Disrupting Maize mobilizes contemporary theoretical resources in a critical examination of the cultural politics at work in the Mexican defence of maize. From such an examination ‘biotechnological disruption’ emerges provocatively as constitutive of Mexican nationalism rather than externally imposed to it by corporate players. Furthermore, it is provocatively conceptualized as a gift, that is, as the promise of a more democratic Mexico.
Disrupting Maize mobilizes contemporary theoretical resources in a critical examination of the cultural politics at work in the Mexican defence of maize. From such an examination ‘biotechnological disruption’ emerges provocatively as constitutive of Mexican nationalism rather than externally imposed to it by corporate players. Furthermore, it is provocatively conceptualized as a gift, that is, as the promise of a more democratic Mexico.
Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico
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Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico
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Overview
Disrupting Maize mobilizes contemporary theoretical resources in a critical examination of the cultural politics at work in the Mexican defence of maize. From such an examination ‘biotechnological disruption’ emerges provocatively as constitutive of Mexican nationalism rather than externally imposed to it by corporate players. Furthermore, it is provocatively conceptualized as a gift, that is, as the promise of a more democratic Mexico.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783486083 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2016 |
| Series: | Disruptions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 218 |
| File size: | 608 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Disrupting Maize
Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico
By Gabriela Méndez Cota
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Gabriela Méndez CotaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-608-3
CHAPTER 1
Mexican Maize
A Biotechnological Story
WHAT KIND OF BIOTECHNOLOGY?
In 1926 Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov established that maize's center of origin and genetic diversity is located in Mesoamerica, somewhere between southern Mexico and Guatemala. A center of origin is the geographical area where a group of organisms, either domesticated or wild, first developed their distinctive properties. Whereas Vavilov's definition of a center of origin and the exact time and location of the origin of maize continue to be a matter of scientific debate, consensus has been established regarding the fact that ancient Mesoamerican farmers achieved maize through the domestication of a wild grass called teosinte (Z. mays parviglumis). By contrast with teosinte, maize produces abundant, large and nutritious kernels that can be stored for long periods. This characteristic is the result of human selection, and it would be lost without human maintenance because the seeds of maize grow tightly packed together in the ear and are prevented by the husk from dispersing into the air. After each harvest, farmers must save and replant some seeds if they want to grow more and better maize in the next season. Over time, farmers combine seeds from different plants and produce virtually endless varieties of maize. It is now universally recognized that maize biodiversity originated from "a prolonged effort that required the interest and the passion of thousands of anonymous agricultural experimenters over dozens of generations." It is not so well known that it took as much interest and passion from the last two generations of social scientists to frame maize agriculture as a sophisticated kind of biotechnology.
In 1981, Guy Rozat, a French sociologist who had recently arrived in Mexico, published a polemical essay titled "The Western Redeemer and His Technical Fantasies." In it, he denounced that most Mexican academic accounts had so far depicted pre-Columbian societies as fundamentally lacking technical skills and achievements. Among their typical assumptions had been the notion that pre-Columbian technology was structurally impossible due to an alleged unfamiliarity with the wheel and a failure to cast iron weapons. As he argued that both assertions were historically inaccurate and indeed absurd, Rozat highlighted maize agriculture among other examples of pre-Columbian technology:
Maize is a Mesoamerican "invention," everybody knows this very well, in the sense that it does not appear spontaneously in nature and human care is needed so that the ridiculously small wild grass teosinte can turn into that biological monster that is the corn on the cob. The pre-Columbians achieved this invention as a kind of "social security" plant, and, the problem for these communities — who certainly did not participate in the curse of labor — presented itself thus: we need a plant that requires little labor (both in land preparation and throughout growing), that gives high yield, that can adapt to many climates and to every type of soil and, finally, that produces a fruit that can be stored for a long time and be prepared in various ways. The result of their centuries-long investigation is maize, a plant that then and now has demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to adapt to every soil and latitude; endowed with a multi-factor plasticity which has permitted nearly every local community, from Nicaragua to Labrador, to possess its own varieties of maize adapted to their own climatological and soil conditions.
Maize agriculture is a technological practice, Rozat insisted passionately, but not in the modern European sense of dominating, exploiting or enslaving Nature in the service of Man. This is merely the fantasy of "the Western redeemer," a colonial phantom that had so far prevented Mexican historians and anthropologists from understanding and appreciating the technological skills and achievements of their pre-Columbian ancestors. Relatively unusual in Mexican academic discourse before the 1980s, Rozat's critique of epistemic colonialism has come to be widely shared throughout the world, inside and outside the university, in light of the economic, social and environmental disasters wrought by neoliberal globalization. His essay appeared only one year before Mexico defaulted on its international loan payments and initiated a "structural adjustment" of its state apparatus. Everything that happened and continues to happen as a consequence of such an adjustment constitutes the immediate backdrop of the contemporary valorization of pre-Columbian techniques, inventions and knowledges. In a time of enforced austerity, flexibilization and individualization, the search for wiser worldviews and more sensible technological paradigms has become less a matter of exoticizing imagination than of planetary survival.
In Mesoamerica, maize has been cultivated for millennia according to the principles of the milpa, a method of mixed cropping that operates cyclically with minimum labor and input requirements. In the traditional milpa, maize grows not on its own but rather in close association with beans, squash and other crops. Thus, the milpa system is best described as a living complex that hosts multiple organisms, including edible weeds and useful insects. The reciprocal interaction between all these organisms makes the milpa strong against pest attacks and effectively prevents erosion of the soil. Therefore, rather than maize as an individual plant, a whole outlook and strategy premised on adaptation to a dynamic environment with unpredictable weather and poor soil conditions has gone underappreciated in Mesoamerican biotechnology. Milpa economy is based on optimal use of resources, energy and space inside and between plots. Farmers cultivate one to five milpas and tend them sequentially or simultaneously. Such a strategy aims at securing the harvest. In addition, they combine farming with other activities such as stockbreeding, forestry, hunting, apiculture and collection of edible, medicinal and ornamental plants. In Rozat's interpretation the highest virtue of maize within this technological framework was that it allowed Mesoamericans to stay relatively free from "the curse of labor" without ever going hungry. Without complex machinery, too much space or indeed too much work, Mesoamerican milpas were able to support large populations who enjoyed a more diverse and nutritious diet than most Europeans could hope for at the time of the conquest. Colonizers, however, would not understand and, above all, would not tolerate the adaptive technological rationality of Mesoamerican societies, since they brought with them their own technological fantasies and projects. According to American food writer Betty Fussell, European colonizers brought the idea of a closed and fixed system governed by principles of abstract equivalence. This mind-set was carried by the English translation of maize into "corn," which signified grain of all kinds in the colonial world. Reflecting on the overall consequences of this translation, Fussell concludes, "The greatest difference between corn and maize ... lies in the symbolic freight that each word carries. If north of Mexico, European immigrants built an industrial kingdom and a global empire on the economic power of corn, in Mesoamerica the Olmec a thousand years before Christ founded a complete universe — a language, calendar, mythos, and cosmos — on the symbolic power of maize. If the one culture diminished a staple food to merchandise, the other sanctified it as divine."
Fussell's distinction between maize and corn is well grounded in the cultural history of Mesoamerican societies. The Olmec, a civilization that flourished between 1500 and 300 BC alongside the Gulf of Mexico, gave maize three characteristic functions that would endure throughout successive Mesoamerican cultures. Maize symbolized fertility and the substance of human beings, connected human beings with the cosmos and gave symbolic legitimation to political power. The Mayan saga Popol Vuh famously recounts that the gods first tried to create human beings with wood and soil, but the creatures resulting from those experiments could not think or feel — that is, they could not remember their creators. For this reason they were destroyed, and human beings were only born when the gods, after patient and careful deliberation, decided to use maize to make their flesh and blood. Later on maize was called Tlaolli, and it was also sometimes referred to as tonacayo, which means "our sustenance." According to early colonial records, the Aztec god Cintéotl generated the different crops out of his (human) body parts, with maize growing out of his nails. The harvest of maize cobs was understood as a beheading of Cintéotl, whose life, like that of maize, was governed by cyclical death and resurrection. Aztec warriors and priests based their theocratic hegemony on claiming privileged access to the highest virtue of the god of maize — namely, that of resurrection. It was no accident that the cob, the most popular figure for representing the god of maize, lent its shape to both agricultural tools and weapons of war. Yet a Promethean-like figure named Quetzalcóatl took maize as a more democratic gift for human beings, so that they could survive and flourish through its cultivation.
Mesoamerican societies undeniably "sanctified" maize, and yet Fussell's distinction between maize and corn tends to lock them in the modern epistemic framework that starkly separates the cultural from the economic sphere, religious from rational thinking and agricultural wisdom from successful agribusiness. Such dichotomies have played a role in the long-standing academic denial of the technological skills and achievements of pre-Columbian societies and have contributed to the fact that Mesoamerican agriculture qua biotechnological practice has been thought marginally in comparison with maize as a cultural trait, a religious symbol or an ethnic food. Nevertheless, they constitute a useful entry point into current debates around biotechnology, food and agriculture at a time when the global penetration of capitalism threatens definitively to wash away, like rising sea levels, all practical wisdoms, symbolic resistances and sacred domains. Whatever has been left of milpa agriculture after five centuries of colonial and modern acculturation is now undergoing both scientific revision and political reimagination. In this conjuncture, the practice of maize agriculture south of the North American border no longer appears as an atavistic remnant of lost civilizations. Instead, it appears as a contemporaneous struggle of transnational dimensions against the global empire of corn.
Approximately one-fourth of the world's population currently depends on direct consumption of corn, while more than half of the global corn harvest goes into animal feed. By consuming meat, milk and eggs, and other processed foods, wealthy populations consume many times more corn than people, such as Mexicans, whose diet is based on direct consumption of it. In addition, corn is being increasingly used as a source of industrial inputs and of biofuel, a controversial alternative to fossil fuels. This industrial kingdom, as Fussell calls it, was made possible by a displacement of the adaptive kind of biotechnology practiced by Mesoamerican societies among many other small-scale societies around the world. It was made possible by the scientification and globalization of the Western understanding of agriculture as "planting fields with crops to feed flocks to supply fields with manure for more crops." Toward the end of the nineteenth century, newly trained agronomists in the United States devoted themselves to designing fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds with the goal of maximizing yields. Public institutions were created to coordinate agricultural production with trade policy. Oriented toward the conquest of foreign markets, agricultural production was made to depend on mechanization, agrochemicals and the constant replacement of improved crop varieties. In the second half of the twentieth century, it became evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere led to soil erosion, water pollution and numerous other serious damages, such as the loss of plant and animal species, the destruction of natural pest-control mechanisms, the consequent proliferation of new pests and "super weeds" and global warming. In recent years, the efficiency of commercial inputs has decreased, and the yields of key crops have in some places been leveling off. Mainstream agroscientists believe that this is happening because the maximum yield potential of current varieties is being approached, and therefore genetic engineering must be applied to the task of redesigning crops.
Based on a generative partnership of molecular biology and information technologies, genetic engineering produces commodities designed to further the expansion of a corporate-controlled global food system, one seen as threatening to displace local agricultural knowledges and practices. As Melinda Cooper points out, contemporary biotechnology is "inseparable from the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant political philosophy of our time." While neoliberalism makes capitalism into "the organizing and regulative principle of the state and society," biotechnology inserts neoliberalism into the core of life itself, harnessing for that purpose "the specific power of life activity of cells, molecules, and genes." By inserting bacterial genes into a higher organism such as a maize plant, genetic engineers have created transgenic maize, a new kind of hybrid organism that would have been impossible to create through conventional breeding methods. The most common variety of transgenic maize has been engineered to produce a protein (Cry) that was originally isolated from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and is lethal to many insects that damage crops specifically in the United States.
Most transgenic maize is engineered by means of a physical technique called bioballistics, which involves the use of gold or tungsten bullets covered with transgenic sequences to cut through the protective membranes of cells. Since the site of cutting is itself random and must be repaired by the organism, the technique poses a risk of "illegitimate recombination" in the organism's genome. Commercial transgenic seeds rarely produce weird plant behavior only because companies select a posteriori the best outcomes of transgenesis and then conventionally generate "pure lines." Yet the risk of "illegitimate recombination" remains within the plant and is increased by the use of promoting sequences, which regulate the expression of transgenes. 35S from the cauliflower virus is a widely used promoting sequence that stimulates transgene expression in all types of tissues throughout the whole development of plants. Some scientists argue that 35S is able to behave autonomously and activate genes other than the desired ones. Moreover, 35S has been identified as a recombinant hot spot, which increases the chances that its behavior causes genomic instability. Such a risk is qualitatively different from anything entailed by earlier forms of biotechnology and springs from the fact that scientists do not yet understand the mechanisms through which organisms are able to maintain their genomic integrity — that is, their species boundaries.
Scientists define "gene flow" as the incorporation of genes from one population into the gene pool of another population. Gene flow means that once transgenic plants are released into the environment, it is possible for transgenes to insert themselves into non-transgenic organisms. This would be a natural phenomenon as in cases of spontaneous hybridization, when the pollen of a plant, carried by an insect or the wind, fertilizes another plant, resulting in a hybrid organism. Whereas some crops only hybridize with members of the same species, others can hybridize with members of other species. Mexican scientists cite evidence that cross-species hybridization has stimulated, at least in the cases of sorghum and radish, the evolution of more persistent and invasive weeds and has increased the risk of extinction by hybridization. In Mexico, the risks of spontaneous hybridization of transgenic and nontransgenic plants are higher than in the United States due to the existence of biodiversity and wild relatives. As a center of origin and diversification, Mexico hosts the wild relatives of maize, which spontaneously hybridize with maize at a rate of 50 percent. In other words, Mexican maize is a "very promiscuous" plant living in a context where cross-pollination is the rule. Moreover, the toxicity of transgenic plants, which targets pests, can also impact nontarget organisms, such as beneficial insects, pollinators and worms that preserve soil nutrients. Other varieties of transgenic maize that are tolerant of herbicides such as glyphosate are incompatible with milpa agriculture because glyphosate attacks all plants. Moreover, if herbicide-tolerant transgenes reach the genome of teocintle, the wild relative of maize that is abundant in Mexico, herbicide-tolerant weeds may result.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Disrupting Maize by Gabriela Méndez Cota. Copyright © 2016 Gabriela Méndez Cota. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements / Introduction / 1. Mexican Maize: A Biotechnological Story / 2. Colonial Legacies, Constitutive Disruptions / 3. Resisting Technoscience: The Nationalist Trap / 4. The People of Maize and the Technoscience of Culture / 5. The Gift of Biotechnological Disruption / Index,