19 January 2011 | News | Food Sovereignty
Food or Fuel?
Mexican MPs could lift ban on ethanol production from corn
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The Mexican parliament is getting ready to vote a bill that would lift the national ban on the use of corn to produce agrofuels, even though corn is a staple in the Mexican diet, which price has increased in the recent days.
The bill was introduced two years ago by former senator and current governor of the State of Sinaloa, Mario Lopez Valdez, and it has had the support of all the Mexican political parties. However, the steady increase of the price of the corn tortilla in December made the national senators of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to withdraw support for the measure, which delayed its approval.
The current law bans the use of corn for agrofuel production if it is not enough to meet the national food demand. The bill seeks to lift this ban by considering the corn demand regionally instead of at a national level. In this way the states with corn surplus can destine it to agrofuel production.
“It is outrageous that this only aims to make the big producers wealthy. 20% of the Mexican population lives in extreme poverty and 45% of food is imported, so it is insane that they want to produce ethanol out of staples”, said the executive director of the National Association of Rural Farmers Commercializing Companies, Victor Suarez.
The Mexican Parliament has refused to include the right to food in the constitution and it has approved, at the same time, GM corn plantations, saying that it was a measure to increase corn production for human consumption.
However, the peasants and rural workers claim the solution is not to plant GM crops, but measures that preserve the biodiversity, investing in the countryside in a sustainable way.
Meanwhile, the campaign of Mexican non governmental organizations “Without corn there is no country” demanded the Senate to secure “that there will not be ethanol production from food, corn and sorgum in Mexico, until the national demand is met and the access to healthy, sufficient and culturally appropriate food is guaranteed for all the population”.
They also demanded the members of Congress to pass the Law on Food and Nutritional Security and Sovereignty “in order to have a long term food planning system based on food sovereignty, the right to food and the value of peasant farming”.
