Mexico City, Mexico
February 23, 2005
Karla Peregrina and Javier Crúz
SciDev.Net
Mexico has
passed legislation that authorises the planting and selling
genetically modified (GM) crops. The Mexican congress's upper
house (the Senate), passed the law on 15 February, with 87 votes
in favour, 16 against and 6 abstentions.
Since it was
proposed, the law has created considerable debate in Mexico and
has practically split the country's scientific community in two.
The Senate
drafted the law in April 2003 with input from the Mexican
Academy of Sciences (AMC), the country's leading science
organisation. However, some academy members were critical of the
process and the academy's involvement.
"Any
omissions we may have made in selecting the committee which
represented the academy before Congress were without malice,"
said the academy's president, Octavio Paredes, in an interview
with SciDev.Net. "At the time I did not sense any serious
difference of opinion from within the academy."
René Drucker,
coordinator of scientific research at Mexico's National
University (UNAM), and former president of the AMC, disagrees.
"[The law]
will bring no benefits to our country in the future," wrote
Drucker in a letter to La Jornada last year following the
law's approval by Mexico's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies.
Another
letter to the same newspaper mocked the law, suggesting it
should be named the "Law of Genetic Colonisation for the 21st
Century". It was sent by Ignacio Chapela, the US-based Mexican
biologist who first claimed that genes from other species had
entered wild maize in Mexico (see
GM maize found 'contaminating' wild strains).
Chapela's
letter said the law served the interests of Mexico's elite,
"which in turn represents economic and political interests from
within and outside the country".
The law was
also criticised by other researchers who oppose the import,
distribution, release and consumption of genetically modified
organisms in Mexico. Seventy researchers signed a full-page
statement in the 8 December edition of La Jornada that
said it was regrettable that the recommendations of a lengthy
study by the Environment Cooperation Commission for North
America had been ignored.
The study
said action should be taken to reduce the risk of foreign genes
spreading and to conserve the biodiversity of maize varieties in
Mexico (see
Warning issued on GM maize imported to Mexico).
Mexico's
senators did, however, seek the advice of the scientists before
drafting the law. Francisco Bolivar Zapata, another former AMC
president and a senior researcher at UNAM's Biotechnology
Institute, says that the chair of the Senate's science and
technology commission, Rodimiro Amaya, explicitly asked the
Mexican Academy of Sciences for advice.
Bolivar adds
that the academy put together a group of 40 of experts "from all
areas of knowledge and from various institutions" to prepare a
draft of the biosecurity bill.
After three
months of work, a document titled Basis and recommendations
for a Mexican law on biosecurity of genetically modified
organisms was presented to the Senate, which then
incorporated the recommendations and approved the draft bill (in
April 2003) before sending it to be debated by the Chamber of
Deputies.
As well as
permitting planting and sale of GM crops, the law covers the
conservation of genetic resources, and calls for a special
protection regime — yet to be determined — for varieties of
maize native to Mexico, the crop's centre of diversity.
It also
requires all GM products to be labelled according to guidelines
to be issued by the Ministry of Health. |