Category Archives: trade

U.S. wins trade dispute, forces Mexico to end GM corn restrictions

by Jim Hodgson

A trade dispute panel has ruled against Mexico’s restrictions on the use of genetically modified (GM or genetically engineered) corn, siding with the United States in forcing Mexico to allow the use of GM corn for food. Canada backed the U.S. position. 

The decision, announced Friday afternoon, Dec. 21, is another demonstration of how free trade agreements are used to undermine policy options made in the public interest.

Mexico City’s La Jornada daily newspaper contains an excellent series of articles today about the consequences for Mexican agriculture of 30 years of free trade with the United States and Canada; climate change is another factor in the fall of production.

In Mexico, a coalition of 300 farming, Indigenous and environmental groups said the Mexican government should not modify its policy and called on civil society organizations to maintain their defense of native varieties of corn. 

The Sin Maíz no hay País (“Without Corn There is no Country”) group told La Jornada that the decision is designed “mostly to protect the interests of transnational corporations, instead of giving priority to the rights of the Mexican people or to sustainability of the environment.”

The trade panel, they added, was made up of three experts in international trade who were not “scientists or experts in public or environmental health” and had no “legitimacy or capacity to evaluate measures taken by a country that were intended to protect its population, preserve its biocultural richness and safeguard the genetic reservoir” of corn.

A La Jornada editorial said the administration of President Joe Biden “fought a legal battle against food sovereignty, health, biodiversity, and the right to an adequate diet for Mexicans—not to favour its citizens, but rather four giant global corporations and a handful of rich farmers.”

The Mexican government said it would comply with the decision though it maintains that the restrictions are in line with the principles of public health and the rights of Indigenous peoples, established in national legislation and in the international treaties to which it is a party. On Feb. 13, 2023, Mexico published a Presidential Decree that included stopping the use of GM white corn intended for use in traditional foods such as tortillas and stated Mexico’s intention to eventually replace all GM (yellow) corn in processed food.

The United States challenged Mexico’s restrictions under the Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement (referred to variously as USMCA or CUSMA) as being a disguised trade restriction. The restrictions were first announced by then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the end of 2020, and revised in 2023.

“This trade panel decision runs counter to a national consensus in Mexico on the threat of GM corn to Mexico’s food sovereignty,” said Cathy Holtslander of the National Farmers Union (NFU) in Canada. “The people of Mexico have the right to protect their unique relationship with corn.”

Holtslander’s comments are included in a Dec. 23 joint news release from the NFU, the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN), the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Trade Justice Group of the Northumberland Chapter of the Council of Canadians.

“Canada joined the US challenge to force open an unwilling market to genetically modified corn,” said Lucy Sharratt of CBAN.

“This outcome demonstrates how free trade agreements can be used to overthrow democratic decisions for corporate interests,” said the joint news release.

The 117-page decision did not assess the scientific evidence on GM corn provided by Mexico but concluded that Mexico did not conduct a risk assessment that conforms to the terms of the trade agreement. “The Panel recommends that Mexico bring its Measures into conformity with its USMCA obligations under Chapters 2 and 9 of the USMCA. The Panel accepts that Mexico is seeking to address genuine concerns in good faith, and suggests that such concerns be channeled into an appropriate risk assessment process, measures based on scientific principles, and in dialogue among all USMCA Parties to facilitate a constructive path forward.”

“Mexico’s GM corn policy was clearly meant to achieve several goals at once, such as supporting biodiversity, cultural diversity, food sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, public health and economic development,” said Stuart Trew, senior researcher with the CCPA. “It is disingenuous for the trade panel to claim the policy is a ‘disguised restriction on trade’ simply because it may affect imports of U.S. or Canadian corn. But doing so conveniently allowed the panel to sidestep Mexico’s strong defence of the GM corn restrictions based on environmental and Indigenous Peoples’ rights exceptions in CUSMA.” 

Canada does not export any corn to Mexico. In explaining its decision to back the U.S. complaint, the government of Canada stated that, to secure a future for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Canada and to prevent trade disruptions due to illegal GMO contamination, product developers need access to all markets.

Mexico is regarded as the birthplace of modern corn. It will continue to prohibit planting of GM corn because it may contaminate native strains of the grain. 

Mexico is the top foreign buyer of U.S.-grown yellow corn, nearly all of which is genetically modified. Half of the corn consumed in Mexico today is imported from the United States. The imports are mostly of “yellow corn,” used for animal feed and industrial food production. “White corn” produced in Mexico is used for human consumption.

Mexico has more than 60 native varieties of corn (known as landraces), coming in a variety of colours and with distinct flavours.

In April 2024, CCPA provided an excellent background analysis of the GM corn dispute.

CBAN has joined with US and Mexican groups to issue a new call to action: Groups and individuals in Canada, the US and Mexico are asked to sign a trinational statement in solidarity.

After grief, the resistance begins

by Jim Hodgson

I feel some relief this morning by two newsletters from U.S. activists that arrived in my email.

One is from “Stop The Coup 2025,” a campaign to fight Project 2025 (the Republicans’ plan for the next Trump administration). It has a toolkit for community organizers that includes a section, “Spotlight on Risk Preparedness/Criminalization/Underground Survival Tips.” It discusses the importance of organizations and individuals taking steps now to prepare and assess their vulnerability to Project 2025’s agenda and learning from LGBTQIA+ activists in other places who have been forced to live and organize under the radar due to state-sanctioned criminalization.

Here’s a bit more information about Project 2025:

Project 2025 has a radical anti-democracy, anti-diversity, anti-gender agenda to:

  • systematically dismantle the federal government – a soft coup
  • give the next Republican president new “supreme powers” – an autocracy
  • use Executive Orders to “legally” reverse many of our civil rights
  • use the military to help clamp down on domestic dissent
  • criminalize & erase gender & LGBTQIA+ identity from government protection
  • reverse racial equality, attack diversity, and reverse environmental gains
  • replace secular education with Christian theocracy and a pro-life agenda
  • recruit and train 20,000 conservatives for government jobs 
  • Use “Schedule F” to remove 50,000 civil servants 
  • Require government “Loyalty Pledges” to an extremist right-wing agenda 
  • Reverse historic US defense policy of deterrence to offense 
  • Require US foreign policy, USAID to align with pro-life agenda 
  • LAUNCH THEIR 180-DAY ADMINISTRATION TAKEOVER ON January 20, 2025

The other newsletter that brought hope to my inbox today came from Codepink, the U.S. network of feminist peace activists. I’ve worked with them in the past to counter the harm caused by U.S. sanctions in Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere, and some of my colleagues have worked with them for peace in the Korean peninsula and the Middle East. Part of the message today:

We don’t want to waste your time with platitudes about how everything will be okay or even talk about the breakdown of the election. We think it’s more useful to go off what we know for certain now: Donald Trump is going to be president in January. 

But, a majority of Americans oppose U.S. support for Israel, and don’t want their tax dollars funding weapons that murder innocent people and destroy the earth. A greater majority of Americans oppose the U.S. starting new wars. It’s okay to feel deflated and discouraged, but don’t forget that the people are on our side – all we have to do is reach them.  

We will continue to do what we have always done: educate by exposing horrific violence carried out by those in power, activate a movement for peace, and cultivate local communities that represent the world we want to live in. Solidarity is our best friend. Finding new and creative ways to scratch at power is our path forward.

Political signs of the times at a rest stop near Junction, Texas.

Last time, and this time: concern for rights of refugees

Back in 2016, I was in Antofagasta, Chile, when I learned that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton and won the U.S. election. The news was unexpected, just like now. 

I was in Chile’s far north to meet and show solidarity with Chilean Methodists who were working with migrants who had come from Colombia and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Haiti. 

Indeed, a great deal of my personal and professional life has been devoted to work with refugees and other people who are forced to flee their homelands because of various political, economic and environmental causes. 

Caravans of migrants from many countries continue to cross Chiapas on their way north, holding out hope that they might score a formal U.S. refugee application before January 20 when Trump, who promises mass deportations, will take power. (Images: La Jornada, Mexico). 

Now I am in north-western Chiapas, having crossed in recent weeks several of the “red states” where support for Trump is strong.

In the wake of the election, pundits point out that Trump weaponized ‘fake news.’ He played to machismo and racists and to people who haven’t a clue what being Trans even means. That he won over a smart, articulate, experienced woman of colour after being convicted of crimes and successfully sued for sexual assault is an indictment of U.S. democracy.

Some, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, point as well to the Democratic Party establishment which again defended the status quo. “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

As ever, don’t expect the Democratic Party to save us. Now is the time for grassroots action.

For Natasha Lennard, writing in The Intercept, the answer is radical action from the grassroots: 

“Far-right policies and parties tend to win the day when so-called centrists take up conservative platforms to purportedly capture disaffected white voters and thus keep the far-right at bay; the upshot is treating conservative nationalism as the fulcrum of all politics. This is what the Harris campaign did, particularly when it came to immigration. At best, as with Britain’s currently ruling Labour Party, the Tories might have lost, but right-wing politics have been reconfigured as the normalized center.”

Venezuelans head to the polls July 28 under shadow of sanctions

President Nicolás Maduro (left) is challenged by retired diplomat Edmundo González. (TeleSUR graphic)

by Jim Hodgson

Just over a week from now, Venezuelans will again head to the polls. For the election in 2018, I was there as an observer. This time, I’m watching with concern but from a distance as Venezuelans vote under the pressure of U.S., European and Canadian sanctions that have made living conditions worse for most people.

I got involved with Venezuela soon after the election of Hugo Chávez in December 1998. Those of us concerned about the expansion of corporate-driven “free trade” across the Americas had created the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), a coalition of networks that included Common Frontiers Canada, the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, Brazil’s Network for Peoples Integration and the U.S. Alliance for Responsible Trade.

At a meeting in Toronto in November 1999 with some of the region’s trade ministers, we found we had a new ally. Venezuela’s trade minister won applause when she said that concern for the rights of the poor needed to be central in trade talks and public policy.

The trade ministers, nevertheless, forged ahead with plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).When their heads of government gathered in Quebec City in 2001, President Chávez was the one participant who refused to endorse the timetable for FTAA by 2005. By 2005, spurred by pressure from social movements, Chávez and other new leaders were able to defeat the FTAA.

Between 2004 and 2019, I visited Venezuela about a half-dozen times. I observed the 2004 recall referendum and the 2018 presidential election. With encouragement from faith-based organizations in Cuba and Colombia, I joined ecumenical encounters in 2004, 2006 and 2019, and attended the Americas Social Forum in Caracas in 2006.

Inside Venezuela, opposition to Chávez and to his successor Nicolás Maduro has been unrelenting. But their coup in 2002 failed. Their recall referendum in 2004 failed. Their attempt in 2019, in alliance with Canada’s then-foreign minister Chrystia Freeland and the “Lima Group,” to impose an interim head of a past national assembly, Juan Guaidó, as president failed—along with three coup attempts and then a botched invasion.

The May 2018 elections followed months of internationally-sponsored negotiations in the Dominican Republic between the government and opposition that, by February that year, achieved an agreement. But at the last minute, part of the opposition movement said no: other parties, notably that of Henri Falcón, did participate. Our Canadian delegation saw the May election as free and fair. Maduro won. I wrote about our experience in a series of articles for rabble.ca. 

After the vote, the pressure continued: the Lima Group’s Guaidó gambit; sanctions strengthened again in order to force regime change; and assets of the state oil company, PDVSA, and its U.S. subsidiary, CITGO, were blocked or seized, as were gold reserves held in London. Humanitarian aid became heavily politicized, even blocking access to vaccines during the Covid pandemic. In those circumstances, migration became a normal response. (International organizations set the number of Venezuelan who have left over the past dozen years above 7 million. The government says their figure is about 2.5 million and that of those, about 1.2 million returned between 2020 and 2023—almost half of them with government support.)

A deep dive into both mainstream media and alternative media (Pressenza, Orinoco Tribune, Venezuelanalysis, TeleSUR, among others, is necessary to get a reasonable sense of what is happening in this election. The far-right may reject official results, much as Trump did in the United States in 2020.

The July 28 vote

This election takes place while Venezuelans suffer under more than 930 “unilateral coercive measures”—sanctions—imposed by the United States, Canada and their European allies. “These should be elections without imperial sanctions,” argued the Mexican philosopher Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez recently. But that is not what is happening.

Early in 2023, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said sanctions on Venezuela “have exacerbated the economic crisis and hindered human rights,” and called for the measures to be lifted. Türk visited Venezuela in January 2023. His comments reflected similar remarks made two years earlier by Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights. She said that the Venezuelan “government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on one per cent of its pre-sanctions income.”

Again this time, complex international negotiations unfolded to produce a basis for the election, finally established through the Barbados Accords. The document was signed in October 2023 by the Maduro government and an alliance of opposition parties known as the Unitary Platform.

The leading opposition candidate is retired diplomat Edmundo González. He is regarded as a stand-in for María Corina Machado whose candidacy was blocked because of her involvement in organizing violent street protests (sometimes called guarimbas) between 2014 and 2018, and for demanding sanctions. González and another far-right candidate, Enrique Márquez, refused to sign a declaration requested by the Electoral Authority promising they would respect the elections results and refrain from violence in its aftermath.

In the campaign, Maduro and his allies report a number of gains made over the past decade with regard to child care, medical attention, job-training and education. More recently, the inflation rate has dropped to 7.8 per cent, and that the GDP is up by seven per cent. The government has sought ways to diversify the resource-dependent economy and increase national production.

Throughout these 25 years, the government has expanded access to health care, education, housing, public transit, food and pensions through misiones—popular campaigns that use oil revenue for public benefit. 

A recent example is the “Great Mission Return to the Homeland” (Vuelta a la Patria). “We want to ensure that the vast majority of those who have not returned come here, with their family, with their friends,” said Maduro. Pointing to foreign sanctions as the principal cause of emigration, he added that it is his desire to “heal this wound” that the departure of millions of people caused , inviting them to return and to invest and enjoy their country.

It’s not that there are no legitimate criticisms to be made of the government. One might wish, for example, that much more had been done long ago to reduce criminal violence, advance LGBTQIA+ rights,* protect the country’s ecology, reduce dependence on oil revenue, and stimulate food production. If only such criticism could be made in an atmosphere of civil debate without threats to overthrow the government or to foment violence.

Since the 1970s in Latin America, the left in power has tried to govern according to the rules of liberal democracy, perhaps without sufficient regard for the roles of money, foreign interference and private media conglomerates. When the poor win power and actually have a shot at changing the rules of politics and economics—at transforming the structures that made them poor—what may they do to hold on? 

“It is not just any election. It is an election that defines the future,” said former vice-president Jorge Arreaza recently. In the face of strong external and internal opposition, Venezuelans sought to transform democracy so that they could continue re-inventing Latin American politics and economics in ways that benefit most people, not just the rich and not the corporations.

Will they have a chance to continue the effort? Or must they rebuild the social movements and networks necessary for a new attempt that may be decades away?

* Regarding LGBTQIA+ rights. In 2016, Venezuela’s Supreme Court declared that the state will provide protection without distinction to all families, including to children born into same-sex families. In the same year, Venezuela’s Public Ministry announced that transgender people may request a new identity card according to their gender identity.

Recent Pride celebrations are reported in the Orinoco Tribune, with some critical comments:

Venezuela is among the few countries in Latin America that have not legalized marriage equality and, unfortunately, a marriage equality bill has been languishing for nearly a decade in the Venezuelan National Assembly.

Recently, some Chavista politicians have been using socially conservative slogans that replicate US conservative approach towards the LGBTQ+ community and promoting so-called “family and traditional values” against what they call the “perversion” of “Western LGBTQ+ values.”

The ruling PSUV has failed to achieve adequate protections for the LGBTQ+ community which is both a failure of its responsibility to the nation and a national security vulnerability that is being exploited by the imperialists.