In his move to ban Monsanto/Bayer’s glyphosate, “Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador quietly rocked the agribusiness world with his New Year’s Eve decree,” Timothy A. Wise of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) noted earlier this year. “His administration sent an even stronger aftershock two weeks later, clarifying that the government would also phase out GM corn imports in three years and the ban would include not just corn for human consumption but yellow corn destined primarily for livestock.” 

Since then, U.S. corporate agribusiness and proponents of so-called Free Trade have been lobbying the Biden administration to lean on Mexican President López Obrador to backtrack on his popular decision to kick GMOs and the toxic chemicals that go along with them out of Mexico.

OCA’s Mexico sister organization, Via Organica, has worked hard for over a decade, along with its 300 other partner organizations in the coalition Sin Maiz, No Hay Pais (“Without Corn there is no country”) to ban GMOs and glyphosate south of the border.

“Mexico imports about 30% of its corn each year, overwhelmingly from the United States,” Wise added. “Almost all of that is yellow corn for animal feed and industrial uses. López Obrador’s commitment to reducing and, by 2024, eliminating such imports reflects his administration’s plan to ramp up Mexican production as part of the campaign to increase self-sufficiency in corn and other key food crops.” 

Read more: 80 Groups Blast US Interference in Mexico’s Phaseout of Glyphosate and GM Corn 

There’s a reason you should boycott Big Meat and all non-organic, non-grass-fed or factory-farmed foods. As Civil Eats tells us: 

“The danger is obvious: If antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect humans more often, once-minor health issues could become life-threatening. The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies antibiotic resistance as “one of the biggest threats to global health” today, and a 2019 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report found antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths annually in the U.S. The CDC’s numbers did show an 18 percent decrease in deaths over the six years since its initial 2013 report, as a result of actions that have been taken to curb overuse in both healthcare and agriculture. But other estimates of deaths attributable to antibiotic-resistant bacteria are much higher.” 

Read more: Is the U.S. Doing Enough to Address the Meat Industry’s Role in Antibiotic Resistance?

Mark Bittman’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, sheds light on why so many Americans, including young people, are falling victim to chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and cancer. 

In relation to COVID-19, it is the increasingly routine consumption of junk food—highly-processed, filled with bad fats, sugar-laden, and laced with synthetic ingredients—that make so many of the elderly and those in poor health vulnerable to a viral trigger such as COVID-19 that magnifies and exacerbates underlying diet-related chronic diseases or co-morbidities. 

As Bittman explains:

“One of the most damning statistics is that close to 50% of the food that’s available is in the form of ultra-processed food. So ultra-processed food is what I call junk food… And it means food that contains non-food ingredients; food that your grandmother, great grandmother, maybe at this point wouldn’t have recognized as food. Food that you can’t cook yourself. Food that you don’t find in your own kitchen in the normal course of cooking and eating. A food that didn’t exist before the 20th century. It’s important to recognize that because ultra-processed food is cheap and it’s fast and it’s widely available; people without time and without money, are more likely to buy that kind of food. But everybody eats junk food. And it also poisons the environment for everybody.” 

Read the interview with Bittman in The Guardian