Mexico waiting on US proof that GM corn safe for its people, deputy ag minister says

You can find the document submitted by Mexico here: https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/MexUSMCAInitialEng.pdf

On the point of transgenic varieties having a negative impact on local strain diversity, I think the concerns are valid. The introduction of high-yielding GMOs can lead to displacement of local varieties and ultimately decrease diversity.

I skimmed through the document to see if they make some good points about the health impact of GMOs. From what I can gather, the arguments are:

Glyphosate herbicides are commonly used when farming GMO corn. There is no global consensus on the potential long-term health effects associated with exposure to glyphosates and formulations that contain it.
Techniques to modify the genome are not perfect. Often, viruses are used, and some viral proteins could be inserted into the genome. Other things could go wrong. Ultimately, you may have an unexpected phenotype that turns out to make the plant toxic.
They argue that the GMO corn has a worse nutritional profile than native varieties. This worse nutritional profile ultimately has a negative health impact.

Personally... Maybe the glyphosate claim I can get somewhat behind but the other two health claims I don't find compelling. The risks over-stated, and their use of citations is not great.

I have an example of their use of citations that made me chuckle... They write:

Mexican corn, mainly native corn, has a better quality in nutritional terms, including compounds that prevent diseases and promote human health.⁷⁵

And the citation reads:

⁷⁵ In Mexico there are scientific compilations and files that bring together the aforementioned literature.

Ah, well, thank you for that 😅

I'm glad you responded. I was really curious to see, as this smells more political than health related.
- Yeah. Claims about potential health effects can be very persuasive.
  
  It is a factual claim that something could go wrong, or that we have a gap in our understanding, and the outcome of that may be detrimental to our health. We can't disprove this because it is true, and so what we need to do is to assess risks in a balanced manner. It is also a factual claim that a de-novo mutation could occur and produce a toxic strain, or maybe we do not understand something about a plant that we commonly eat and we later find out that it is carcinogenic. Our understanding evolves over time, and risks are everywhere.
  
  But most politicians are not so concerned with painting a balanced picture. The claim "a risk exists" is always factual and that is good enough to push an agenda.
  
  In my opinion this does not in itself mean that one political position is better than the other. Maybe the health claims are not a good argument, but there are many other valid reasons to want to stop GMO corn.

In a written submission to a panel of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Mexico, the top buyer of U.S. corn, argued that science proves GM corn and the herbicide glyphosate are harmful to human health and its native varieties, and that its decree to ban GM corn for human consumption is within its right.

TBF, we're not picking on Mexico, we give it to our own people too. I like that they're making them prove it's safe as opposed to proving it's harmful. That's the way to go about it.

Yes and i would not trust any food related claim from the US without data backing up it.
- I live here and eat the food. And I 10000% agree with this statement. Do not trust the USAs word.
- There's a reason why Europe has tons of banned foods that the US doesn't, we care about profits and the share holders above the health of our people (especially the poor).
The GM hysteria is stupid though. By this logic you would have to prove this for every single non GM plant too. Whether you use completely random mutations over controlled mutations is somewhat irrelevant, although arguably the random ones could potentially be even more dangerous than the planned ones, since you don't have control over them.
- The GM hysteria is stupid though.
  
  Is it though? We don't know about things we haven't tested for because humans are different than livestock and rats. Time will tell, but most of us will be dead before we know for sure. We're messing with nature with no idea of the repercussions that we may already be experiencing.
Where's this science that genetically modified food causes harm? All I can find looking for anything that says something other than that GM food affects you the same as non-GM food is linking back to this article. And I mean, if you want to get technical, pretty much all plants we consume in the modern age were genetically modified through selective breeding.

anytime I see anything about GMO, and anything about Monsanto, that doesn't explicitly mention the health impacts of glyphosate and or other chemical herb and pesticides, I die a little inside.

and yeah there's a passing mention, but it's linked directly to the GM crops, as if they're hand in hand. I dunno i've spent too long around hippies who have no idea what they're talking about.

Yeah most gmo crops in use are designed to harden the crops against pesticides so that they can use more of them without killing the crop, if you actually look into the numbers its very distressing and more people need to be talking about this.

Gmo isn't automatically bad but it's bad when its implementation is by companies looking to create monopolies and who don't care at all if it causes problems like increased chemical additions running off into water ways and cause immense ecological damage

Do... do they not know that corn was selectively bred from what amounts to a wheat like grass? Modern corn is NOTHING like its wild ancestor (which still grows there) granted thats a different method of altering what genes are or are not there but its still a form of modification by humans. What we used to do is just a very crude and haphazard way of doing it in a way that we have no idea what actually happened whereas with modern GMO, you are making very specific changes.