Final Dreer Report
During the final stretch of my “papaya odyssey,” I investigated the status of the papaya industry and genetically engineered crops in Mexico. My first stop, however, was just north of the border near McAllen, Texas.
Near McAllen, in the smaller town of Hidalgo, I met with the US-based CEO of the Mexican fruit company that is trying to get on the GM papaya band wagon. I had been waiting for several weeks for his contact information, but Dennis Gonsalves was waiting until they finished negotiations in July until he shared his contact information with me. The CEO of Las Trechas fruit company, Lalo Trevino, runs the family business from the US side of the border while his father, manages the business from the orchard sites near Tapachula, México.
I ventured off to the Hidalgo-based fruit trucking and distribution center- a fruit basket upset of large trucks coming in from Mexico, rearranging the loads and heading off to supermarkets across America. I was directed to the CEOs sparsely decorated office perched above the loading dock. The much anticipated meeting was quicker than I had anticipated, owing to the casual attitude this guy had towards his expected ease in which the project will be implemented in Mexico. According to him, there’s no controversy in Mexico, he expects to be met with no opposition and couldn’t list any other companies that are competitive threats. The only threat, according to him, is the virus.
The company was set up in the 1980’s, but they didn’t venture into papaya during the first years. By the 1990’s however, their papaya business was strong and they were shipping out 1-6 million tons of papaya per week. All that ended in 1997-98, just as Hawaii was getting their GM, virus resistant papaya out into the field. The virus hit hard and was followed by two devastating hurricanes in 1998 and 2005, which caused them to loose a large proportion of their crop. After the first loss the company cut back their papaya production dramatically, and in the meantime started doing some research on the virus and mechanisms of controlling it. That led Lalo to Dennis Gonsalves, who he began consulting with. Dennis recommended means of trying to control the virus in the meantime, and also told him about the transgenic work they were doing for Hawaii. Excited at the prospects, the company received seeds from Hawaii that were a poorly bred variety but were transgenic for the virus. They set up a field test in 1997 to see if the transgenic was resistance to the Mexican strain of the virus. The test was going well when it was shut down by the government on grounds that Mexico did not yet have a biosafety law in place.
Fast forward ten years and Mexico not only has a biosafety law but companies like Monsanto have already brought various transgenic crops into Mexico, the most controversial of which of course is maize. However, due to an unofficial moratorium, only transgenic cotton is being legally grown in Mexico at the moment. With the moratorium expected to be lifted in the coming weeks, the company completed negotiations with the relevant parties involved in Hawaii just last week and expect to be planting a GM, virus resistance papaya for Mexico in a year and a half.
Now this CEO is working on another angle of the business: Promoting papaya for the healthful food that it is. Considering its status as a rich source of essential vitamins, and a digestive aid, he doesn’t understand why more Americans aren’t consuming papaya, transgenic or not. He wants to get beyond the stereotype of papaya as a stinky fruit rotting on grocers' shelves and market it as a kind of superfood.
My next stop was in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico where I met with the Mexican-based team from Las Trechas. We spent the day driving to two different field sites. At the first site, pickers were harvesting and the second site was a new field only recently planted. The patriarch of the company, Baodelio, inherited most of the land from his father who was in the banana business. Thus, some of the infrastructure used during harvest has been adapted from the way things are done in the banana business. The company no longer grows bananas, but is growing mangoes and a limited number of avocados in addition to papaya, which in good times, is really the money maker, according to Baodelio. At their height of production, about ten years ago, Las Trechas was the largest producer of papaya in México. Since then, they’ve cut back, as mentioned above. Only now are they trying to slowly expand again, encouraged by the prospects of growing virus resistance papaya. The field managers at Las Trechas are extremely vigilant when it comes to the virus. They hire full time virus vigilantes who do nothing but walk the fields looking for signs of the virus. One person can cover 5 ha per day, so roughly 14 people are needed for each field site.
Baodelio says it is hard to estimate how much the company loses from the virus, since in bad times, it can be as much as 100% and when it is kept at bay, it is obviously far less. However, he says that 10% of the company’s total expenditures is spent on controlling the virus. Trees are rogued immediately if virus is detected in the orchards. As another means of control, they have borders of sugarcane around the fields. These sugarcane borders are prayed heavily with aphicides and the idea is that hopefully they can trap any aphids in the sugarcane borders before they enter the papaya fields.
Before breeders in Cuba produced the popular, “Maridol” variety nearly half a century ago, Mexico didn’t really have any true varieties or much of a papaya business. It was the Maridol that kicked off the industry in Mexico and only then, with the development of large orchards, did the virus become apparent. It slowly progressed, until the mid 1990’s when it became an industry-devastating problem. At Las Trechas, they are growing three different varieties of papaya: Tainung, Red Lady, and Maridol. Tainung and Red Lady are more virus tolerant than Maridol, but fruit shape is too irregular for the marketplace and Tainung trees are also very tall, an inconvenience during harvest.
If all goes well, according to Baodelio, they’ll be planting a GM, virus resistant cross between the Hawaiian Sun-up papaya and the Mexican preferred Maridol. Preliminary tests have shown that the Mexican strain of the virus is similar in its genomic sequence to the Hawaiian strain. Thus, they don’t have to transform the Mexican papaya with the coat protein gene of the Mexican virus. Rather, researchers in Hawaii are breeding it into the Maridol line. Eventually, they would like to have a Maridol that is directly transformed, but for starters they will adopt a Sun-up Maridol hybrid (Sun-up and other Hawaiian papayas are extremely small compared with the larger papayas preferred by the Mexican Market).
From numerous interviews with policy advisors, academics, and other stakeholders in Mexico, I have surmised that the history of GM crops in Mexico reads pretty similarly to other countries’ accounts: During the 1990’s numerous crops were brought in primarily by seed companies, fields tests were ongoing by academics and industry alike, and then around 1997 Greenpeace set up an office in Mexico City and immediately campaigned for a moratorium on GM crops. From 1988 to 1998, the government received 250 applications for field trials in México. After 1998, that came to a standstill. The government was criticized for not having a biosafety law in place and at the same time, the issue of the Bt gene “flowing” into Mexican maize land races exploded.
The government had a biosafety law by the beginning of 2005, but was subsequently criticized since there were no rules which explained how to use the law. The accompanying rules have just been completed, and it is thought that they will be signed by the president in the next two weeks, after which the government will being accepting applications for field trials again. Incidentally, despite the moratorium, GM cotton is still being produced in the northern part of the country. Heavily monitored, it is technically considered a large field trial, even though it is being grown commercially.
Maize is the big controversy in Mexico. The staple food of the people, opponents of GMOs fear that the transgenic nature of GMO varieties could get bred into local landraces, which has clearly already happened in southern states such as Oaxaca. As the center of origin of maize and a current center of diversity, the debate over GM maize takes center stage. The papaya is hardly on the radar and although campaigners at Greenpeace are opposed to any and all forms of genetic engineering, it is maize that they are most actively trying to protect. Interestingly, México is the center of origin and a center of diversity for a large number of crops such as tomato, squash, papaya, peppers, cotton, and several legumes including the Phaseolus genus. Thus, Mexico will likely have to confront this issue every time a permit is granted to grow a modified version of any one of these native crops. A large effort to not only understand where the center of origin of maize is, but also where the current centers of diversity are, is under way. At least one government official working on this issue, Ariel Alvarez, says they should be doing this for all of the crops native to the area. This would obviously have implications for the papaya work.
Mexico is taking a cautious approach to the GM issue after their more hasty advances back fired. The government has an organization CIBIOGEM, which coordinates all the ministries involved in the GM issue. The country has some cautious, but hopeful people in some key positions, that should help Mexico make well-informed decisions as to what they want their relationship with GM crops to be. In the next two weeks, as the rules of the biosafety law are signed into law, no doubt the discussion will heat up again.
Alas, this report marks the end of my “papaya odyssey.” I look forward to sharing my research and adventures in the coming months in a final seminar presentation.
Near McAllen, in the smaller town of Hidalgo, I met with the US-based CEO of the Mexican fruit company that is trying to get on the GM papaya band wagon. I had been waiting for several weeks for his contact information, but Dennis Gonsalves was waiting until they finished negotiations in July until he shared his contact information with me. The CEO of Las Trechas fruit company, Lalo Trevino, runs the family business from the US side of the border while his father, manages the business from the orchard sites near Tapachula, México.
I ventured off to the Hidalgo-based fruit trucking and distribution center- a fruit basket upset of large trucks coming in from Mexico, rearranging the loads and heading off to supermarkets across America. I was directed to the CEOs sparsely decorated office perched above the loading dock. The much anticipated meeting was quicker than I had anticipated, owing to the casual attitude this guy had towards his expected ease in which the project will be implemented in Mexico. According to him, there’s no controversy in Mexico, he expects to be met with no opposition and couldn’t list any other companies that are competitive threats. The only threat, according to him, is the virus.
The company was set up in the 1980’s, but they didn’t venture into papaya during the first years. By the 1990’s however, their papaya business was strong and they were shipping out 1-6 million tons of papaya per week. All that ended in 1997-98, just as Hawaii was getting their GM, virus resistant papaya out into the field. The virus hit hard and was followed by two devastating hurricanes in 1998 and 2005, which caused them to loose a large proportion of their crop. After the first loss the company cut back their papaya production dramatically, and in the meantime started doing some research on the virus and mechanisms of controlling it. That led Lalo to Dennis Gonsalves, who he began consulting with. Dennis recommended means of trying to control the virus in the meantime, and also told him about the transgenic work they were doing for Hawaii. Excited at the prospects, the company received seeds from Hawaii that were a poorly bred variety but were transgenic for the virus. They set up a field test in 1997 to see if the transgenic was resistance to the Mexican strain of the virus. The test was going well when it was shut down by the government on grounds that Mexico did not yet have a biosafety law in place.
Fast forward ten years and Mexico not only has a biosafety law but companies like Monsanto have already brought various transgenic crops into Mexico, the most controversial of which of course is maize. However, due to an unofficial moratorium, only transgenic cotton is being legally grown in Mexico at the moment. With the moratorium expected to be lifted in the coming weeks, the company completed negotiations with the relevant parties involved in Hawaii just last week and expect to be planting a GM, virus resistance papaya for Mexico in a year and a half.
Now this CEO is working on another angle of the business: Promoting papaya for the healthful food that it is. Considering its status as a rich source of essential vitamins, and a digestive aid, he doesn’t understand why more Americans aren’t consuming papaya, transgenic or not. He wants to get beyond the stereotype of papaya as a stinky fruit rotting on grocers' shelves and market it as a kind of superfood.
My next stop was in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico where I met with the Mexican-based team from Las Trechas. We spent the day driving to two different field sites. At the first site, pickers were harvesting and the second site was a new field only recently planted. The patriarch of the company, Baodelio, inherited most of the land from his father who was in the banana business. Thus, some of the infrastructure used during harvest has been adapted from the way things are done in the banana business. The company no longer grows bananas, but is growing mangoes and a limited number of avocados in addition to papaya, which in good times, is really the money maker, according to Baodelio. At their height of production, about ten years ago, Las Trechas was the largest producer of papaya in México. Since then, they’ve cut back, as mentioned above. Only now are they trying to slowly expand again, encouraged by the prospects of growing virus resistance papaya. The field managers at Las Trechas are extremely vigilant when it comes to the virus. They hire full time virus vigilantes who do nothing but walk the fields looking for signs of the virus. One person can cover 5 ha per day, so roughly 14 people are needed for each field site.
Baodelio says it is hard to estimate how much the company loses from the virus, since in bad times, it can be as much as 100% and when it is kept at bay, it is obviously far less. However, he says that 10% of the company’s total expenditures is spent on controlling the virus. Trees are rogued immediately if virus is detected in the orchards. As another means of control, they have borders of sugarcane around the fields. These sugarcane borders are prayed heavily with aphicides and the idea is that hopefully they can trap any aphids in the sugarcane borders before they enter the papaya fields.
Before breeders in Cuba produced the popular, “Maridol” variety nearly half a century ago, Mexico didn’t really have any true varieties or much of a papaya business. It was the Maridol that kicked off the industry in Mexico and only then, with the development of large orchards, did the virus become apparent. It slowly progressed, until the mid 1990’s when it became an industry-devastating problem. At Las Trechas, they are growing three different varieties of papaya: Tainung, Red Lady, and Maridol. Tainung and Red Lady are more virus tolerant than Maridol, but fruit shape is too irregular for the marketplace and Tainung trees are also very tall, an inconvenience during harvest.
If all goes well, according to Baodelio, they’ll be planting a GM, virus resistant cross between the Hawaiian Sun-up papaya and the Mexican preferred Maridol. Preliminary tests have shown that the Mexican strain of the virus is similar in its genomic sequence to the Hawaiian strain. Thus, they don’t have to transform the Mexican papaya with the coat protein gene of the Mexican virus. Rather, researchers in Hawaii are breeding it into the Maridol line. Eventually, they would like to have a Maridol that is directly transformed, but for starters they will adopt a Sun-up Maridol hybrid (Sun-up and other Hawaiian papayas are extremely small compared with the larger papayas preferred by the Mexican Market).
From numerous interviews with policy advisors, academics, and other stakeholders in Mexico, I have surmised that the history of GM crops in Mexico reads pretty similarly to other countries’ accounts: During the 1990’s numerous crops were brought in primarily by seed companies, fields tests were ongoing by academics and industry alike, and then around 1997 Greenpeace set up an office in Mexico City and immediately campaigned for a moratorium on GM crops. From 1988 to 1998, the government received 250 applications for field trials in México. After 1998, that came to a standstill. The government was criticized for not having a biosafety law in place and at the same time, the issue of the Bt gene “flowing” into Mexican maize land races exploded.
The government had a biosafety law by the beginning of 2005, but was subsequently criticized since there were no rules which explained how to use the law. The accompanying rules have just been completed, and it is thought that they will be signed by the president in the next two weeks, after which the government will being accepting applications for field trials again. Incidentally, despite the moratorium, GM cotton is still being produced in the northern part of the country. Heavily monitored, it is technically considered a large field trial, even though it is being grown commercially.
Maize is the big controversy in Mexico. The staple food of the people, opponents of GMOs fear that the transgenic nature of GMO varieties could get bred into local landraces, which has clearly already happened in southern states such as Oaxaca. As the center of origin of maize and a current center of diversity, the debate over GM maize takes center stage. The papaya is hardly on the radar and although campaigners at Greenpeace are opposed to any and all forms of genetic engineering, it is maize that they are most actively trying to protect. Interestingly, México is the center of origin and a center of diversity for a large number of crops such as tomato, squash, papaya, peppers, cotton, and several legumes including the Phaseolus genus. Thus, Mexico will likely have to confront this issue every time a permit is granted to grow a modified version of any one of these native crops. A large effort to not only understand where the center of origin of maize is, but also where the current centers of diversity are, is under way. At least one government official working on this issue, Ariel Alvarez, says they should be doing this for all of the crops native to the area. This would obviously have implications for the papaya work.
Mexico is taking a cautious approach to the GM issue after their more hasty advances back fired. The government has an organization CIBIOGEM, which coordinates all the ministries involved in the GM issue. The country has some cautious, but hopeful people in some key positions, that should help Mexico make well-informed decisions as to what they want their relationship with GM crops to be. In the next two weeks, as the rules of the biosafety law are signed into law, no doubt the discussion will heat up again.
Alas, this report marks the end of my “papaya odyssey.” I look forward to sharing my research and adventures in the coming months in a final seminar presentation.
posted by papaya odyssey | 10:18 AM
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