What Mexico’s ban on American GMO corn means

Nov 10, 2022

Despite losing a large chunk of its Mexico corn exports, the economic impact on US farmers may not be too severe.

By Andrew Joseph, Farms.com; Photo by Phoenix Han on Unsplash

Mexico plans to phase out imports of US-grown GMO corn and the herbicide glyphosate by 2024.

This isn’t new news, but it will impact the US going forward.

It was revealed in 2020 by the President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, that part of the reasoning being that the GMO seeds could contaminate the heritage varieties native to Mexico. Oh, and then there are its researchers pointing out that glyphosate has some adverse effects.

Mexico is not shutting the door on US corn, stating that it will seek direct agreements with farmers in the US, Argentina, and Brazil to provide it with non-GMO yellow corn instead.

With the inclusion of possible agreements with both Brazil and Argentina cutting into corn sales, the US is a bit worried.

After China and its 20 percent of all US corn exports, Mexico is number two.

Mexico imports about 33 percent of its corn needs—16mmt (646 million bushels) just for its livestock needs.

As well, a lot of that US corn was being used to feed Mexico’s less fortunate people.

The US believes that Mexico’s decision potentially violates the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, formerly NAFTA) free trade obligations—and may have future reprocutions for any and all future trades between them.

For the US, it could recoup its economic loss in GMO corn by exporting it to China, but with trade relations low—pick a reason—China may look elsewhere.

The US could possibly grind its now excess GMO corn and use a higher blend of alcohol, but that’s only been hypothesized and is not a current reality.

Of course, all of this pondering may be academic.

Drought conditions in the US that are expected to continue over the next three years until the end of 2025—it’s all part of the 89-year drought cycle.

Because of the expected drought conditions, there is little expectation of farmers overproducing corn, meaning whatever economic impact the US will feel by losing Mexico as a customer for its GMO corn, it will not be severe.

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.