Morena will promote an initiative in January to ban genetically modified corn

In 2020, then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a decree to prohibit the use of this genetically modified seed for human consumption and order the gradual replacement of transgenic corn that is imported from the United States for animal feed.

In 2023, in a new decree, the former president restricted this type of modified seed only for human consumption.

On February 5, 2024, within a package of 20 initiatives sent to the Chamber of Deputies, the former president proposed including in the Constitution that corn, “an element of national identity intended for human consumption, must be free of genetic modifications, such as the transgenic ones.”

Although this initiative has not been approved, given the decision of the TMEC Dispute Resolution Panel, Monreal insisted today in a video published on his social networks that a constitutional reform will be promoted to prohibit human consumption of genetically modified corn.

From his native Zacatecas and on his ranch in the community of Puebla de Palmar, the legislator insisted that restricting genetically modified corn “is an old demand.”

“Here in Mexico, corn was born and through the centuries it now feeds the world and now we must never forget the phrase that ‘without corn there is no country’. We must be proud of our seeds here in the Mexican countryside. The countryside has always been a solution,” he said.

President Claudia Sheinbaum announced last Monday that to protect biodiversity and preserve corn as a Mexican cultural and food symbol, she will propose including in the Constitution a ban on sowing transgenic corn seeds in Mexico.

“We must protect it due to genetic diversity, but also culturally, because in Mexico it is linked by our origin, by what the indigenous peoples of yesterday and today are and by the resistance to corn. “Corn is Mexico, that is why it is said that without corn there is no country,” said the president.