Notes

PREFACE

1. 1 Maintenance can be dangerous for the few families that own their own mini home silos. These require the insertion of a phosphine or phosphamine pill, which releases poisonous vapors and which can also cause accidental deaths if not handled properly.

2. 2 Grandia, “Toxic Tropics.”

3. 3 Grandia, Tz’aptz’ooqeb’; Grandia, Enclosed.

4. 4 Irwin Block, “Quebec Beefs Up Pesticide Ban,” Montreal Gazette, April 4, 2006, http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/montreal/story.html?id=50a34c28-106f-4ced-8376-619db1f348d9.

5. 5 Plymale, A Chemical Reaction.

6. 6 Government of Canada, “Questions and Answers.”

7. 7 Pets and people track herbicide residues into homes. Almost 83 percent of household dust samples in a North Carolina and 98 percent in an Ohio sample contained 2,4-D. Morgan et al., “Adult and Children’s Exposure to 2,4-D.” Little wonder that dogs have higher rates of canine lymphoma in households that apply 2,4-D than in households that do not. Hayes et al., “Case-Control Study of Canine Malignant Lymphoma”; Doyle, Trespass Against Us, 136.

8. 8 Heap and O Duke, “Overview of Glyphosate-Resistant,” 1042.

9. 9 After years of class action lawsuits, in 1984 Congress ordered compensation and medical care to be provided to Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange and were suffering from lymphoma and other cancers and diseases; the list of official health problems associated with this defoliant can be found at https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/agentorange/conditions/.

10. 10 Rowan, “VVA Seeks President’s Help.”

11. 11 EWG, “Elementary School Students at Increased Pesticide Risk.”

12. 12 Wang et al., “The Association between 2,4-D.”

13. 13 Kristen Rogers, “What Robin Williams’ Widow Wants You to Know about the Future of Lewy Body Dementia,” CNN, August 17, 2022, http://www.cnn.com/2022/07/01/healthy/lewy-body-dementia-robin-williams-life-itself-wellness/index.html.

14. 14 Goldman, “From President to Prison.”

15. 15 Ian Laing, “ChemChina Takeover of Syngenta Cleared by US Regulators,” Conventus Law, September 4, 2016.

16. 16 Rauh et al., “Seven-Year Neurodevelopmental Scores.”

17. 17 Isenhour, “Can Consumer Demand Deliver?”

18. 18 Gross, “Food Activism.”

19. 19 Cowan, More Work for Mother.

20. 20 Schulte, Overwhelmed.

21. 21 Bain and Dandachi, “Governing GMOs.”

22. 22 Weg, “No More GMO.”

23. 23 CFS, “Court Rules ‘QR’ Codes Alone Unlawful.”

24. 24 Martyn, “In Monsanto’s Old Backyard.”

25. 25 Grandia, “Toxic Gaslighting.”

26. 26 Carey Gillam, “Revealed: Monsanto Owner and US Officials Pressured Mexico to Drop Glyphosate Ban,” The Guardian, February 16, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-monsanto-mexico-us-glyphosate-ban.

27. 27 Gillam, The Monsanto Papers.

28. 28 Nabhan, Toxic Exposure.

29. 29 Gillezeau et al., “The Evidence of Human Exposure.”

30. 30 Malkan, “Glyphosate.” After reading these FAQs on glyphosate, consumers who want to lose weight are probably wiser to count chemicals than count calories.

31. 31 Casassus, “EU Allows Use.” However, in its November 2023 ruling, the EU notably banned the use of glyphosate as a preharvest desiccant. In April 2024, German ministers bucked the EU and approved additional restrictions on glyphosate. Chambers, “German Cabinet.”

32. 32 This was a century before Hindu scholars independently invented zero. Europeans never developed a zero, but around 1200 AD appropriated it via the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who had learned it from Arab intellectuals who, in turn, had learned it from India.

INTRODUCTION

1. 1 B’otz left Guatemala ostensibly to cure his late first wife’s illness with the help of a Belizean healer, but reading between the lines of his varying migration stories, it is clear he fled Guatemala’s military repression during the civil war.

2. 2 In Q’eqchi’, fresh maize-on-the-cob is called rax hal, or “green” corn.

3.   3 Evans and Glass, “Why California Must End the Use.”

4. 4 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “La Vía Campesina”; Patel, Stuffed and Starved; Rosset, Food Is Different.

5. 5 Via Campesina, “It’s Time to Globalize Solidarity.”

6. 6 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 52–53.

7. 7 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “La Vía Campesina.”

8. 8 Pollan, “The Way We Live Now.”

9. 9 Foley, “It’s Time to Rethink.”

10. 10 As a former board member of Ralston Purina, Earl “Rusty” Butz created a corporate advisory committee that was controversial then but now seems quaint, compared to how cozy agribusiness is with a revolving door into the USDA, the FDA, and the EPA. Tricky as Nixon, Butz later went to prison for tax evasion. James Risser and George Anthan, “Why They Love Earl Butz,” New York Times, June 13, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/13/archives/why-they-love-earl-butz-prosperous-farmers-see-him-as-the-greatest.html.

11. 11 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 52.

12. 12 Grist, “Special Series on Food and Farming”; Risser and Anthan, “Why They Love Earl Butz.”

13. 13 Although Europe has better protected its small farming sector, this region still loses thousands of farms annually. Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!, 61, 66.

14. 14 Canby, “Retreat to Subsistence.”

15. 15 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

16. 16 Between 2006 and 2011, US farmers added an additional 13 million acres to corn production. Almost half this new acreage was converted from other edible grains—wheat (2.9 million), oat (1.7 million), and sorghum (1 million). Foley, “It’s Time to Rethink,” 5–6.

17. 17 Bovines evolved the intestinal microbial diversity to digest grass as ruminants. Because corn feed disrupts this delicate microbiome, cows belch and expel excess methane, a potent greenhouse gas. To keep cattle healthy on a diet of corn, industrial feedlots use heavy doses of antibiotics that can then pass into the human food chain. This, in turn, alters the human microbiome with repercussions for both mental and physical health. Gálvez, Eating NAFTA; Perro and Adams, What’s Making Our Children Sick?

18. 18 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 19.

19. 19 Through C-4 photosynthesis, maize converts carbon dioxide into a heavier isotope (called carbon 13 or C-13) more efficiently than other plants. Kimmerer, “Corn Tastes Better on an Honor System.”

20. 20 This harkens from a quip by journalist George Monbiot, that if you want to eat less soy, then actually just eat soy instead of consuming beef. George Monbiot, “The Best Way to Save the Planet? Drop Meat and Dairy,” The Guardian, June 8, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/08/save-planet-meat-dairy-livestock-food-free-range-steak.

21. 21 Foley, “It’s Time to Rethink.”

22. 22 Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!, 68.

23. 23 Duffy and Popkin, “High-Fructose Corn Syrup,” 1725S.

24. 24 Alkon, “Food Justice.”

25. 25 Pollan also created an astounding demand for grass-fed beef. Alvin Powell, “Chance of Sun in Michael Pollan’s Climate Forecast,” Harvard Gazette, November 2, 2021, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/11/chance-of-sun-in-michael-pollans-climate-forecast/.

26. 26 All six signatories to the 2006 DR-CAFTA agreed to reduce tariffs on corn products like HFCS within fifteen years. Clearly seeing this as a boon to exports, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) lobbied for passage of the DR-CAFTA and supported the agreement. CRS, Agriculture in the DR-CAFTA. See also Zahniser et al., The Growing Corn Economies; USDA FAS, “US Exports of Corn-Based Products.”

27. 27 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 26.

28. 28 Pollan, “Overabundance of Corn.”

29. 29 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 22, 41.

30. 30 Rather than praising traditional diets for centering plants, Pollan credits Thomas Jefferson for recommending “a mostly plant-based diet that uses meat chiefly as a ‘flavor principle.’” Pollan, Food Rules, 95.

31. 31 Lavin, Eating Anxiety.

32. 32 Bain and Dandachi, “Governing GMOs”; Alkon and Agyeman, “Introduction,” 2; Guthman, “‘If Only They Knew.’”

33. 33 Cox, “New Dating App.”

34. 34 DeLind, “Are Local Food?,” 276.

35. 35 Hall, “Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics”; Lynch and Giles, “Let Them Eat Organic Cake.”

36. 36 Hermione Hoby, “Michael Pollan: ‘I’m Uncomfortable with the Foodie Label,’” The Guardian, February 21, 2016, 3, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/21/michael-pollan-uncomfortable-with-foodie-label-cooked-netflix.

37. 37 Young, “Adorno, Gastronomic Authenticity.”

38. 38 Alkon, “Food Justice.”

39. 39 Ruskin, “Seedy Business”; Calabrese, “Caveat Emptor!”; Otero, “Blaming the Victim?”

40. 40 Michael Pollan, “You Are What You Grow,” New York Times, April 22, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html.

41. 41 Michael Pollan, “The Great Yellow Hope,” New York Times, May 24, 2006, https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-great-yellow-hope/.

42. 42 Alkon and Agyeman, “Introduction.” Other movements for unifying local consumption and production systems preceded Pollan. The E. F. Schumacher Society promoted a concept of “bioregionalism,” which I remember young Yale environmentalists debating in the 1990s. Gary Nabhan’s similar concept of a “foodshed” more respectfully centers Native foods and seed revitalization within the local.

43. 43 Lavin, “The Year of Eating Politically.”

44. 44 Lavin, Eating Anxiety.

45. 45 Lavin, Eating Anxiety.

46. 46 Pollan, In Defense of Food, 160–61.

47. 47 Harrison, “Neoliberal Environmental Justice.”

48. 48 Guthman, Agrarian Dreams.

49. 49 Localism is not always inherently more democratic and just. For example, localism in education (the financing of public schools via property taxes) reinforces systemic wealth inequalities.

50. 50 Via Campesina’s platform could also help my idealistic students break into farming in California. Like much of the Global South, California is dominated by large farms. Facing skyrocketing land prices, young aspiring farmers will not be able to buy land without government intervention or other efforts to curb land speculation. See Carlisle et al., “Securing the Future.” Like much of the Global South, about 60 percent of arable land in California is farmed through tenant agreements, which discourages investment in long-term sustainability. Bigelow, Borchers, and Hubbs, “US Farmland Ownership.”

51. 51 Guthman, “Commentary on Teaching Food”; Counihan, “Cultural Heritage in Food Activism”; Shostak, “Food and Inequality.”

52. 52 Marya and Patel, Inflamed, 34.

53. 53 Schnell, “Food Miles, Local Eating.”

54. 54 McWilliams, Just Food, 12.

55. 55 McWilliams, Just Food, 25–26.

56. 56 McWilliams, Just Food, 29.

57. 57 McWilliams, Just Food, 127.

58. 58 Imhoff, The Farm Bill, 149.

59. 59 McWilliams, Just Food, 121.

60. 60 McWilliams, Just Food, 124.

61. 61 Kauffman, Hippie Food.

62. 62 Peralta, “[De]Stabilizing,” 91.

63. 63 DeLind, “Are Local Food?”; Derkatch and Spoel, “Public Health Promotion of ‘Local Food.’”

64. 64 Barnhill, “Does Locavorism Keep It Too Simple?”; Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!; DeLind, “Are Local Food?,” 276.

65. 65 Tess Riley, “Just 100 Companies Responsible for 71% of Global Emissions, Study Says,” The Guardian, July 10, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change.

66. 66 Rebecca Solnit, “Big Oil Coined ‘Carbon Footprints’ to Blame Us for Their Greed,” The Guardian, August 23, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook.

67. 67 DeLind, “Are Local Food?”

68. 68 Mitchell, “Localwashing.”

69. 69 Bartolovich, “A Natural History.”

70. 70 Szasz, Shopping Our Way to Safety, 42.

71. 71 Szasz, Shopping Our Way to Safety, 195; Nader, The Energy Reader.

72. 72 Julie Guthman also critiques Pollan for having appropriated the words and collective works of other scholars, including her opus on organic farming in California. Guthman, Agrarian Dreams; Guthman, “Commentary on Teaching Food.”

73. 73 Solnit, “Big Oil Coined.”

74. 74 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

75. 75 Ritchie, “Half of the World’s Habitable Land.”

76. 76 Kornhuber et al., “Risks of Synchronized Low Yields.”

77. 77 Garland and Curry, “Turning Promise into Practice,” 1; Bruns, “Southern Corn Leaf Blight.”

78. 78 This crisis set the stage for Earl Butz’s policy change to encourage farmers to plant more corn.

79. 79 Canby, “Retreat to Subsistence”; Garland and Curry, “Turning Promise into Practice.” Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines landrace as “a local variety of a species of plant or animal that has distinctive characteristics arising from development and adaptation over time to conditions of a localized geographic region and that typically displays greater genetic diversity than types subjected to formal breeding practices.”

80. 80 Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance.

81. 81 Smith et al., “Global Dependence.”

82. 82 Bruns, “Southern Corn Leaf Blight,” 1223.

83. 83 Dowd-Uribe, “GMOs and Poverty,” 135; Shiva, “Pests, Pesticides and Propaganda.”

84. 84 UNCTAD, “Wake Up Before It Is Too Late.”

85. 85 Naylor, “GMOs, the Land Grab.”

86. 86 Benbrook, “Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops.”

87. 87 Benbrook, “Trends in Glyphosate Herbicide Use.”

88. 88 Heap and Rossi, “International Herbicide-Resistant Weed Database.”

89. 89 Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution.

90. 90 Shiva, “Pests, Pesticides, and Propaganda.”

91. 91 Shaw and Wilson, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”

92. 92 Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

93. 93 Anderson, “Clever Name, Losing Game?”

94. 94 GMO Answers, “Members of Croplife International.”

95. 95 According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, even in heterosexual households in which the wife earns half the family income, women spend 4.6 hours on housework compared with 1.9 hours for men, plus two extra hours on childcare per week. Hsu, “Women Are Earning.”

96. 96 Garland and Curry, “Turning Promise into Practice.”

97. 97 Montenegro de Wit, “Can Agroecology?,” 737; ISAAA, “Biotech Crops.”

98. 98 Cotter et al., “Twenty Years of Failure.”

99. 99 Bayer, “Traits to Strengthen Farmer Productivity & Quality.”

100. 100 Union of Concerned Scientists, “Counting on Agroecology.”

101. 101 Toledo, “Los Biotecnólogos”; Altieri, Agroecology.

102. 102 Borras, “La Via Campesina,” 698; Via Campesina, Nyéléni Newsletter, 6.

103. 103 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

104. 104 Altieri and Toledo, “The Agroecological Revolution”; Holt-Giménez, “Measuring Farm Agroecological Resistance.”

105. 105 Pimentel et al., “Environmental, Energetic, and Economic Comparisons.”

106. 106 Sacco, “Accelerating Ecological Farming.”

107. 107 Rodale Institute, Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change, 5.

108. 108 Montenegro de Wit, “Can Agroecology?”

109. 109 Montenegro de Wit, “Can Agroecology?”; Stone, “Dreading CRISPR.”

110. 110 Ajates, “From Land Enclosures to Lab Enclosures.”

111. 111 Kloppenberg, First the Seed.

112. 112 Dowd-Uribe, “GMOs and Poverty.”

113. 113 Méndez Rojas, “Maize and the Green Revolution.”

114. 114 Hellin, Bellon, and Hearne, “Maize Landraces and Adaptation.”

115. 115 Khoury et al., “Crop Genetic Erosion”; Hellin, Bellon, and Hearne, “Maize Landraces and Adaptation.”

116. 116 Francisco Rodríguez, “Una Semilla Patentada Podría Modificar a Cultivos Vecinos, y Eso Los Convertiría en Cultivos Ilegales,” El Periódico (Guatemala City), August 25, 2014, http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/es/20140825/pais/842/Una-semilla-patentada-podr%C3%ADa-modificar-a-cultivos-vecinos-y-eso-los-convertir%C3%ADa-en--cultivos-ilegales.htm (page discontinued).

117. 117 Montenegro de Wit, “Banking on Wild Relatives”; Hellin, Bellon, and Hearne, “Maize Landraces and Adaptation.”

118. 118 Canby, “Retreat to Subsistence,” 9.

119. 119 Hellin, Bellon, and Hearne, “Maize Landraces and Adaptation.”

120. 120 Baumann, Zimmerer, and van Etten, “Participatory Seed Projects.”

121. 121 Grandia et al., Salud, Migración y Recursos Naturales.

122. 122 For readers interested in more technical information on maize markets and the milpa cycle, see Grandia, “Modified Landscapes.”

123. 123 Grandia et al., Salud, Migración y Recursos Naturales; Ybarra et al., Tierra, Migración.

124. 124 Grandia, The Wealth Report; Grandia, Stories from the Sarstoon Temash; Grandia, From the Q’eqchi’ Kitchen.

125. 125 Gross, “Food Activism.”

126. 126 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 5.

127. 127 Thompson, “The Moral Economy”; Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back In.”

128. 128 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, xv.

129. 129 Thanks to Mario Godinez for this metaphor and to my talented research assistant, Celia Amezcua, for the work behind that consultative translation.

130. 130 Rosset, “Social Movements,” 51.

131. 131 Much of the literature on Mexican maize has an unfortunate tendency to overlay anachronistic nationalist categories onto maize. For more on this point, see Méndez Cota, Disrupting Maize.

132. 132 Kirchhoff, “Mesoamérica”; Bartra, Profound Rivers of Mesoamerica.

133. 133 Ray, The Seed Underground, xii.

134. 134 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, xiv.

135. 135 Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 11.

136. 136 Monsanto’s previous CEO, Hugh Grant, said his one regret from his executive tenure was that he did not spend the $20 million needed to change the name of the company. Specter, “Seeds of Doubt.”

1. MAIZE FUTURES

1. 1 Vandermeer and Perfecto, Breakfast of Biodiversity.

2. 2 The pandemic shuttered the Chicago trading pits, so today this trader may be spending his days sitting at a computer. But the New York Stock Exchange still has live trading.

3. 3 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 8.

4. 4 Rosset, “Social Movements, Agroecology, and Food Sovereignty”; Borras, “Politically Engaged,” 452; Borras, “La Via Campesina.”

5. 5 Borras, “Politically Engaged,” 449.

6. 6 Clapp, Food; Friedmann, “The Political Economy of Food,” 30.

7. 7 McMichael, Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions, 9.

8. 8 McMichael, Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions, 11.

9. 9 To sum up the vast food studies literature, some authors show how a particular food changed history, while others describe how historical processes changed a food. See Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees.”

10. 10 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

11. 11 Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation.

12. 12 Clapp, Food.

13. 13 Mintz, Sweetness and Power.

14. 14 Marya and Patel, Inflamed, 137.

15. 15 Marya and Patel, Inflamed, 137.

16. 16 Fitzgerald and Petrick, “In Good Taste.” At UC Davis I teach one course called “Corporate Colonialism” to show that corporate power has not only been detrimental to Indigenous peoples, but to everyone else as well, including citizens of rich nations.

17. 17 Coe, America’s First Cuisines; Mintz, “Food Patterns in Agrarian Societies.”

18. 18 Marx, Capital.

19. 19 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 180.

20. 20 Marya and Patel, Inflamed.

21. 21 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 149.

22. 22 Lavin, Eating Anxiety, xv.

23. 23 A Chicago slaughterhouse reportedly inspired Henry Ford to design his auto assembly line. In turn, Fordist principles were applied to food processing, which dramatically increased the consumption of meat and processed foods. Pritchard, “Food Regimes”; McMichael, “Political Economy”; Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy, chap. 3.

24. 24 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma, 168; Bartolovich, “A Natural History.”

25. 25 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma, 169.

26. 26 Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!, 72.

27. 27 Clapp, Food, 34.

28. 28 McMichael, Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions.

29. 29 Hiatt, A Game as Old as Empire; Isakson, “Maize Diversity.”

30. 30 Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!, 88.

31. 31 McMichael, “Political Economy,” 63.

32. 32 Clapp and Isakson, “Risky Returns,” 437. The Stop Land Grabs coalition, for example, started an impressive campaign to demand that the TIAA-CREF pension fund to which many professors belong divest from land acquisitions and palm oil.

33. 33 Murphy, Burch, and Clapp, “Cereal Secrets.”

34. 34 Mighty Earth, “Cargill.”

35. 35 Cargill, “A History of Nourishing the World.”

36. 36 Mighty Earth, “Cargill.”

37. 37 Cargill, “A History of Nourishing the World.”

38. 38 Cargill, “A History of Nourishing the World.”

39. 39 Public Citizen, “Cargill vs. Mexico.”

40. 40 Mighty Earth, “Cargill.”

41. 41 Patel, The Value of Nothing.

42. 42 McMichael, Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions.

43. 43 McMichael, Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions, 1.

44. 44 UNCTAD, “Wake Up Before It Is Too Late.”

45. 45 Such transitions are never without struggle. As Marx put it, “Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one” (Capital, 916).

46. 46 Marya and Patel, Inflamed, 34.

47. 47 Patel and Moore, A History of the World.

48. 48 Harvard University, “Obesity Prevention Source.”

49. 49 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 8.

50. 50 Otero et al., “Food Security”; Bodley, Victims of Progress.

51. 51 Ferguson, Global Shadows.

52. 52 Dowler, “Thousands of Tonnes.”

53. 53 Weir and Schapiro, Circle of Poison. Pesticide formulation has shifted from North America to overseas, especially to China, creating more complex pathways of circulation. Shattuck, “Generic, Growing, Green?”; Galt, “Beyond the Circle of Poison.” Nevertheless, the United States and Europe still host the headquarters of most transnational corporations that profit from poison. Mesoamerica suffers disproportionately from these chemical circuits, such that a dialectical analysis still seems appropriate.

54. 54 Copeland, “Mayan Imaginaries of Democracy”; Grandia, “Poisonous Exports”; Galt, Food Systems.

55. 55 Wright, The Death of Ramón González.

56. 56 Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies.

57. 57 Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchu.

58. 58 Fischer and Benson, Broccoli and Desire; Dowdall and Klotz, Pesticides and Global Health.

59. 59 Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit.

60. 60 Butler, War Is a Racket.

61. 61 Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy; Scott, The Moral Economy.

62. 62 Chayanov’s other key insight was that the economic differentiation of the countryside is not permanent, but fluidly follows the life cycle of peasant families. The most prosperous families are those who can command the labor of youth and unmarried children.

63. 63 Ray, The Seed Underground.

64. 64 Nigh, “Agriculture in the Information Age.”

65. 65 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

66. 66 Edelman and Wolford, “Introduction.” Peasant and agrarian studies became a covert way for anthropologists to discuss questions of political economy and distribution during an anticommunist period in history. In these debates, the formalists argued peasants are perfectly rational; substantivists counter- argued that small-scale horticultural societies are kin- and family-based systems with their own cultural logics. Wolf, Peasants; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant.

67. 67 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 6.

68. 68 Kearney, Reconceptualizing the Peasantry; Edelman, Peasants Against Globalization.

69. 69 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 1.

70. 70 Altieri, Genetic Engineering in Agriculture, 1; ETC Group, “Small Scale Farmers”; Handy, Tiny Engines of Abundance; CEMDA, Report.

71. 71 Altieri and Toledo, “The Agroecological Revolution.”

72. 72 Holt-Giménez, Patel, and Shattuck, Food Rebellions!, 116.

73. 73 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma, 56.

74. 74 FAO, UNDP, and UNEP, “A Multi-Billion-Dollar Opportunity.”

75. 75 Montenegro de Wit, “Can Agroecology?”

76. 76 Figueroa-Helland, Thomas, and Pérez Aguilera, “Decolonizing Food Systems.”

77. 77 Figueroa-Helland, Thomas, and Pérez Aguilera, “Decolonizing Food Systems,” 11.

78. 78 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

79. 79 After Rigoberta Menchú symbolically won the 1992 Nobel Prize as both an Indigenous woman and a rural organizer, many peasant organizations began to celebrate their cultural alterity. Both Rigoberta and her father, Vicente Menchú, were organizers for the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC), which is one of Guatemala’s four organization members of Via Campesina. (Via Campesina allows member organizations to participate vertically without needing to form national umbrella organizations.)

80. 80 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “La Vía Campesina.”

81. 81 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 97.

82. 82 Thus began Via Campesina’s love-hate relationship with the allied NGOs that initially controlled the means of transnational organizing (faxes, computers, reliable telephone lines). Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 106. As this global peasant network matured in the early 2000s and the cost of telecommunications plummeted, Via Campesina leaders deftly denied NGOs the privilege of continuing to speak for them. Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “La Vía Campesina”; Desmarais, “Peasants Speak.”

83. 83 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics; the “rooted cosmopolitans” insight is from Borras, “La Via Campesina.”

84. 84 See also Varese, “Think Globally.”

85. 85 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 131; Mooney et al., A Long Food Movement.

86. 86 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “La Vía Campesina,” 160.

87. 87 Over the last century the percentage of the US population that farms fell from 41 percent to less than 2; over that same period settler farmers have lost 94 percent of their seed diversity. Ray, The Seed Underground, 6, 17. Others, however, contest the precision of such figures. Khoury et al., “Crop Genetic Erosion.”

88. 88 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “La Vía Campesina.”

89. 89 Although a third of global peasants live in China, neither they nor the post-collectivized peasants of the former Soviet Union have joined Via Campesina’s solidarity network. Intriguingly, all these nations share interconnected histories of maize. China slightly trails the United States in corn production.

90. 90 Borras, “La Via Campesina,” 5.

91. 91 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 16.

92. 92 Desmarais, “Peasants Speak,” 108.

93. 93 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “La Vía Campesina.”

94. 94 Borras, “La Via Campesina,” 4.

95. 95 Borras, “La Via Campesina,” 4; Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “Diálogo de Saberes.”

96. 96 Desmarais, “Peasants Speak,” 98.

97. 97 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “Diálogo de Saberes”; Edelman and Wolford, “Introduction.”

98. 98 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 72.

99. 99 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 141.

100. 100 The GMO threat to peasants was already clearly articulated in the coalition’s declarations against the WTO before the 1999 tribunal in Seattle, which is as far back as the coalition’s website collects historic posts.

101. 101 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “Diálogo de Saberes,” 983; CEMDA, Report.

102. 102 Shattuck, Schiavoni, and VanGelder, “Translating the Politics.”

103. 103 Bjork-James, Checker, and Edelman, “Transnational Social Movements,” 592; Trauger, We Want Land to Live, 23.

104. 104 Edelman, “The Next Stage.”

105. 105 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Alfred, “Sovereignty.”

106. 106 Desmarais, “Peasants Speak.”

107. 107 Shattuck, Schiavoni, and VanGelder, “Translating the Politics,” 429.

108. 108 Via Campesina, Nyéléni Newsletter, 3.

109. 109 Bjork-James, Checker, and Edelman, “Transnational Social Movements,” 596; Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics.

110. 110 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics, 131.

111. 111 Edelman and Borras, Political Dynamics; Shattuck, Schiavoni, and VanGelder, “Translating the Politics”; Borras, “Politically Engaged.”

112. 112 Edelman and Wolford, “Introduction,” 962.

113. 113 Borras, “Politically Engaged,” 464.

114. 114 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “Diálogo de Saberes.”

115. 115 Prince Charles, “Prince Charles Reflects on the Reith Lectures,” The Guardian, May 17, 2000, 3, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/may/18/religion.uk. King Charles also apparently displays in his home a bust of anti-GMO and seed activist Dr. Vandana Shiva. Specter, “Seeds of Doubt.”

116. 116 Wittman, Desmarais, and Wiebe, Food Sovereignty.

117. 117 Müller, “Introduction.”

118. 118 Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

119. 119 Grey and Patel, “Food Sovereignty as Decolonization.”

120. 120 Hoover, “You Can’t Say You’re Sovereign,” 31.

121. 121 Manuel, “Indigenous Brief to WTO.”

122. 122 Grey and Patel, “Food Sovereignty as Decolonization.”

123. 123 Doukas, Worked Over; Smythe, “The Rise of the Corporation.”

124. 124 Oglesby, “Corporate Citizenship?”

125. 125 Achbar and Abbott, The Corporation.

126. 126 Achbar and Abbott, The Corporation.

127. 127 Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, “Food Crises, Food Regimes”; Pechlaner, Corporate Crops.

128. 128 Cosier, “For Thousands of Years.”

129. 129 Murphy, Burch, and Clapp, “Cereal Secrets,” 7.

130. 130 Naik et al., “Corporate Capture of FAO.”

131. 131 Kinzer, Overthrow; Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit; Butler, War Is a Racket.

132. 132 Shiva, Barker, and Lockhart, “The GMO Emperor Has No Clothes,” 43.

133. 133 Mattei and Nader, Plunder.

134. 134 Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

135. 135 Industrial food processors are likewise killing their own customers. Mark Bittman, “Parasites, Killing Their Host: The Food Industry’s Solution to Obesity,” New York Times, June 18, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/opinion/mark-bittmanthe-food-industrys-solution-to-obesity.html.

136. 136 Bayer-Monsanto, “Crop Science”; Schiffman, “Life in the Rural Police State.”

137. 137 Müller, “Introduction.”

138. 138 As a condition of the merger Bayer had to spin off some lines, which were sold to BASF.

139. 139 Strömberg and Howard, “Recent Changes.”

140. 140 Sumpter, “The Growing Monopoly.”

141. 141 Because so many health effects are delayed or transgenerational (epigenetic), the three evil stepsisters may have pushed the full cost of this pollution onto future generations.

142. 142 Berne Declaration, “Agropoly”; Falkner, “The Troubled Birth,” 229.

143. 143 Levidow, “Democratizing Technology,” 223; Elmore, Seed Money.

144. 144 Klepek, “Selling Guatemala’s Next Green Revolution.”

145. 145 Canby, “Retreat to Subsistence.”

146. 146 US FDA, “GMO Crops, Animal Food, and Beyond.”

147. 147 Sumpter, “The Growing Monopoly,” 649.

148. 148 Ruskin, “Seedy Business.”

149. 149 Acedo, “Mexico Celebrates.”

150. 150 Robin, The World According to Monsanto.

151. 151 Gillam, Whitewash; Gillam, The Monsanto Papers.

152. 152 Tweedale, “Hero or Villain?”

153. 153 Most toxicology studies on Roundup were the standard three months long, but Gilles-Éric Séralini and Jéromeq Douzelet fed their mice for two years, which for mice would be middle age. Seralini and Douzelet, The Monsanto Papers.

154. 154 Acedo, “Mexico’s GMO Corn Ban.”

155. 155 Antoniou et al., Roundup and Birth Defects; Robin, The World According to Monsanto.

156. 156 Schapiro, “Toxic Inaction.”

157. 157 Benbrook, “How Did the US EPA and IARC?”

158. 158 As the judgments piled up, many towns, communities, school districts, state agencies, and my own UC system symbolically banned Roundup but, unfortunately, without the additional scrutiny of the health effects of alternate products. In most cases the regrettable alternative has been Dow Chemical’s 2,4-D.

159. 159 Stempel, “Bayer Reaches $6.9 Million Settlement.”

160. 160 Elmore, Seed Money, 8.

161. 161 Upholt, “A Killing Season.”

162. 162 Johnathon Hettinger, “US Court Bans Three Weedkillers and Finds EPA Broke Law in Approval Process,” The Guardian, Februrary 7, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/07/us-weedkiller-ban-dicamba-epa.

163. 163 Donley, “National Institutes of Health Study.”

164. 164 Chronister et al., “Urinary Glyphosate.”

165. 165 IARC, DDT, Lindane, and 2,4-D.

166. 166 CFS, “EPA Failed to Protect.”

167. 167 Held, “New Evidence.”

168. 168 Cohen, “To Feed Its 1.4 Billion.”

169. 169 Novartis, in turn, was the product of an earlier merger of Funk Seeds (one of the original US hybrid corn producers) and Ciba-Geigy.

170. 170 Aviv, “A Valuable Reputation.”

171. 171 Naidenko and Lunder, “Atrazine.” According to EPA water regulations, atrazine is 230 times more toxic than glyphosate. Specter, “Seeds of Doubt.”

172. 172 Carey Gillam and Aliya Uteuova, “Secret Files Suggest Chemical Giant Feared Weedkiller’s Link to Parkinson’s Disease,” The Guardian, October 20, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/20/syngenta-weedkiller-pesticide-parkinsons-disease-paraquat-documents.

173. 173 Imhoff, The Farm Bill.

174. 174 Andrew Pollack, “US Approves Corn Modified for Ethanol,” New York Times, February 11, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/business/12corn.html?_r=4.

175. 175 Ecowatch, “GMO-Ethanol Corn.”

176. 176 Jennifer Clapp, “Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta: Rush for Mega-mergers Puts Food Security at Risk,” The Guardian, May 5, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/may/05/monsanto-dow-syngenta-rush-for-mega-mergers-puts-food-security-at-risk.

177. 177 Begemann, “Syngenta Releases Acuron.”

178. 178 Howard, Concentration and Power.

179. 179 Phys.org, “China Shifting GM Policy.”

180. 180 Cohen, “To Feed Its 1.4 Billion.”

181. 181 Werner, Shattuck, and Galt, “While Debate Rages,” 1.

182. 182 Phys.org, “China Shifting GM Policy.”

183. 183 Cohen, “To Feed Its 1.4 Billion.”

184. 184 “China to Approve First GMO Corn.”

185. 185 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol.”

186. 186 Bellon et al., “Evolutionary and Food Supply Implications.”

187. 187 Curry, Endangered Maize.

188. 188 Soto Laveaga, “The Socialist Origins.”

189. 189 Curry, Endangered Maize, 90; Curry, “Taxonomy, Race Science.”

190. 190 Curry, “Taxonomy, Race Science,” 15.

191. 191 Curry, Endangered Maize.

192. 192 Curry, Endangered Maize, 223, 122.

193. 193 Khoury et al., “Crop Genetic Erosion.”

194. 194 Curry, “The History of Seed Banking,” 671.

195. 195 Curry, “The History of Seed Banking.”

196. 196 Damian Carrington, “Arctic Stronghold of World’s Weeds Flooded after Permafrost Melts,” The Guardian, May 19, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts. Syrians very nearly sacked another global seed vault in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, which stores fifteen hundred varieties of desert-adapted species adapted over ten thousand years in the Fertile Crescent. Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance, 93.

197. 197 Figueroa-Helland, Thomas, and Pérez Aguilera, “Decolonizing Food Systems”; Montenegro de Wit, “Banking on Wild Relatives.”

198. 198 Morales, “Agroecological Feminism.”

199. 199 Fenzi et al., “Community Seed Network.”

200. 200 Bellon et al., “Evolutionary and Food Supply Implications.”

201. 201 Bellon et al., “Evolutionary and Food Supply Implications.”

202. 202 Fenzi and Couix, “Growing Maize Landraces.”

203. 203 Ruckstuhl et al., “Introduction,” 3.

2. SACRED MAIZE, STALWART MAIZE

1. 1 Hastorf and Johannessen, “Becoming Corn-Eaters.”

2. 2 Sánchez G. et al., “Three New Teosintes.”

3. 3 Iltis was also ahead of his discipline, using trenchant critiques of the continued colonial habits of collecting plants without reciprocal specimen deposits to local herbaria. Iltis, “From Teosinte to Maize.”

4. 4 Doebley, “The Genetics of Maize Evolution.”

5. 5 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

6. 6 Matsuoka et al., “A Single Domestication for Maize.”

7. 7 Yang et al., “Two Teosintes.” On the same day that Ross-Ibarra’s team article was released in Science, Sololá was preparing to elect a new cycle of ancestral authorities. The US joined the right side of history by placing Guatemala’s ex-president Giammattei’s presumed lover on the sanctioned Magnitsky list for his role in bribery and vaccine kickback schemes. This allowed US officials to freeze his foreign bank assets and block visa entry.

8. 8 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

9. 9 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

10. 10 Kennett et al., “South-to-North Migration.”

11. 11 Keme and Coon, “For Abiayala to Live.”

12. 12 Azurdia, “Agrobiodiversidad de Guatemala.”

13. 13 Carroll, “Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years,” New York Times, May 24, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25creature.html; Doebley, “Mapping the Genes that Made Maize.”

14. 14 Nadal, Corn in NAFTA.

15. 15 Isakson, “Market Provisioning,” 1445; Wang et al., “The Interplay of Demography.”

16. 16 Johannessen, “Domestication Process of Maize”; Montenegro de Wit, “Banking on Wild Relatives”; Bellon et al., “Beyond Subsistence.”

17. 17 Sánchez G. et al., “Three New Teosintes.”

18. 18 Wilkes, “A Modest Proposal,” 55. Teosinte was once abundant enough for Friar Bernardino de Sahagún to mention it in his 1570 book about New Spain; he called it cocopi. Sánchez G. et al., “Three New Teosintes,” 1538.

19. 19 Sánchez Gonzalez et al., “Ecogeography of Teosinte.”

20. 20 Email communication with Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, 2019.

21. 21 Wilkes, “A Modest Proposal,” 53.

22. 22 Wilkes, “A Modest Proposal.”

23. 23 Nagarajan, “New Greenhouse Honors Scientist.”

24. 24 Text communication with Nicholas Copeland, 2023.

25. 25 Van den Akker, “Madre Milpa”; Montejo and Lampbell, “The Origin of Corn.”

26. 26 Anaya, The First Tortilla.

27. 27 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

28. 28 White, “Planting Sacred Seeds.”

29. 29 Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchu, 12.

30. 30 Johannessen and Hastorf, Corn and Culture.

31. 31 WhatsApp communication with Sebastián Cux, November 16, 2023.

32. 32 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

33. 33 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

34. 34 Kennett et al., “High-Precision Chronology.”

35. 35 Brown, “Glottochronology.

36. 36 Balick, People, Plants, and Culture.

37. 37 Forbes, “The Urban Tradition.”

38. 38 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

39. 39 Blake, Maize for the Gods; Santos Baca and Sousa e Berruezo, “Maize and the World Market.”

40. 40 Galinat, “Maize.”

41. 41 Montenegro de Wit, “Banking on Wild Relatives,” 5.

42. 42 Cosier, “For Thousands of Years,” 7.

43. 43 Neruda, Selected Odes, 333.

44. 44 Altieri and Toledo, “The Agroecological Revolution”; Montenegro de Wit, “Can Agroecology?”

45. 45 Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better.’”

46. 46 Kruse-Peeples, “The Story of Glass Gem Corn.”

47. 47 Galinat, “Maize.”

48. 48 Nabhan, Enduring Seeds.

49. 49 Grandia, “Modified Landscapes.”

50. 50 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

51. 51 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

52. 52 Linda Townsend, “Why Sweet Corn Should Be Designated New York’s Official State Vegetable,” The Citizen (Auburn, NY), May 10, 2016, https://auburnpub.com/news/local/townsend-why-sweet-corn-should-be-designated-new-york.

53. 53 Callie, “Is Your Sweet Corn Naked?”

54. 54 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

55. 55 Reina, “Milpas and Milperos.

56. 56 Curry, “Taxonomy, Race Science.”

57. 57 Kimmerer, “Corn Tastes Better.”

58. 58 Mesoamerican squashes are a bit different in form and function from North American pumpkins, which are grown for their carbohydrates and storability. Mesoamerican squashes are mostly grown for their blossoms and runners (relished in soups) and have been selected to produce an abundance of seeds for making protein-rich sauces (or moles, from the Nahuatl mōlli).

59. 59 Although maize produces more calories per seed planted, manioc (also known as cassava) provides more carbohydrates per acre.

60. 60 Grandia, The Wealth Report.

61. 61 Rodríguez, “El Conocimiento Tradicional.”

62. 62 Fuentes López et al., Maiz para Guatemala.

63. 63 Mann, 1491.

64. 64 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange.

65. 65 Steinberg and Taylor, “The Impact of Political Turmoil.”

66. 66 United Mexican States, “Mexico: Measures,” 13–14.

67. 67 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

68. 68 Nadal, The Environmental and Social Impacts, 104.

69. 69 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz.

70. 70 Van Akkeren, “Authors of the Popol Wuj.”

71. 71 Christenson, Popol Vuh; Montejo and Garay, Popol Vuh.

72. 72 They also told wonderful Maya adaptations of the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, in which the two siblings cook the witch into tamales. Grandia, Stories from the Sarstoon Temash.

73. 73 Stross, “Maize in Word and Image.”

74. 74 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz.

75. 75 Morton, Tortillas.

76. 76 Isakson, “Market Provisioning,” 1449.

77. 77 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz.

78. 78 Email with Jessa Rae Growing Thunder, 2023.

79. 79 Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies.

80. 80 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

81. 81 Johnson, Tomatoes, Potatoes.

82. 82 Galinat, “Maize.”

83. 83 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

84. 84 Pilcher, Planet Taco, 28.

85. 85 Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

86. 86 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz. For the botanically curious, male flowers are in the tassel and female flowers appear lower in clusters that mature into cobs after pollination. Each silk that is pollinated becomes a kernel.

87. 87 Fussell, The Story of Corn; Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

88. 88 Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

89. 89 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA.

90. 90 Grandia, “From Dawn ’til Dawn.”

91. 91 In remote villages, where typically no one has the capital needed to start a mill, women often organize collective projects with nonprofit organizations to establish cooperative mills.

92. 92 Maize drinks or “atoles” require a third grinding.

93. 93 Blake, Maize for the Gods; Clampitt, Maize.

94. 94 Johannessen, “Domestication Process.”

95. 95 Keleman, Hellin, and Bellon, “Maize Diversity.”

96. 96 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

97. 97 Guzzon et al., “Conservation and Use.” This is important, because although GM corn boosters claim Bt corn is needed to reduce aflatoxins, nixtamalization already does this for free.

98. 98 The exception to this was South America, where maize is more commonly used to make beer, a process that does not employ nixtamalization (Blake, Maize for the Gods, 185). The Andes, however, were another great Valvilov center of plant domestication for protein-filled potatoes, the other great staple the Americas provided to the world, as well as “superfood” quinoas; therefore, the protein advantages of nixtamalized maize were less important there.

99. 99 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

100. 100 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

101. 101 Blake, Maize for the Gods.

102. 102 Grandia, Enclosed.

103. 103 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

104. 104 Morton, Tortillas.

105. 105 Kirby Vickery, “Aztec Maize,” Manzanillo (Mexico) Sun, May 1, 2023, https://www.manzanillosun.com/aztec-maize/.

106. 106 Morton, Tortillas.

107. 107 Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

108. 108 Grandia, From the Q’eqchi’ Kitchen.

109. 109 Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

110. 110 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

111. 111 Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

112. 112 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA.

113. 113 Calvo and Esquibel, Decolonize Your Diet.

114. 114 Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz, 16.

115. 115 Hatse and De Ceuster, Prácticas Agrosilvestres Q’eqchi’es, 19.

116. 116 Hernández Rodríguez, “Seed Sovereignty,” 986.

117. 117 Hatse and De Ceuster, Cosmovisión y Espiritualidad, 18; Grandia, The Wealth Report.

118. 118 Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth.

119. 119 Morton, Tortillas.

120. 120 Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo.

121. 121 In addition to maize, several other American foods and medicines provisioned colonial armies and fundamentally shaped world history—including chicona bark (for quinine, which enabled colonizers to stay alive in the tropics), rubber, henequen, chocolate, cochineal, and cotton; Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

122. 122 CEMDA, Report, 17.

123. 123 Warman, Corn and Capitalism, 37.

124. 124 Coe, America’s First Cuisines, 15.

125. 125 Clampitt, Maize, 10.

126. 126 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

127. 127 Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

128. 128 Warman, Corn and Capitalism, xiii.

129. 129 Guzzon et al., “Conservation and Use,” 2.

130. 130 Kopp, “The World’s 6 Biggest Corn Producers.”

131. 131 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

132. 132 Warman, Corn and Capitalism; Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma.

133. 133 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

134. 134 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

135. 135 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

136. 136 Clampitt, Maize.

137. 137 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

138. 138 Because maize was already associated with the peasantry and poverty, physicians initially thought pellagra was contagious. To show it was not, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a scientist with the organization that evolved into the National Institutes of Health, audaciously injected himself with blood from pellagra patients. Although the niacin connection to pellagra was not fully understood until 1937, Goldberger had a hunch in 1920 that pellagra was just an expression of nutritional deficiency that could be cured with brewer’s yeast or beans. See Warman, Corn and Capitalism; and Squibb et al., “A Comparison.”

139. 139 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

140. 140 Boutard, Beautiful Corn, 3.

141. 141 Depending on how large the group is, men team up 2 by 2, 3 by 3, or 4 by 4. To play the b’uluk game, someone will place any number of maize kernels in a row; it could be 21, 25, 35, 40—however long they wish the game to last. Each player finds five unique sticks or leaves and gathers them on his respective side of the maize kernel line. Someone marks the back side black of four large maize kernels which serve as “dice.” In turn, each player throws the “dice.” Depending on how many kernels land with the painted black side up, the player can advance one stick that many spaces. If the player throws maize dice and they all land with the black side down and the white/yellow side up, then he may advance an extra space (for a total of five). Whenever a player lands exactly on the same space of a player from the opposing team, he captures that stick.

142. 142 Grandia, The Wealth Report.

143. 143 Taussig, “The Genesis of Capitalism.”

144. 144 Galeano, Guatemala, 25.

145. 145 Carey, “Guatemala’s Green Revolution.”

146. 146 Fitting, The Struggle for Maize.

147. 147 Bellon et al., “Evolutionary and Food Supply,” 2.

148. 148 Ribeiro, “The Day the Sun Dies,” 7.

149. 149 Teosinte produces a similar gel. It seems Indigenous farmers must have purposefully introgressed this trait via pollen flow between maize and its wild progenitor in order to create olotón.

150. 150 Pskowski, “Indigenous Maize?”

151. 151 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol.”

152. 152 CEC, Maize and Biodiversity, 4.

153. 153 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol.”

154. 154 Howard, Concentration and Power.

155. 155 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol,” 8; Van Deynze et al., “Nitrogen Fixation.”

156. 156 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol.”

157. 157 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol,” 8.

158. 158 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol,” 9.

159. 159 Pskowski, “Indigenous Maize?”

160. 160 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol.”

161. 161 Pskowski, “Indigenous Maize?”

162. 162 Monstross, “UC Davis Researchers,” 3.

163. 163 Pskowski, “Indigenous Maize?”; Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol,” 4.

164. 164 Bretting, Goodman, and Stuber, “Isozymatic Variation.”

165. 165 Turrent Fernández and Calderón, “Fijáción Biológica.”

166. 166 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol,” 10.

167. 167 Daley, “The Corn of the Future”; Van Deynze et al., “Nitrogen Fixation.”

168. 168 Van Deynze et al., “Nitrogen Fixation.”

169. 169 Daley, “The Corn of the Future.”

170. 170 Kloppenburg, Calderón, and Ané, “The Nagoya Protocol,” 10.

171. 171 Yong, “The Wonder Plant.”

172. 172 Whyte, “Indigenous Food Sovereignty,” 464.

173. 173 Whyte, “Food Justice.”

174. 174 Corntassel and Bryce, “Practicing Sustainable Self-Determination.”

THREE GREEN TO GENE REVOLUTION

1. 1 Richards, “Cultivation?”

2. 2 Weatherford, Indian Givers, 61.

3. 3 Pollan, The Botany of Desire, 206.

4. 4 “Backup” seed banking mimicked the military logic of “backup command sites” in anticipation of nuclear war. Curry, “The History of Seed Banking.”

5. 5 Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

6. 6 Alkon and Agyeman, “Introduction.”

7. 7 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 117–18.

8. 8 Dowie, American Foundations, 109.

9. 9 encyclopedia.com, “Henry Wallace.”

10. 10 Incite!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.

11. 11 Warman, Corn and Capitalism, 185. Like the name “Xerox” for photocopies, the umbrella term “hi-bred” or “hybrid” became synonymous with any plant or animal that was crossbred for superior progeny. Bruns, “Southern Corn Leaf Blight,” 1219.

12. 12 Kirkendall, “Henry A. Wallace Remembered.”

13. 13 Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy.

14. 14 Olsson, Agrarian Crossings.

15. 15 Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution, 107–8.

16. 16 Olsson, Agrarian Crossings.

17. 17 Perkins, “The Rockefeller Foundation.” The Mexican OSS should not be confused with the US CIA’s antecedent, the Office of Strategic Services.

18. 18 Olsson, Agrarian Crossings.

19. 19 Wellhausen et al., Races of Maize.

20. 20 Mangelsdorf and Cameron, “Western Guatemala”; Anderson, “Field Studies of Guatemalan Maize”; Stadelman, “Maize Cultivation.”

21. 21 Steinberg and Taylor, “The Impact of Political Turmoil,” 344.

22. 22 Méndez Cota, Disrupting Maize; Curry, Endangered Maize.

23. 23 Curry, “Taxonomy, Race Science,” 14.

24. 24 These open-pollinated varieties (OPVs) were technically (and confusingly) termed “synthetics.” OPV seeds were naturally grown, but involved less inbreeding than hybrids. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings; Matchett, “At Odds over Inbreeding”; Smith et al., “Global Dependence.”

25. 25 Olsson, Agrarian Crossings.

26. 26 Olsson, Agrarian Crossings.

27. 27 Santos Baca and de Sousa e Berruezo, “Maize and the World Market,” 149.

28. 28 Thomison and Geyer, Managing “Pollen Drift.”

29. 29 Doing this work was once a teenage rite of passage in the US Midwest.

30. 30 Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

31. 31 Boutard, Beautiful Corn.

32. 32 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

33. 33 Adamson, “Seeking the Corn Mother,” 237.

34. 34 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

35. 35 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 97; Klepek, “Against the Grain” (2011).

36. 36 Isakson, “Market Provisioning.”

37. 37 Philpott, “A Brief History.”

38. 38 Mullaney, Agricultural Revolution.

39. 39 Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

40. 40 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 5.

41. 41 Warman, Corn and Capitalism, 206.

42. 42 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 118.

43. 43 Young, The History.

44. 44 Doyle, Trespass Against Us.

45. 45 One of those first-generation picloram-based herbicides was field-tested at the UC Davis campus in 1964. Young, The History.

46. 46 President Richard Nixon closed the biological weapons research facility at Fort Detrick in 1969, and ironically relocated the newly established National Cancer Institute there in 1971 (into the same Area A). Fort Detrick Alliance, “History of Fort Detrick”; Young, The History.

47. 47 Dioxin is so deadly that just a single teaspoon could poison the water supply of a major city. It also has a long half-life, so trace amounts found in soils of more than three thousand Southeast Asian villages following the Vietnam War have caused birth defects and cancer over several generations. Ian Musgrave, “Are Toxic Dioxin Levels Lurking in Our Weed Killers? Follow Up on the Four Corners Report,” The Conversation (Boston), July 23 2013, https://theconversation.com/are-toxic-dioxin-levels-lurking-in-our-weed-killers-follow-up-on-the-four-corners-report-16336.

48. 48 Poison Papers B-3071, “Roundup.”

49. 49 Tweedale, “Hero or Villain.”

50. 50 Doyle, Trespass Against Us, 136.

51. 51 Romero, Economic Poisoning.

52. 52 Davis, “DDT and Pesticides.”

53. 53 Pisa et al., “An Update.”

54. 54 Everts, “The Nazi Origins.”

55. 55 Romero, Economic Poisoning, 13.

56. 56 Davis, “DDT and Pesticides.”

57. 57 Arnold, “Consequences of DDT Exposure.”

58. 58 Grandia, “Poisonous Exports.”

59. 59 Pimentel, “Is Silent Spring Behind Us?”

60. 60 Van den Bosch, The Pesticide Conspiracy.

61. 61 Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution.

62. 62 Altieri, Genetic Engineering in Agriculture, 2.

63. 63 Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution.

64. 64 Dowie, American Foundations; Lorek, “The Green Revolution in Latin America”; Goldman, Imperial Nature; Patel, “The Long Green Revolution.”

65. 65 Danaher, 50 Years Is Enough, 9. After his term as secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, McNamara became president of the World Bank. For him, all these posts were both practically and ideologically aligned; indeed, he was famous for remarking that “running any large organization is the same, whether it’s the Ford Motor Corporation, the Catholic Church, or the Department of Defense.”

66. 66 Curry, “The History of Seed Banking.”

67. 67 Soviet cereals were also introduced to Guatemala. Méndez Rojas, “Maize and the Green Revolution,” 139.

68. 68 Klepek, “Against the Grain” (2011).

69. 69 Carey, “Guatemala’s Green Revolution”; Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better’”; Copeland, “Greening the Counterinsurgency”; Grandia, “Poisonous Exports”; Isakson, “Maize Diversity”; Wingert, Feed the Future Initiative.

70. 70 In the highland communities where he worked, Isakson found that two-thirds of small farmers engage in seed exchanges, mostly within families. Isakson, “Market Provisioning.”

71. 71 Falla, “Hacia la Revolución Verde.”

72. 72 Klepek, “Against the Grain” (2011).

73. 73 Falla, “Hacia la Revolución Verde.”

74. 74 To be sure, Guatemalans use half the amount of fertilizer relative to Mexico, and of course significantly less than the United States.

75. 75 Roosevelt, “The Chemical Bomb”; de Campos and Olszyna-Maryzs, “Contamination of Human Milk.”

76. 76 Copeland, “Mayan Imaginaries of Democracy,” 312.

77. 77 Grandia, “Raw Hides.”

78. 78 Grandia, Enclosed.

79. 79 ICTA, “ICTA Desde 1972.”

80. 80 Isakson, “Market Provisioning.”

81. 81 John Russell, “Guatemala—The Tiger of Ixcán and His Evangelical Sons,” Guatemala Chronicle, September 16, 2015, https://guatemalachronicle.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/guatemala-the-tiger-of-ixcan-his-evangelical-sons/; Colby and Dennett, Thy Will.

82. 82 In a moment of déja-vu, during the 2014 trial of former president Ríos Montt for crimes against humanity, the Guatemalan government offered fertilizer to Maya peasants who were willing to attend a rally in support of the dictator on trial. Many instead joined a counter-rally, photos of which went viral on social media showing signs saying, “I prefer not to receive fertilizer to deny the genocide.”

83. 83 CJA, “Guatemala.”

84. 84 Peckenham, “Bullets and Beans.”

85. 85 A quintal represents one hundred pounds. Isakson, “Maize Diversity”; Sigüenza Ramírez, “El Sector Público Agrícola.”

86. 86 Sigüenza Ramírez, “El Sector Público Agrícola.”

87. 87 Handy, Tiny Engines of Abundance, 53.

88. 88 Klepek, “Selling Guatemala’s Next Green Revolution”; memo quoted in van Etten, “Molding Maize,” 703.

89. 89 Manz, Paradise in Ashes.

90. 90 Grandia, Enclosed.

91. 91 Steinberg and Taylor, “The Impact of Political Turmoil,” 348.

92. 92 Stadelman, “Maize Cultivation.”

93. 93 Alonso-Fradejas and Gauster, Perspectivas Para la Agricultura Familiar, 26, translation mine.

94. 94 Grandia, “Modified Landscapes”; van Etten and de Bruin, “Regional and Local Maize”; Guzzon et al., “Conservation and Use.” In Mexico as well, research teams have found that over time, farmers have “creolized” commercial varieties by selecting for adaptations to local conditions. Fenzi et al., “Community Seed Network,” 342.

95. 95 Klepek, “Selling Guatemala’s Next Green Revolution.”

96. 96 Tay, Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles; Zahniser et al., The Growing Corn Economies, 18.

97. 97 Eduardo Smith and Rosa María Bolaños, “Transgénicos, ¿solución a la falta de alimentos?,” Prensa Libre (Guatemala City), October 31, 2005, http://www.prensalibre.com/economia/Transgenicos-solucion-falta-alimentos_0_113989613.html.

98. 98 Tay, Guatemala: Agricultural Biotechnology Annual (2009).

99. 99 USDA, “McKinney on Trade Mission.”

100. 100 USDA FAS, “USDA Borlaug Fellowship Program.”

101. 101 Smith and Bolaños, “Transgénicos, ¿solución a la falta de alimentos?”

102. 102 USDA-FAS, “Cochran Fellowship Program.”

103. 103 Tay, Guatemala: Biotechnology GE Plants and Animals.

104. 104 Seralini and Douzelet, The Monsanto Papers, 70, 80.

105. 105 Odd GMO combinations—like scorpion poison in cabbage, pigs that glow in the dark, and goat milk that contains spider silk—set the internet aflame with a “narrow and dystopian construct of ‘Frankenfood.’” Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 352.

106. 106 Soleri et al., “Understanding the Potential Impact.”

107. 107 Bain and Dandachi, “Governing GMOs.”

108. 108 Kleist, “Valentine Remembered”; Fell, “Nothing Ventured”; Dickson, “Commercialization,” 6. This 1994 Calgene biotech research company was cofounded by a UC Davis professor and a venture capitalist. They set up the company shortly after the 1980 Bayh-Dole act allowed universities to form public-private enterprises using federally funded research. Some thirty other UC Davis professors were consultants to the company. This precedent helped reshape university conflict-of-interest policies about such public-private collaborations.

109. 109 In a similar pattern, after France approved the EU’s first GM crop, Bt tobacco, in 1994, a public backlash triggered other European countries to pass stringent GMO regulations.

110. 110 Anderson and Cobb, “From the Green Revolution.”

111. 111 Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

112. 112 Friedlander, “Toxic Pollen.”

113. 113 Although the two terms are often misused interchangeably, toxins refer to naturally produced poisons (by plants, animals, insects, or microorganisms), whereas toxics or toxicants are synthetically created substances that are foreign to an ecological or biological system.

114. 114 Randy Shore, “The Herbicide Glyphosate Persists in Wild, Edible Plants: B.C. Study,” Vancouver Sun, February 20, 2019, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-herbicide-glyphosate-persists-in-wild-edible-plants-b-c-study.

115. 115 Altieri, Genetic Engineering in Agriculture, 46.

116. 116 Altieri, Genetic Engineering in Agriculture, 36–41.

117. 117 Perro and Adams, What’s Making Our Children Sick?

118. 118 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma, 68–69.

119. 119 Robin, The World According to Monsanto, 107.

120. 120 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

121. 121 Huff, “How Monsanto Invaded.”

122. 122 “Seed Saving,” 18.

123. 123 Grandia, “Toxic Tropics.”

124. 124 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 37.

125. 125 Shapiro, “Democracy Now! Interviews.”

126. 126 Schiffman, “Life in the Rural Police State.”

127. 127 Broughton, “Behind a Corporate Monster.”

128. 128 Monsanto has even sued dairy farmers for simply advertising their milk as not containing rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), arguing that such labels imply that rBGH is harmful. Barlett and Steele, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear”; DeSantis, “Control through Contamination.”

129. 129 Schiffman, “Life in the Rural Police State.”

130. 130 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma, 613.

131. 131 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 319.

132. 132 Pollack, “Monsanto’s Fortunes Turn Sour.”

133. 133 Robin, The World According to Monsanto.

134. 134 GRAIN, “Seed Laws in Latin America.”

135. 135 Robin, The World According to Monsanto.

136. 136 Beilin and Suryanarayanan, “The War between Amaranth and Soy.”

137. 137 Binimelis, Pengue, and Monterroso, “‘Transgenic Treadmill.’”

138. 138 Beilin and Suryanarayanan, “The War between Amaranth and Soy.”

139. 139 Patel, “The Long Green Revolution.”

140. 140 Howard, Concentration and Power?

141. 141 Athanasiou, “The Age of Greenwashing,” 12.

142. 142 Martínez-Torres and Rosset, “Diálogo de Saberes,” 991.

143. 143 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant.

144. 144 Khoury et al., “Crop Genetic Erosion”; Schapiro, Seeds of Resistance, 51.

145. 145 Smith et al., “Global Dependence.”

FOUR LEGAL MAZE

1. 1 Asturias, Men of Maize, 5–6.

2. 2 Asturias, Men of Maize, 208.

3. 3 Asturias, Men of Maize, 253.

4. 4 Asturias, Men of Maize.

5. 5 Coe, America’s First Cuisines, 229.

6. 6 Similarly in North America, once colonists no longer depended on Native American agrarian knowledge, colonizing “corn growers” murdered or forcibly resettled maize-growing tribes onto infertile reservation lands.

7. 7 Coe, America’s First Cuisines.

8. 8 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

9. 9 Coe, America’s First Cuisines, 230.

10. 10 I draw here on Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between a war of maneuver and a war of position. Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks.

11. 11 Miller, “The Mexican Hacienda.”

12. 12 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA.

13. 13 Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better.’” In my fieldwork in Q’eqchi’ Maya villages, elders remembered with flashes of anger how they had to self-provide hardtack tamales during months spent working for free on Ubico’s road-building brigades.

14. 14 McCreery, “‘An Odious Feudalism.’”

15. 15 McCreery, “‘An Odious Feudalism.’”

16. 16 Coatsworth, “Anotaciones Sobre la Producción.”

17. 17 Carey, “Guatemala’s Green Revolution.”

18. 18 Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better.’”

19. 19 Carey, “Guatemala’s Green Revolution,” 290.

20. 20 Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better,’” 168.

21. 21 Simon, Endangered Mexico.

22. 22 Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better,’” 136–37.

23. 23 Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better,’” 168.

24. 24 Handy, Tiny Engines of Abundance, 67–68.

25. 25 Chassé, “‘Produce More to Live Better,’” 212.

26. 26 Warman, Corn and Capitalism.

27. 27 Nations and Komer, “Rainforests and the Hamburger Society.”

28. 28 In 1970 the Petén region produced just 1 percent of Guatemala’s corn; by 1979, it was 10 percent; and by 2001, 17 percent of the country’s corn and 25 percent of the country’s beans came from Petén. As a point of comparison, Petén then represented only 5 percent of the national population. Schwartz, “Pobreza Planeada o Accidente Histórico?,” 20.

29. 29 Grandia, “Modified Landscapes.”

30. 30 Grandia, Enclosed.

31. 31 Alonso-Fradejas, “The Discursive Flexibility.”

32. 32 Solano, “Reconversión Productiva”; Konforti, “‘Nosotros No Comemos Caña’”; Cámara del Agro and Agrequima, El AGRO es Vital.

33. 33 Watts, Silent Violence.

34. 34 Sealing, “Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Farmers.”

35. 35 Rosset, Food Is Different.

36. 36 Carlsen, NAFTA Free Trade Myths.

37. 37 Imhoff, Foodfight, 23.

38. 38 Richard, “Withered Milpas,” 396.

39. 39 Author calculations from Zahniser et al., The Growing Corn Economies.

40. 40 Zahniser et al., The Growing Corn Economies, 37.

41. 41 Goodluck, Ahtone, and Lee, “The Land-Grant Universities.”

42. 42 According to Tay’s Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles, 10, Guatemala has but one meter of roads per capita, compared to twenty meters in the United States. Reports such as hers provide seasonal price calendars that give foreign corporations vital information about when to dump corn on national markets.

43. 43 Credit disparities emerged as a central NAFTA issue. US grain traders could secure lots from the US Commodity Credit Corporation at a 7 percent interest rate for three years for “foreign market development” under the Agricultural Trade Act of 1978. This was a huge advantage, when compared to the 25–30 percent in-country rates available to Mexican brokers in an inflationary peso economy. Richard, “Withered Milpas.”

44. 44 Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

45. 45 Campanella, “DR-CAFTA and the Future.”

46. 46 Tay, Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles, 10.

47. 47 Witness for Peace, “Fact Sheet.”

48. 48 Tay, Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles.

49. 49 Beyond issues related to agriculture, other contentious issues in later WTO fora included forced privatization of basic services (water, telecommunications, education).

50. 50 Simmons, Meaningful Resistance, 151.

51. 51 Poitras, “Unnatural Growth,” 119.

52. 52 Baker, Corn Meets Maize, 50.

53. 53 Nadal, “Corn and NAFTA”; Nadal, Corn in NAFTA.

54. 54 Nadal, “Corn and NAFTA.”

55. 55 Suppan, “Mexican Corn”; Carlsen, NAFTA Free Trade Myths, 3.

56. 56 The Mexican committee responsible for enforcing these tariffs was composed of officials from the Ministries of Agriculture (SAGARPA) and Economy (ME), plus representatives of flour mills, industrial food processors, corn product refiners, the livestock sector, and industrial chicken producers—but, significantly, not Indigenous people nor national maize growers. Nadal, “Corn and NAFTA.” See also DeSantis, “Control through Contamination,” #11640; Henriques and Patel, “NAFTA, Corn.”

57. 57 DeSantis, “Control through Contamination”; Richard, “Withered Milpas.”

58. 58 Nadal, “Corn and NAFTA.”

59. 59 Nadal, The Environmental and Social Impacts.

60. 60 Zahniser et al., The Growing Corn Economies.

61. 61 Suppan, “Mexican Corn.”

62. 62 Nadal, The Environmental and Social Impacts.

63. 63 Judis, “Trade Secrets.”

64. 64 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA.

65. 65 Nadal, Corn in NAFTA, 157.

66. 66 Gonzalez and Nader, Losing Knowledge.

67. 67 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality; Appendini, “Reconstructing the Maize Market”; Zahniser et al., The Growing Corn Economies, 32.

68. 68 However, smallholders in the state of Mexico around the D.F. (Mexico City) are able to continue to produce small-scale maize by blending their agricultural work with off-farm employment. Supported by the Zapatistas, Chiapas is another exceptional stronghold of subsistence production, returning to pre-NAFTA acreage by 2007. Eakin et al., “Correlates of Maize,” 80, 83; Public Citizen, “NAFTA’s Legacy for Mexico.”

69. 69 Quigley, “NCGA Recognizes NAFTA Benefits.”

70. 70 Nadal, Corn in NAFTA.

71. 71 Appendini, “Tracing the Maize-Tortilla Chain.”

72. 72 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA, 99.

73. 73 Nevaer, “Mexico’s NAFTA Generation.”

74. 74 Nevaer, “Mexico’s NAFTA Generation.”

75. 75 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA.

76. 76 Public opposition on the streets of Miami combined with an inside alliance of leftist governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia, successfully halted the FTAA.

77. 77 CRS, Agriculture in the DR-CAFTA, 5–6.

78. 78 DeSantis, Control through Contamination.

79. 79 DeSantis, Control through Contamination. Pinochet’s Chile was the “Chicago boys” experiment in structural adjustment, privatization, and neoliberal trade regimes after the coup of Salvador Allende in 1973.

80. 80 DeSantis, Control through Contamination.

81. 81 Cáceres, “El CAFTA.”

82. 82 Morley, Trade Liberalization under CAFTA; Cáceres, “El CAFTA,” 1; Granados and Cornejo, “Convergence in the Americas.”

83. 83 Tay, Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles.

84. 84 Cáceres, “El CAFTA,” 1; Tay, Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles.

85. 85 Public Citizen, “More Information.”

86. 86 DeSantis, Control through Contamination; Grandia, “Unsettling.”

87. 87 Grandia, “In Their Own Words.”

88. 88 Grandia, “In Their Own Words”; Finley-Brook and Hoyt, “CAFTA Opposition.”

89. 89 Stalcup, “CAFTA Becomes Law.”

90. 90 CRS, Agriculture in the DR-CAFTA, 14.

91. 91 Aistara, “Privately Public Seeds”; Pearson, “On the Trail.”

92. 92 US Dept. of State, cable, February 13, 2003.

93. 93 The United States pressured Guatemala to approve the UPOV 1991, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure, and the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID). US Dept. of State, cable, November 22, 2005. The UPOV clause was also one reason for Costa Rica’s hesitation in ratifying the DR-CAFTA because critics knew it could overturn many of the country’s biodiversity protections.

94. 94 Suppan, Analysis.

95. 95 Kloppenburg, First the Seed, 323.

96. 96 Aistara, “Privately Public Seeds.”

97. 97 GRAIN, “Seed Laws in Latin America.”

98. 98 Granados and Cornejo, “Convergence in the Americas.”

99. 99 Villagrán, “Lo Que Debes Saber Sobre.”

100. 100 Suppan, “Food Safety and GMOs.”

101. 101 US Dept. of State, cable, March 13, 2006.

102. 102 US Dept. of State, cable, January 11, 2006, 2 and 10.

103. 103 The name “Chapter 11” refers to its place in the NAFTA document, not as the synonym for bankruptcy.

104. 104 Public Citizen, “Corporations Reveal.” Interested readers can track and tally cases via the UN Trade and Development website, https://investmentpolicy.unctad.org/investment-dispute-settlement.

105. 105 Mark Engler and Nadya Martinez, “Harken v. Costa Rica,” People’s Weekly World Newspaper, May 27, 2004, https://www.bilaterals.org/?harken-v-costa-rica-us-companies.

106. 106 Engler and Martinez, “Harken v. Costa Rica”; Liza Grandia, “Silence Is Beholden: Are Corporations Hog-Tying Conservation Groups in CAFTA Fight?,” Daily Grist, June 5, 2005, http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/06/02/grandia-cafta/.

107. 107 Ricker, “Competition or Massacre?”

108. 108 LADB, “Guatemala Losing Heritage.” Put another way, a hectare of corn costs US$304 to grow in the United States due to government subsidies, but US$562 in Guatemala. LADB, “After Six Months.”

109. 109 Author calculations.

110. 110 Tay, Guatemala: Agricultural Biotechnology Annual (2017).

111. 111 Leffertt, “Region Could Suffer,” 1.

112. 112 LADB, “After Six Months.”

113. 113 Galemba, “Corn Is Food.”

114. 114 Tay, Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles.

115. 115 Vasquez, “Guatemala.”

116. 116 USDA-FAS, “Corn 2020 Export Highlights.”

117. 117 Tay, Guatemala’s Corn Sector Struggles.

118. 118 US Dept. of State, cable, August 1, 2007.

119. 119 Weller, “Farmer Cooperatives.”

120. 120 Oxfam America, “Seeds of Discord.”

121. 121 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance”; Brechelt, Transgénicos en Santo Domingo; Grandia, “Modified Landscapes.” See also chap. 6.

122. 122 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance,” 614.

123. 123 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance.”

124. 124 Aventis labeled the corn with a bewildering tag, which stated: “Under this purchase agreement, customer or any user may: use this hybrid corn seed or any non-hybrid corn seeds found herein, for the purpose of producing grain for feeding or processing.” This left unclear whether “processing” referred to industrial food processing or other commercial uses. Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance,” 621.

125. 125 DeSantis, Control through Contamination.

126. 126 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance,” 628.

127. 127 DeSantis, Control through Contamination.

128. 128 DeSantis, Control through Contamination.

129. 129 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance,” 642.

130. 130 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance,” 625.

131. 131 Clapp, “Unplanned Exposure.”

132. 132 Grandia, “Modified Landscapes.”

133. 133 Mencos, “La Situación de los Transgénicos,” 92. As of 2023, none of the major private laboratories I contacted offered testing for StarLink, so it is anyone’s guess whether those genes continue circulating.

134. 134 Clapp, “Illegal GMO Releases.”

135. 135 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance.”

136. 136 Clapp, “Illegal GMO Releases.”

137. 137 Price and Cotter, “The GM Contamination Register.”

138. 138 Ribeiro, Maíz. This happened in Brazil, where cultivation of contraband GM soy from Argentina (nicknamed “Maradona” after its national soccer star) became so prevalent that it threatened the integrity of Brazil’s export market.

139. 139 Klepek, “Selling Guatemala’s Next Green Revolution.” One biotech consultant explained this to the Toronto Star in 2001: “The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded [with genetically modified organisms] that there’s nothing you can do about it. You just sort of surrender” (ETC Group, “Fear-Reviewed Science,” 2).

140. 140 Klepek, “Against the Grain” (2011), 183.

141. 141 Cleveland and Soleri, “Rethinking”; Mercer and Wainwright, “Gene Flow.”

142. 142 Ruiz-Marrero, “Genetic Pollution.”

143. 143 Otero, Food for the Few; Kimbrell and Mendelson, Monsanto vs. US Farmers.

144. 144 Schwartz, “You Can’t Read the TPP.”

145. 145 Palmer, “Some Secrecy Needed.”

146. 146 In 1994 Ralph Nader famously challenged any US congressional member to read the five-hundred-page World Trade Agreement before ratifying it. He offered a $10,000 donation to the charity of choice of anyone who would sign an affidavit that he or she had read the entire document and then take a ten-question quiz on its contents. Only Colorado’s Republican senator Hank Brown accepted the challenge. Although Brown had planned to vote to ratify the WTO, after reading the treaty with his own eyes, he was aghast at the contents. Nader and Wallach, “GATT, NAFTA.”

147. 147 USTR, North American Free Trade Agreement.

148. 148 USTR, Request for Comments, 187.

149. 149 USTR, Request for Comments, 173 and 179.

150. 150 Hernández-López, “GMO Corn in México” (emphasis added).

151. 151 This is one of the key principles at stake in the current dispute the USTR filed against Mexico over its phaseout of GM corn imports for tortillas.

152. 152 Suppan, “Food Safety and GMOs,” 4.

153. 153 Hansen-Kuhn, “Mexico’s Move.”

154. 154 Bernasconi-Osterwalder, “USMCA Curbs.”

155. 155 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA.

156. 156 ASTA, Strategic Plan 2021.

157. 157 Lydia Carey, “Lobbyists Win a Round in Fight over Protecting Farmers’ Rights to Seeds,” Mexico News Daily, July 7 2020, https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/lobbyists-win-a-round-in-fight-over-protecting-farmers-rights-to-seeds/.

5. MANY MEXICAN WORLDS IN DEFENSE OF MAIZE

1. 1 Lovell, Lutz, and Kramer, Strike Fear in the Land.

2. 2 Sherman, “A Conqueror’s Wealth.”

3. 3 Espinosa, “Ponencia Magistral.”

4. 4 Edelman, “Food Sovereignty.”

5. 5 Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci contrasted “organic” and “traditional” intellectuals: while traditional leaders serve the ruling class’s interests, organic leaders make unconventional alliances with “subaltern” (read: subordinate) groups. Grandia, “Raw Hides.”

6. 6 Montenegro de Wit, “Can Agroecology?”; Curry, “Taxonomy, Race Science”; CEMDA, Report; H. Wilkes, “Efraim Hernández Xolocotzi-Guzman.”

7. 7 Joseph and Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution; Fitting, The Struggle for Maize. The modern Zapatistas chose their group’s name in honor of mestizo Mexican leader Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919), who commanded the Liberation Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution. Zapata trusted Francisco Madero’s promises for agrarian reform, but when Madero took office in 1911, he sent federal troops to disperse Zapata’s supporters. The original Zapatistas (mostly Nahua speakers) waged guerrilla warfare until President Venustiano Carranza recruited urban militias, known as the “Red Battalions,” to quash the Zapatistas and Pancho Villa’s army in the north.

8. 8 Fitting, “Importing Corn, Exporting Labor”; Curry, Endangered Maize.

9. 9 Martínez Esponda et al., Report on the Biocultural Relevance, 17.

10. 10 During the Mexican Revolution, a Mexican widowed woman could take over her late husband’s weapons and uniform or attach to another soldier. Some troops even had women corporals and captains, with names like “La China” from Morelos. See Morton, Tortillas.

11. 11 CGIAR, Portraits of Women Working.

12. 12 González, Zapotec Science.

13. 13 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA; Peralta, “[De]Stabilizing”; Curry, “Taxonomy, Race Science.” Not until the 1940s did nutritional research show that maize was as, if not more, nourishing than wheat. Santos Baca and de Sousa e Berruezo, “Maize and the World Market.”

14. 14 Ribeiro, Maíz, 304.

15. 15 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity.

16. 16 Barkin, “The Reconstruction,” 79.

17. 17 Barkin, “The Reconstruction,” 81.

18. 18 Peralta, “[De]Stabilizing”; Fitting, The Struggle for Maize; Otero, Food for the Few; Poitras, “Unnatural Growth.”

19. 19 Patel, Stuffed and Starved, 58.

20. 20 Suppan, “Mexican Corn,” 3.

21. 21 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity, 16.

22. 22 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 7.

23. 23 Richard, “Withered Milpas,” 396.

24. 24 For instance, Mexico’s Minister of Agriculture and his family collected $11 million pesos between 2005 and 2010. Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 27.

25. 25 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 8.

26. 26 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 34.

27. 27 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 14.

28. 28 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 11.

29. 29 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 29.

30. 30 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 24. N.B.: The number of Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico can vary depending on how they are counted.

31. 31 Galvan-Miyoshi, Walker, and Warf, “Land Change Regimes.”

32. 32 Lind and Barham, “The Social Life of the Tortilla”; Espinosa A., “La Guerra de la Tortilla,” 73.

33. 33 Peralta, “[De]Stabilizing.”

34. 34 Simmons, Meaningful Resistance, 133.

35. 35 Gálvez, Eating NAFTA; LADB, “US Food Processor ADM”; DeSantis, Control through Contamination.

36. 36 Espinosa A., “La Guerra de la Tortilla,” 71.

37. 37 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity, 15; Ribeiro, Maíz, 92.

38. 38 Galvan-Miyoshi, Walker, and Warf, “Land Change Regimes.”

39. 39 Richard, “Withered Milpas.”

40. 40 Nadal, The Environmental and Social Impacts; Keleman, García Raño, and Hellin, “Maize Diversity,” 192.

41. 41 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality.

42. 42 Michelle Estrada, spring quarter 2023, class discussion Native American Studies 198, UC Davis.

43. 43 Simmons, Meaningful Resistance, 152.

44. 44 Keleman, García Raño, and Hellin, “Maize Diversity,” 189.

45. 45 Espinosa A., “La Guerra de la Tortilla,” 72.

46. 46 Simmons, Meaningful Resistance.

47. 47 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity, 79.

48. 48 Simmons, Meaningful Resistance, 153.

49. 49 Esteva and Marielle, Sin Maíz no Hay País.

50. 50 Richard, “Withered Milpas”; Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 37.

51. 51 Otero, Food for the Few.

52. 52 Richard, “Withered Milpas,” 388.

53. 53 Simmons, Meaningful Resistance, 159. PAN is the party that broke the PRI’s stranglehold on power in 2000.

54. 54 Simmons, Meaningful Resistance, 156.

55. 55 Peralta, “[De]Stabilizing,” 110.

56. 56 To review: Monsanto did not launch its Roundup Ready corn line until 1998, four years after NAFTA was ratified. Hernández-López, “GMO Corn in México.”

57. 57 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity, 4.

58. 58 Fitting, “Importing Corn, Exporting Labor”; Nadal, Corn in NAFTA; Toledo, “Los Biotecnólogos.”

59. 59 Wise, Eating Tomorrow.

60. 60 Wise, “High Risks, Few Rewards.”

61. 61 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 39; CGIAR, Portraits of Women Working.

62. 62 CEC, Maize and Biodiversity.

63. 63 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity.

64. 64 Rowell, “Immoral Maize,” 3.

65. 65 Soleri and Cleveland, “Farmers’ Genetic Perceptions.”

66. 66 Bonneuil, Foyer, and Wynne, “Genetic Fallout.”

67. 67 Soleri and Cleveland, “Farmers’ Genetic Perceptions”; González, Zapotec Science.

68. 68 Nadal, Corn in NAFTA, 31.

69. 69 Marie-Monique Robin, “Phantoms in the Machine: GM Corn Spreads to Mexico,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 3, 2010, https://www.smh.com.au/world/phantoms-in-the-machine-gm-corn-spreads-to-mexico-20100702-zu3r.html.

70. 70 Robin, “Phantoms in the Machine”; Canby, “Retreat to Subsistence”; Cleveland and Soleri, “Rethinking”; Altieri, Genetic Engineering in Agriculture; Dyer et al., “Dispersal of Transgenes”; Nadal, Corn in NAFTA; Kato- Yamakake, “Transgenic Varieties.” Teosinte’s growing season (June–October) and pollination season (September) still match that of maize. Nadal, Corn in NAFTA.

71. 71 Quist and Ignacio Chapela, “Transgenic DNA.”

72. 72 Canby, “Retreat to Subsistence.”

73. 73 Robin, The World According to Monsanto; Clapp, “Illegal GMO Releases.”

74. 74 McAfee, “Corn Culture.”

75. 75 Soleri et al., “Understanding the Potential Impact.”

76. 76 Robin, The World According to Monsanto.

77. 77 Gerdes, “Killing the Messenger.”

78. 78 Robin, “Phantoms in the Machine.”

79. 79 Mann, “Has GM Corn Invaded?”

80. 80 DeSantis, Control through Contamination; Rowell, “Immoral Maize,” 19.

81. 81 CEC, Maize and Biodiversity; Fitting, “Importing Corn, Exporting Labor.”

82. 82 DeSantis, Control through Contamination; CEC, Maize and Biodiversity, 32; Ribeiro, Maíz, 101. By 2003 DICONSA had decided to purchase only domestic grain. Fitting, “The Political Uses of Culture”; Mercer and Wainwright, “Gene Flow,” 112.

83. 83 Nadal, Corn in NAFTA, 32.

84. 84 Zarembo, “The Tale of the Mystery Corn.”

85. 85 Canby, “Retreat to Subsistence.”

86. 86 ETC Group et al., “Contamination”; Clapp, “Unplanned Exposure”; Fitting, “Risk, Regulation and Resistence.”

87. 87 Clapp, “Unplanned Exposure.”

88. 88 Ribeiro, Maíz, 3, translation mine.

89. 89 Ribeiro, Maíz, 176, translation mine.

90. 90 CEC, Maize and Biodiversity, 23.

91. 91 CEC, Maize and Biodiversity, 46.

92. 92 Rowell, “Immoral Maize,” 19.

93. 93 See Mercer and Wainwright, “Gene Flow”; Bonneuil, Foyer, and Wynne, “Genetic Fallout.”

94. 94 Dyer et al., “Dispersal of Transgenes.”

95. 95 McAfee, “Corn Culture”; Dyer et al., “Dispersal of Transgenes”; Cleveland and Soleri, “Rethinking”; Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

96. 96 Fitting, “Risk, Regulation and Resistence”; Soleri, Cleveland, and Aragón Cuevas, “Transgenic Crops.”

97. 97 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma.

98. 98 This may be how Monsanto’s YieldGard (MON810) could have entered Mexico as early as 1997. Dyer et al., “Dispersal of Transgenes,” 3, citing the Mexican Rural Household Survey.

99. 99 ETC Group, “Fear-Reviewed Science,” 3.

100. 100 Zarembo, “The Tale of the Mystery Corn.”

101. 101 Otero, Mexico.

102. 102 Soleri, Cleveland, and Cuevas, “Transgenic Crops,” 503; McAfee, “Corn Culture,” 23.

103. 103 Ribeiro, Maíz. Ribeiro provided essential counternarratives to AGROBIO, an industry association that lavishly courted Mexican journalists and government functionaries with fancy informational tours and “prizes” for articles showing a positive spin regarding GMO technology. Peralta, “[De]Stabilizing”; Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity.

104. 104 ETC Group, “Fear-Reviewed Science”; Bazán Landeros, “Entre la Construcción Discursiva,” 55.

105. 105 Poitras, “Unnatural Growth.”

106. 106 Peralta, “[De]Stabilizing”; Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity; Poitras, “Unnatural Growth.”

107. 107 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity.

108. 108 Poitras, “Unnatural Growth.”

109. 109 Vargas-Parada, “GM Maize Splits Mexico,” 16.

110. 110 Ribeiro, Maíz, 139.

111. 111 Ribeiro, Maíz, 136.

112. 112 Ribeiro, Maíz, 111.

113. 113 Ribeiro, Maíz, 192.

114. 114 Ribeiro, Maíz, 255.

115. 115 Hernández-López, “Racializing Trade in Corn”; Wise, Eating Tomorrow.

116. 116 Ribeiro, Maíz, 160; Hernández-López, “Racializing Trade in Corn.”

117. 117 Quijones, “Mexican Gourmet Chefs.”

118. 118 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity.

119. 119 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity, 42.

120. 120 Ribeiro, Maíz, 41, translation mine.

121. 121 Brandt, “Zapatista Corn,” 881.

122. 122 Eakin et al., “Correlates of Maize,” 83.

123. 123 EZLN, “Did You Hear It?”

124. 124 Hernández, Perales, and Jaffee, “‘Without Food,’” 241.

125. 125 Marcos, “The Fourth World War,” 282.

126. 126 Hernández Rodríguez, Perales Rivera, and Jaffee, “Emociones.”

127. 127 Hernández, Perales, and Jaffee, “‘Without Food.’”

128. 128 Brandt, “Zapatista Corn,” 894.

129. 129 Hernández Rodríguez, “Seed Sovereignty.”

130. 130 When testing leaves, not kernels, it is possible to miss contamination that occurs during pollination, but over time GM strains might be removed from the region. Brandt, “Zapatista Corn,” 890.

131. 131 Brandt, “Zapatista Corn,” 890.

132. 132 Schools for Chiapas, “GMO-Free Zapatista Corn.”

133. 133 The sarcophagus lid of the tomb of Palenque’s king, Pakal (603–683 CE), is one of the best examples from ancient Mayan artwork of maize depicted as a foliated cross.

134. 134 Haenn, Fields of Power.

135. 135 Víctor M. Toledo, “El Día Que Monsanto Infiltró a Morena,” La Jornada, December 19, 2017, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2017/12/19/politica/016a1pol.

136. 136 Suryanarayanan and Beilin, “Milpa-Melipona-Maya.”

137. 137 Ribeiro, Maíz, 145.

138. 138 Strochlic, “An Unlikely Feud”; Suryanarayanan and Beilin, “Milpa-Melipona- Maya.”

139. 139 Tamariz, “GM Crops vs. Apiculture.”

140. 140 Ribeiro, Maíz, 150.

141. 141 Tamariz, “GM Crops vs. Apiculture.”

142. 142 Goldman Environmental Foundation, “Leydy Pech.”

143. 143 Suryanarayanan and Beilin, “Milpa-Melipona-Maya.”

144. 144 Torres-Mazuera and Ramírez-Espinosa, “How a Legal Fight.”

145. 145 Tamariz, “GM Crops vs. Apiculture.”

146. 146 Bazán Landeros, “Entre la Construcción Discursiva,” 17.

147. 147 Garcia Ruiz, Knapp, and Garcia-Ruiz, “Profile of Genetically Modified Plants”; Otero, Mexico: Agricultural Biotechnology Annual.

148. 148 Strochlic, “An Unlikely Feud”; Bazán Landeros, “Entre la Construcción Discursiva.”

149. 149 Torres-Mazuera and Ramírez-Espinosa, “How a Legal Fight.”

150. 150 Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo.

151. 151 Torres-Mazuera and Ramírez-Espinosa, “How a Legal Fight.”

152. 152 Kinchy, Seeds, Science, and Struggle.

153. 153 Wade, “Mexico’s New Science”; Alvarez-Buylla and Piñeyro-Nelson, El Maíz.

154. 154 González-Ortega et al., “Pervasive Presence.”

155. 155 Lozano-Kasten et al., “Seasonal Urinary Levels.”

156. 156 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity, 41–42.

157. 157 Clapp, “Unplanned Exposure”; Hansen-Kuhn, “Mexico’s Move.”

158. 158 Bonneuil, Foyer, and Wynne, “Genetic Fallout.”

159. 159 Sean Pratt, “Mexico’s GM Corn Ban Would Hit US Hard,” Western Producer, February 4, 2021, https://www.producer.com/markets/mexicos-gm-corn-ban-would-hit-u-s-hard/.

160. 160 Carey Gillam, “Revealed: Monsanto Owner and US Officials Pressured Mexico to Drop Glyphosate Ban,” The Guardian, February 16, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-monsanto-mexico-us-glyphosate-ban.

161. 161 Bazán Landeros, “Entre la Construcción Discursiva.”

162. 162 Queally, “Let’s Be Clear.”

163. 163 Hansen-Kuhn, “Mexico’s Move.”

164. 164 Bazán Landeros, “Entre la Construcción Discursiva.”

165. 165 Bazán Landeros, “Entre la Construcción Discursiva.”

166. 166 James F. Smith, “Biotech Farmers in Chiapas Lead Peaceful Agricultural Revolution,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1998, https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/biotech-farmers-chiapas-lead-peaceful/docview/421383790/se-2?accountid+14505. As a potential partner for bioprospecting, Romo briefly served as donor and board member to Conservation International—a relationship which “did not end well” according to an anonymous source.

167. 167 Philpott, “A Small Farmer Ruminates.”

168. 168 Aristegui Noticias, “Alfonso Romo.”

169. 169 Bazán Landeros, “Entre la Construcción Discursiva,” 59.

170. 170 Toledo, “El Día Que Monsanto.”

171. 171 González, “Por Estrés.”

172. 172 Fonteyne et al., “Weed Management”; Wise, “Swimming against the Tide.”

173. 173 Wise, “Mexico to Ban Glyphosate.”

174. 174 Alexander and Sethi, “Mexico Is Phasing Out.”

175. 175 Goodman, “Corn Grower Leaders.”

176. 176 Alexander and Sethi, “Mexico Is Phasing Out.”

177. 177 Wise, “Distorting Markets.”

178. 178 Gillam, “Revealed.”

179. 179 Hernández-López, “GMO Corn in México,” 103.

180. 180 NCGA, “Mission.”

181. 181 Goodman, “Corn Grower Leaders.”

182. 182 USDA, “Statement by Secretary Vilsack.”

183. 183 Baden-Mayer, “Back to the Future.”

184. 184 Grist, “Germany to Ban.”

185. 185 CONACYT, “CONACYT Promueve Debate Internacional.”

186. 186 Government of Mexico, “Efectos Nocivos.”

187. 187 Wise, “Worlds Collide.”

188. 188 Bratspies, “Myths of Voluntary Compliance,” 607.

189. 189 CEMDA, Report, 39.

190. 190 Tomson, “Mexico Embeds GM Corn Ban.”

191. 191 White & Case, “The Presidential Decree.”

192. 192 United States of America, “Mexico: Measures.”

193. 193 Canada, “Third Party.”

194. 194 United Mexican States, “Mexico: Measures.”

195. 195 Timothy Wise from the Institute for Agriculture & Trade policy has been closely tracking the panel and posted the entire trove of insightful NGO submissions in Spanish and English at https://www.iatp.org/usmca-corn-case-submissions. The small producers union, ANEC, notes how the US document belittles the Mexican scientific establishment, while ignoring how corrupt US scientific “experts” sowed doubt for decades about the health harms of cigarettes. Other briefs emphasize Indigenous rights.

196. 196 United Mexican States “Mexico: Measures,” 18.

197. 197 World Trade Institute, “Dr. Christian Häberli.”

198. 198 White & Case, “The Presidential Decree.”

199. 199 Goodman, “Mexico.”

200. 200 CEMDA, Report.

201. 201 Mercer and Perales, “Evolutionary Response”; Hernández Rodríguez, “Seed Sovereignty,” 991.

202. 202 Nadal, Corn in NAFTA; Galvan-Miyoshi, Walker, and Warf, “Land Change Regimes”; Espinosa A., “La Guerra de la Tortilla.”

203. 203 Bellon et al., “Beyond Subsistence.”

204. 204 Appendini and Quijada, “Consumption Strategies.”

205. 205 Wise, “Stop Cheapening.”

206. 206 Acedo, “Mexico’s GMO Corn Ban.”

207. 207 González-Ortega et al., “Pervasive Presence.”

208. 208 Wise, Eating Tomorrow, 198.

209. 209 Fox and Haight, Subsidizing Inequality, 14; Wise, “Stop Cheapening.”

210. 210 Wise, Eating Tomorrow, 199.

211. 211 Bellon et al., “Beyond Subsistence.”

212. 212 Swanson, “Mexico.”

213. 213 Ribeiro, Maíz, 142.

214. 214 Suryanarayanan and Beilin, “Milpa-Melipona-Maya.”

215. 215 Wainwright and Mercer, “The Dilemma of Decontamination”; Seay-Fleming, “‘Biotechnologizing’?”; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Kinchy, Seeds, Science, and Struggle; Ureta et al., “A Data Mining Approach.”

216. 216 Acedo, “Mexico Celebrates.”

217. 217 Antal, Baker, and Verschoor, Maize and Biosecurity.

218. 218 Ribeiro, Maíz, 39.

219. 219 Ribeiro, “The Day the Sun Dies,” 6–7.

220. 220 Alexander and Sethi, “Mexico Is Phasing Out.”