▷ Transgenic Corn and Intransigence

Published: 01/24/2015 - Updated: 01/24/2015

Tortillas (previously made with natural and completely organic corn) are one of the most popular foods in Mexican cooking. They are used to create a large variety of dishes and they are perfect accompaniments for dinnertime, lunchtime, or breakfast. However, the tortillas that were previously made by hand by country folk are not prepared with a type of completely artificial corn, which leaves everything to be desired.

Transgenic corn has been artificially injected with biological characteristics from other species, either plant, animal, or bacterial, in an attempt to give the corn unique capabilities, like insecticide or herbicide resistance. This means that the plant would have the ability to kill insects or plagues that attack it, and its seeds, on the other hand, will not retain their natural reproductive capacity without certain chemicals.

Therefore, corn and transgenic products are an unnatural variety that is cultivated and created in a completely artificial fashion. These products currently have undesirable properties or consequences for consumers, like allergies to added chemicals and antibiotic resistance.

In addition to this, transgenic products are creating quite a bit of environmental damage because their modifications change pollination in other native corn plants.

Why transgenic corn?

This type of corn was created by international companies that were interested in exorbitant financial earnings, with a very low investments and costs. That’s why new corn varieties are designed to resist indiscriminate consumption of insecticides and herbicides that these same companies produce, like Monsanto, Novartis, Du Pont, and others. Herbicide resistance allows transgenic corn to be watered several times with chemicals and toxins, without killing the plant. The plant even becomes resistant to a fairly high toxicity or poison level.

A thousand years ago, our ancestors were in charge of learning how to domesticate and cultivate corn, to the point that this food actually became one of the primary foods in Mexico. The company Monsanto has risked more than 59 corn varieties (blue, white, yellow corn, etc.), and Mexican farmers and producers will have to pay the “royalty” for the patented grain and millionaire fines, if a neighbor sowing organic seeds had become contaminated by transgenic corn pollen, which could reach the plant either through insects, wind, or seed exchange for starting a new crop.

Revised by: Dra. Loredana Lunadei on 01/24/2015