhood and power accumulated incrementally;¹²⁶ so surely we can also dismantle it incrementally. The problem is not an amorphous “neoliberal” agricultural system. Rather, it is a very specific corporate capture of agriculture in recent living memory, made possible by state acquiescence during a third food regime.¹²⁷ The difference may seem like academic semantics, but I think the crimes of particular corporations can get lost in generalized griping about “neoliberalism” or “capitalism” writ large. After five centuries of Euro-American imperialism, “decolonization” will take time, but there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to be immediately plucked in “decorporatization.” For example, only since passage of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act have corporations been able to patent inventions (including seeds) funded by federal research.¹²⁸ If this rule were repealed, public university professors might be more interested in partnerships with tribal governments for food sovereignty instead of the pursuit of lucrative contracts with biotech corporations.

Although only four corporations control 70 to 90 percent of the global grain trade, the glass is still more than half full. Most grains never cross a national border; only 10 percent of cultivated corn gets traded.¹²⁹ At the very least we should prevent new types of corporate capture of public or global institutions, such as the recently signed letter of intent between CropLife International and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Such new collusions could be reversed if more people watchdogged these processes or cared about how corporations have wrecked other countries’ democracies for profit.¹³⁰

As Guatemala painfully learned when dealing with the United Fruit Company, should a country attempt to reclaim its power from corporations, the United States has proved willing, time and again, to invade or overthrow other sovereign governments.¹³¹ Banana companies dominated Central America in the twentieth century, but today Monsanto and other biotech corporations want that role. No other industry (except perhaps the defense industry) has enjoyed such collusion with foreign aid, regulators, diplomacy, and higher education. The endgame seems to be to compel every farmer worldwide to purchase inputs and seeds from a corporate vendor.¹³²

To give an example of seed gunboat diplomacy from another part of the world, Iraq’s national gene bank was looted during the US invasion in 2003. The leader of the US occupation force, Paul Bremer, issued an order (no. 81) criminalizing farmers not just for replanting or sharing GM seeds, but for using any of their own seeds at all.¹³³ Like Mesoamerican farmers, Iraqis descend from one of the world’s ancient centers of domestication. Although the Iraqi Congress eventually watered down the occupation mandate, its agricultural sector was decimated and corporate suppliers now provide 94 percent of the seeds used in the country. USAID put a former Cargill executive turned director of the North American Export Grain Association, Dan Amstutz, in charge of Iraq’s agricultural reconstruction in 2003.

The Iraq story may seem an extreme example of “disaster capitalism.”¹³⁴ But the agritech industry itself evolved from war technologies. After both world wars of the early twentieth century, munitions factories repurposed ammonia into fertilizer. Nerve gases became pesticides. Defoliants became herbicides. Back on the home front, war profiteers convinced families to apply these killer chemicals on their manicured lawns. While expanding domestic sales, Monsanto and Dow Chemical profited from blitzing Southeast Asia with Agent Orange. Then cancer and pollution lawsuits caught up with them, leading these warmongering corporations to rebirth themselves as “life science” companies.¹³⁵ It is an odd business sector that claims to be committed to “a world where biodiversity thrives in harmony with humankind” but then bullies, bullshits, and buries its own customers.¹³⁶

With their sights now on Mesoamerica, multinational corporations seek to destroy one of the healthiest and most sustainable subsistence diets in the world for both people and the land. When measured by calories per hectare, a fertilized and chemically doused midwestern cornfield, of course, beats a Mesoamerican maize field. However, when measured by nutrition, climate resilience, and cultural value, the polycropped milpa wins every time. Indigenous horticultural tribes throughout Turtle Island (North America) share common stories about the ancient relationality of the three sisters—maize, beans, and squash—which agribusiness now wants to separate into orphaned monocrops. Three sisters agriculture cannot be revitalized, therefore, without vigilance over the three evil stepsisters of agribusiness—Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-DuPont, and Syngenta-ChemChina—and other corporations nipping at their heels.

THE THREE EVIL STEPSISTERS

Like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, at first there were ten companies, then six.¹³⁷ Today only three are left standing (plus Baden Aniline and Soda Factory [BASF], as a distant fourth cousin).¹³⁸ These final mergers occurred in quick succession right after Monsanto’s patents on Roundup Ready seeds began to expire in 2015. In 1994 the top three firms controlled 21 percent of the market; by 2009 it was 54 percent; and today they commandeer at least 62 percent of agrochemical sales and half of global seed sales.¹³⁹ Little wonder that a recent poll of US farmers revealed that 93 percent felt the Bayer-Monsanto merger would adversely affect them.¹⁴⁰

These mergers almost perfectly blended the profit dowries from chemical corporations with the bridal trousseaus of GM seed technology (table 2). All easily agreed to a “prenuptial” agreement to externalize health and environmental costs onto society, ghostwrite scientific assurances of agrochemical safety, and collude with regulators.¹⁴¹ Although Monsanto has maintained the most high-profile appointments of former executives and lawyers to regulatory bodies and even the US Supreme Court, all the major biotech firms have enjoyed a revolving door with government agencies. The Department of Justice ignored the unfolding conditions of oligopoly or “agropoly” and amazingly approved every merger with only cosmetic restructuring.¹⁴² Barely past their honeymoons, however, Bayer, Dow, and ChemChina may be regretting some of the legal debts inherited from their partners.

Bayer-Monsanto

Founded as a chemical company, Monsanto was the first to integrate seeds into its central business plan to create a genetic-pesticide treadmill.¹⁴³ Once Monsanto won the race in 1996 to bring to market GM seeds for feed and fiber crops, a quarter of US farmers became their customers in four years. By 2001 Monsanto had filed 188 patents on maize seeds and 266 patents on soybean seeds.¹⁴⁴ By 2009, GMOs accounted for 85 percent of feed crops.¹⁴⁵ By 2020, GMOs constituted 94 percent of soy, 96 percent of cotton, and 92 percent of corn grown in the United States.¹⁴⁶ Between 1996 and 2018, Monsanto acquired a hundred seed companies, including Central America’s Cristiani Burkhard. Monsanto’s future spouse, Bayer, purchased another fifty.¹⁴⁷

TABLE 2. Three Evil Stepsisters (and a distant fourth cousin)

Sources: MacDonald (2019) based on 2015 sales before mergers began; author calculations of comparative percents of revenue; and see Strömberg and Howard, “Recent Changes in the Global Seed Industry,” on prior acquistions of smaller companies.

Having secured almost 90 percent control of the global GM seed market, Monsanto became a meta-symbol among food activists for the ills of industrial, vertically integrated, and transnational agriculture. It also became the company everyone loves to hate.¹⁴⁸ As a Mexican journalist noted, “Monsanto is not a decent corporation. The one merit that can be attributed to it is that it has sparked a dynamic global movement against it that is demanding accountability for who grows our food and how they do it.”¹⁴⁹

For decades, Monsanto assured the public that Roundup was “less toxic to rats than table salt following acute oral ingestion.”¹⁵⁰ Monsanto apparently paid scientists to publish ghostwritten articles that manipulated safety data in favor of Monsanto.¹⁵¹ In the 1980s Monsanto paid a retainer of $1,500 a day to Sir Richard Droll, a renowned epidemiologist, who reciprocated this corporate patronage by downplaying occupational chemical exposures as a cause of cancer and by directly intervening in an Australian investigation of Agent Orange.¹⁵² But not everyone could be so easily bought.

Monsanto’s fall from grace began with the 2012 study by French scientist Gilles Eric Séralini showing that rats fed Roundup Ready corn over a long period of time had a two- to threefold higher mortality rate.¹⁵³ Because the effects were different in female and male animals, Séralini’s study suggested that Roundup (glyphosate) is not just mutagenic, but also possibly an endocrine disruptor—meaning that even low doses could alter hormonal systems and induce other health problems. Building on that insight, in 2014 Nancy L. Swanson published a study that crossed US government databases of Roundup applications with epidemiological data of diseases such as thyroid cancer, liver cancer, bladder cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, diabetes, strokes, autism, and hypertension.¹⁵⁴ Her research and other studies show an unusually high rate of miscarriages, birth defects, and premature deliveries among farming families that use Roundup.¹⁵⁵

Why had the EPA not foreseen these adverse health impacts before it approved glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, in 1974? The answer is disturbingly simple: the EPA does not conduct toxicological tests of its own and instead trusts the agrochemical industry to be truthful and comprehensive in its private testing. Nor does the EPA inquire about inactive ingredients in formulated pesticides. Some 85 percent of pesticide applications presented to the EPA contain no health data at all, but nevertheless get rubber-stamped.¹⁵⁶ In the case of Monsanto, the company selectively presented data from internal experiments on pure glyphosate, not on formulated Roundup. Roundup is a mixture of glyphosate with other inactive ingredients like solvents, carriers, emulsifiers, and surfactants that help the herbicide penetrate weed cells. It’s that chemical cocktail that apparently makes glyphosate all the more mutagenic (causing DNA damage), oncogenic (producing tumors), teratogenic (inducing birth defects), endocrine disrupting (altering the hormonal system), and ecotoxic (causing harm to other biological organisms). When reviewing the international literature on formulated Roundup, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded in 2015 that the herbicide was, in fact, a Class 2A “probable carcinogen.”¹⁵⁷ (To put the severity of that ruling into perspective, the IARC also classified the infamously carcinogenic DDT as class 2A.) California’s EPA reclassified glyphosate as a Proposition 65 carcinogen shortly thereafter.

Taking into account the new toxicological data on Roundup, US lawyers launched a series of lawsuits on behalf of sickened users. One California jury awarded school groundskeeper Lee Johnson a record-breaking settlement of $289 million in 2018. The next two major lawsuits against Monsanto involved California homeowners with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who had also sprayed the weedkiller on their properties over decades. The Hardemans (from Sonoma) won $80 million in 2019. In the next case, brought by the Pilliods (from Livermore, also 2019), the jury slammed Monsanto with $2 billion in punitive damages for willfully covering up evidence of its carcinogenicity. By June 2020 Bayer had announced it would pay more than $10 billion to close the first round of lawsuits. The US Supreme Court rejected Bayer’s proposed cap, and civil litigation continues moving forward without limits. At least thirty thousand lawsuits remain pending.¹⁵⁸ Accusing Bayer of false advertising, New York’s attorney general won another a $7 million settlement.¹⁵⁹ In late 2023 a Philadelphia jury awarded Ernest Caranci $175 million for the lymphatic cancer he developed after decades of heavy Roundup use on his lawn and garden. Then in early 2024, a Pennsylvania jury fined Bayer $2.25 billion in punitive damages for another lymphoma victim. With other law firms now collecting mass tort cases for several other lymphatic cancers, there is no end in sight for Bayer.

To be sure, Bayer is not an innocent victim holding the bag of Monsanto’s wrongdoing. Under Bayer’s management, the old Monsanto team commercialized its GM Extendimax package of dicamba-resistant crops. Fully cognizant of how far its dicamba herbicide can drift, corporate leaders apparently figured that if enough neighboring farms had their crops ruined, they would feel compelled to start buying the Extendimax seeds themselves. One executive wrote in an email memo: “I think we can significantly grow business … if we reach out to the drift people … [who] can be turned into new users.”¹⁶⁰ The “drift people” were angry; one even killed his neighbor over dicamba drift.¹⁶¹ As of 2020 Bayer faced 120,000 lawsuits for drift damage. In February 2024 a US judge issued a judgment to ban dicamba-based herbicides, arguing that the EPA had failed to solicit public comment through which farmers could have testified to these known problems of herbicide drift.¹⁶² New studies suggest that dicamba threatens monarch butterflies and may also be carcinogenic.¹⁶³ Sadly, other herbicides may also cause harm. A new study shows that both Roundup’s competitor (2,4-D) has negative effects on human adolescents’ brains, including leading to impaired memory and anxiety.¹⁶⁴

Dow-DuPont

The year after Monsanto bought Dekalb Seed Company, DuPont acquired a stake in Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Co. (descended from Henry Wallace’s original company) and completed its takeover in 1999. Meanwhile, Dow purchased the biotech firm Mycogen in 1996, which claimed to have an insect-resistant corn product in production. Then, like Monsanto, Dow bet big on pairing its signature herbicide, 2,4-D, with its GM seeds. However, the IARC reclassified 2,4-D herbicide as Class 2B (“possibly carcinogenic”) in 2016.¹⁶⁵ Nevertheless, Dow continued forward with Orwellian web pages asserting the safety of 2,4-D and the company’s good intentions to help “agricultural communities thrive.” Dow has also used trade agreements to attack Canadian restrictions on the use of 2,4-D (described in the preface).

One of the oldest chemical herbicides on the market, 2,4-D has been used since World War II primarily on grain crops and pastureland (35 million pounds annually), but also on residential lawns and gardens (11 million pounds annually) under brand names Weed B Gon, Killex, and Tri-Kil. Mocking the suffering of soldiers and Southeast Asian villages caused by Agent Orange, Dow branded its new line of GM seeds paired with 2,4-D with the trademarked name Enlist. The Center for Food Safety is now suing the EPA for failing to consider the health and environmental harms of 2,4-D when it renewed approval of Enlist in 2022.¹⁶⁶ Nipping at Monsanto’s heels, Dow has also spun new “stacked” traits and combo-herbicide products with its other proprietary herbicide, Liberty (glufosinate-ammonium).

Dow’s merger with DuPont came with skeletons from both closets. DuPont’s signature repellant, Teflon, is manufactured from long-chained carbon molecules called PFAs (polyfluoroalkyl substances), better known as “forever chemicals” because they never break down. Recent research suggests that PFAs from agrochemical containers leach into the pesticide containers and permanently pollute agricultural fields.¹⁶⁷ Facing lawsuits for PFAs and other chemicals, Dow-DuPont reorganized its seed business into a new subdivision called Corteva. Corteva will likely bring the first CRISPR-edited GM corn crop to market—specifically to enhance the waxiness of a corn used for glossy paper or other industrial food uses—unless Syngenta develops a CRISPR-edited seed first.¹⁶⁸

Syngenta-ChemChina

Syngenta’s corporate kinship is the most convoluted. The UK-based Astra merged with Sweden’s Zeneca in 1998. A year later, AstraZeneca made a deal with the Swiss corporation Novartis to spin off its respective chemical and agritech businesses to form Syngenta.¹⁶⁹ Like other agritech firms, Syngenta has enjoyed a long but often controversial relationship with public universities. In addition to harassing Ignacio Chapela, Syngenta stalked another UC Berkeley biologist, Tyrone Hayes, after he showed that atrazine changes the sex of frog gonads and can disrupt endocrine systems.¹⁷⁰ Atrazine is the second-most commonly used herbicide in the United States and has tainted the water systems of nearly eight million people, possibly causing cancer and birth defects.¹⁷¹ Syngenta manufactures another killer herbicide: paraquat, alleged to cause Parkinson’s disease.¹⁷²

Syngenta created more controversy with Enogen, a GM corn modified by a bacteria that lives in the scalding vents on the ocean floor.¹⁷³ This corn produces an amylase enzyme that remains stable at high temperatures, which helps agrofuel factories break down corn starch into sugar for ethanol. That same trait, however, ruins food factory operations with even minor contamination.¹⁷⁴ One Enogen kernel mixed among ten thousand normal kernels is enough to disrupt proper starch levels during industrial food processing. Although Syngenta created a purple kernel to identify and isolate Enogen harvests, grain elevators were not prepared to prevent comingling. Like StarLink corn (see chapter 4), Enogen corn keeps showing up in the food supply where it should not. A Latino grocery store chain in Los Angeles reported that many customers had their Christmas tamales ruined and some people fell ill from an Enogen-contaminated masa (dough). Farmers who grow non-GM or organic corn for specialty markets have also lost their certification due to cross-pollination with Enogen.¹⁷⁵

Undeterred by this red flag, Monsanto spied Syngenta across a crowded room in 2015, but Syngenta did not reciprocate the affection. After Monsanto’s failed takeover, China’s state-run ChemChina won Syngenta’s heart with an almost identical bid in 2016 for $43 billion—the largest acquisition in Chinese history.¹⁷⁶ Shortly before that cross-cultural marriage, in April 2015 Syngenta announced a “breakthrough” corn herbicide called Acuron, which blends bicyclopyrone with atrazine, S-Metolachlor, and mesotrione.¹⁷⁷ Although Syngenta ranks a distant third for GM crop development behind Monsanto and Dow, this corporation has a particularly large R&D team devoted to the new CRISPR (“gene editing”) technology.¹⁷⁸

Although it previously banned GM crops, China signaled in the late 2010s that it might welcome applications for CRISPR technology that would make seeds “the ‘computer chips’ of agriculture.”¹⁷⁹ Before it acquired Syngenta, China was already spending twice what the United States invests in corporate-driven agricultural research.¹⁸⁰ In the mid-1990s China began producing more pesticides; by 2018 it was manufacturing and exporting 46 percent of herbicides used worldwide.¹⁸¹ It is currently the largest global importer of commodity corn, purchasing one and a half times more than Mexico.¹⁸² With 20 percent of the global population living on only 7 percent of its land base, China needs more feed crops to provide meat for its growing middle class.¹⁸³ Having decimated its small farms through collectivization and destroyed even more farmland through urban sprawl, China has committed to a future of industrial farming. It quickly approved Syngenta’s first GM-corn product in 2022.¹⁸⁴

Though ostensibly competitors, all three mega corporations sell the same formula: genetically modified seeds that require proprietary herbicides or that make plants themselves insecticidal. All claim that they can wave a technological wand that will save the world from climate change. But it seems clear they have no interest in creating pathways to a more sustainable future. Their central business seems to be to file princely biotech patents to sell more herbicides. Like Cinderella’s golden coach, these companies’ GM seeds have a patent time limit, but also seem to lose productivity after five to ten years. Because of the perennial problem of weed resistance, those Frankenseeds will turn back into a pumpkin at midnight. Although GMO discourse would lead us to believe such technologies are the “future” of agriculture, the real path forward is “back to the future,” using the diversity of farmer-saved seeds in situ.

MAIZE FUTURES

This raises the question about what to call farmer-saved seeds. In the academic literature they are often known as “farmer varieties” or “traditional cultivars,” and are juxtaposed against “modern varieties” or “breeder varieties.” In colloquial terms, despite being pre-Columbian crops, native maize seed varieties in Mesoamerica are oddly known as “creole” (criollo) seeds, but food movements in both Mexico and Guatemala increasingly use the term “native” maize(s). I follow this lead. In early manuscript drafts I called them “heirloom,” both to emphasize that they should be treasured and to build bridges with gardeners. Then one reviewer pointed out that the term “heirloom” conveys a sense of fragility or something to be saved in a curio cabinet. Unlike standardized and stagnant corporate seeds, open-pollinated varieties are continuously strengthened by cross-pollination with wild progenitors.¹⁸⁵ They are arguably more “modern” than the seeds frozen in “doomsday” seed banks intended to help breeders hedge against future disasters.¹⁸⁶

Helen Curry’s monumental history of Mexican maize collections reveals just how fragile, if not useless, the seeds stored in those ex situ seed banks are.¹⁸⁷ Imagining that Indigenous seeds were disappearing along with Indigenous cultures, the Rockefeller Foundation supported “salvage” collection projects in the 1940s. Although only the gringo botanists took credit for the collections, Mexican scientists like Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi did much of the real work.¹⁸⁸ After a frenzied decade of collection, the “Maize Committee” of the US National Academy of Sciences belatedly realized a plan was needed for storing, naming conventions, and tagging. “‘Doubtful’ that Indigenous farmers ‘played a conscious role in the creation of new races of maize,’” the committee chose new names and erased the local nomenclatures on which they had relied for collection.¹⁸⁹ Also, doubtful that the Mexican government could manage the collection, they sent duplicate seeds to a USDA facility in Glenn Dale, Maryland, which was later transferred to Fort Collins, Colorado. Through his service on the committee, William Brown secured duplicate seeds for his employer, Pioneer Hi-Bred (now owned by Dow-DuPont’s Corteva Division).¹⁹⁰

After decades of a continuing comedy of errors, poor management, and arrogance on the part of the US botanists, a corn scientist, Major Goodman, became interested in using tropical varieties to add vigor to corn breeding lines. Taking on seed bank organization as his personal crusade, he cochaired, with William Brown, a new “crop advisory committee” to the US secretary of agriculture. Goodman realized that almost all the aging collections needed to be regenerated and duplicated. Most of them lacked contextual markers and phenotypic descriptions from the field, because the collectors did not think Indigenous knowledge mattered. Again, Pioneer Hi-Bred volunteered to “help” with the seed duplication and probably helped themselves to the seeds.¹⁹¹

After sifting through decades of correspondence about these mishaps, Curry reached the conclusion that in situ seed conservation strategies are superior because “crop varieties do not survive, or do not survive well, without cultivators.” When banked, “seeds had to be endlessly reborn and yet remain forever the same.”¹⁹² To avoid genetic erosion, she recommends that ex situ seed banks should coordinate more closely with local communities and other in situ conservation efforts.¹⁹³ Moreover, in any major disaster, seeds preserved through an external “Noah’s ark”–like bank could never immediately restore crops.¹⁹⁴ They would have to be tediously grown out over several crop cycles to multiply sufficient seeds to restore agriculture at a mass scale—that is, if the seed banks even survived catastrophe.¹⁹⁵ In 2017 the “fail-safe” Global Seed Vault located on a remote Norwegian island flooded when permafrost melted and poured into the underground tunnel entrance.¹⁹⁶ Apparently we need a backup of the backup.

Seeds will survive only when intergenerational knowledge, landscapes, stories, and community traditions exist to support them.¹⁹⁷ Plant diversity requires human diversity.¹⁹⁸ In a rare longitudinal study, Marianna Fenzi and her team found that following climate disturbances in the Yucatán Peninsula, farmers were understandably risk averse the next season, returning to tried-and-true varieties. They restored milpa diversity thereafter through local seed exchanges. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to save a seed.¹⁹⁹

Across Mexico, thousands of communities continue to plant 11.5 million acres with native seeds that one research team calculated could cross-pollinate to create 138 billion genetically unique maize plants every planting season—a cornucopia of maize diversity adapting in real time to climate change. Small farmers’ conservation efforts can also take into account the plant’s phenotypic characteristics, not just the seed appearance after harvest. Laboratories can never approximate the ongoing experimentation and observant seed selection of Indigenous horticulturalists.²⁰⁰ What’s more, small farmers already have the techniques, skills, and social networks to learn from one another how to adapt seeds in real time to the changing weather. The millennial seeds of Mesoamerica are modern; they are the true foundation of resilience. Maize as a more-than-human relative continues to share its knowledge with the peoples who continuously cocreated it through hard times.

Maize also traversed the world via colonial voyages. From China to West Africa to Romania, small farmers adapted maizes to thousands more ecological niches around the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁰¹ Today, in a similar way, ecological farming associations in France are experimenting with how to use tropical maize diversity to readapt maize to a new European climate.²⁰² Unlike biotech corporations, those French farmers have committed to maintaining these seeds as a common open-pollinating resource.

In conclusion, rather than thinking about native seeds as “traditional,” let us reimagine them as transitional varieties for climate change. As Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada puts it, “Standing on our mountain of connections, our foundation of history and stories and love, we can see both where the path behind us has come from and where the path ahead leads.… The future is a realm we have inhabited for thousands of years.”²⁰³ Maize connects past, present, and future in an evolving chain between ancestors and descendants. If I were a betting woman, I would hedge against the corporate capuchins and up the ante for the climate-wise practices of ongoing Mesoamerican milpas.