Mexico takes a stand against US Big Ag and GMO corn to protect their native varieties of Mexican corn

Back in 2014 when my online food store, Healthy Traditions, started testing all of our USDA certified organic grains for the presence of the herbicide glyphosate, which is used in RoundUp and is the world’s most-used herbicide, we were shocked to find out that even our USDA certified organic grains were almost all contaminated with glyphosate, even though they were “certified organic.”

We found out that the NOP (National Organics Program) allowed for small amounts of pesticides and herbicides in certified organic products, and so we stopped buying grains based on organic status, and also stopped “certifying” our own products as “organic,” since it now has almost no meaning anymore. Big Food wanted in on the booming organic grocery business, and they have successfully watered down U.S. organic standards over the past decade or so.

Instead, we started testing all of the products we wanted to purchase for the presence of glyphosate, and if we carried a product that had a GMO equivalent in the marketplace, we also tested for the presence of GMO DNA.

It started a very long process for us to find grains that were not contaminated, and in most cases, we had to look outside the U.S. to find such grains that tested clean.

Corn was, by far, the hardest product to source that tested clean of GMO DNA, and we even purchased certified organic corn products off the shelves of stores like Whole Foods, that were also GMO “verified,” and all the samples we tested came back positive for genetically modified DNA.

We were unable to find a single supplier of organic corn in the U.S. who had corn that tested clean.

We finally found a supplier down in Central Mexico, in a Province that at that time had banned the planting of U.S. GMO corn, that finally tested clean of GMO DNA, and we have been selling corn from that region ever since, for almost 10 years now.

Now, Mexico has decided to ban U.S. GMO corn nationwide, as well as ban the use of glyphosate, and the U.S. and Canada are trying to bully Mexico into continuing to import GMO corn.

Aljazeera recently published an excellent analysis of this “corn war” between the U.S. and Mexico.