translated from Spanish: Who has the rights to indigenous maize?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Yale E360 and the Food and Environment Reporting Network. The original English version can be read Here.
A recent study shows that a nitrogen-fixing maize plant that was grown in an indigenous region of Mexico has the ability to fertilize itself. A global company and several U.S. scientists are already working to replicate this quality in other varieties of corn, but then will the populations from which the corn came have any share of the profits? 
In 1979, during a visit to Totontepec, a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, naturalist Thomas Boone Hallberg marveled at the local corn. The plants grew to almost 6 meters in nutrient-deficient soil, even though local farmers did not use any fertilizer.
Corn had aerial roots that produced a mucous gel a few months after planting. It seemed impossible, but Hallberg wondered if the corn would be fixing its own nitrogen: extracting it from the air and somehow making it usable for the plant. He had visited countless populations since he moved to Oaxaca in the 1950s, but he would never forget what he saw in Totontepec. 
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In 1992, Hallberg returned with a group of Mexican scientists. Corn, known as Oloton, was almost ready to be harvested and its aerial roots glistened in gel. Ronald Ferrera-Cerrato, a microbiologist, took samples to his lab outside Mexico City for tests on bacteria in the gel. Their preliminary results, which were published in a 1996 report, showed that maize had nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the air roots, but did not definitively check whether the plant received nitrogen in this way.
At the time, scientists around the world were asking the same questions. In a 1996 article published in Plant and Soil, microbiologist Eric Triplett, who at the time was working at the University of Wisconsin, described the possibility of corn plants fixing nitrogen as the “holy grail,” due to its potential to reduce fertilizer demand. 
It was more than two decades before suspicions about Totontepec maize were confirmed in a collaborative magazine. Last August, researchers from the University of California, Davis, the University of Wisconsin and Mars Inc—the global food and candy conglomerate—published the results of a 10-year study in PLOS Biology, describing how bacteria that develop in the oxygen-low environment from the corn mucosa, get nitrogen from the air and supply it to the plant. 
The media applauded the findings. “The miracle plant, ” he proclaimed The Atlantic. The Smithsonian Declared:”The corn of the future.” 
Scientists provided little details about where the maize came from, or about the circumstances of what UC Davis called the researchers’ “extraordinary discovery,” stating only that corn came from a remote population in Oaxaca. A Subsidiary Company of Mars called BioN2 had signed an agreement with a population to participate in the economic gains from the marketing of maize. This population turned out to be Totontepec, an indigenous Mixe community in the eastern mountains of Oaxaca. 
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Scientists would probably take years to determine whether a commercial application of maize is possible. But if they successfully reproduce this feature in commercial maize, farmers could substantially reduce their use of synthetic fertilizer. In the United States alone, farmers spend more than $3 billion a year on corn fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer is also one of the main causes of water pollution, dead zones in rivers and lakes, as well as an important source of greenhouse gases. 
UC Davis/Mars researchers received a certificate of compliance with the Nagoya Protocol, an international agreement aimed at compensating indigenous communities for their biological resources and traditional knowledge. Still, the situation around Totontepec maize poses complex questions about how indigenous communities fairly benefit when research scientists and multinational companies market local crops and plants. If Totontepec maize turns out to be a miracle, a self-fertilizing crop, whose genetic characteristics can replicate around the world, will people in the Mixe community have an important long-term share in profits, which potentially amounting to millions of dollars? How does Nagoya ensure that the rights and interests of small indigenous communities are safeguarded when its leaders negotiate complex dealings with international lawyers and executives? Not least: when a valuable plant is found across a region, is it fair for a single population, such as Totontepec to get economic benefits from its maize, while neighboring communities with identical or similar maize receive nothing?
Alejandro Ruiz García, an agronomist from Guelatao, Oaxaca who accompanied Hallberg to Totontepec in 1992, thinks that other communities that cultivate Oloton they should also have a say in the future marketing of maize and receive economic benefits. “This is part of our cultural and agricultural heritage,” he said. “The debate is just beginning.”
Photo: Quartercuro
Indeed, Totontepec maize is a reminder that policies that seek to safeguard the genetic resources of indigenous communities, in Mexico and around the world, are still in progress. Some positives have emerged, but fair long-term agreements are rare. 
Biopiracy is defined as the exploitation of indigenous knowledge and biological resources without permission. The practice is remote to several centuries. International companies have exploited the botanical wealth of the Amazon, for example, for more than a century, from the expropriation of the seeds of Brazilian rubber plants in the 1870s, to the current controversy over the international patent Copoazú fruit from the Amazon. Even before the Nagoya Protocol, countries such as Costa Rica took steps to regulate bioprospecting. Some indigenous communities have taken a proactive approach to negotiating agreements, rather than relying on national governments. In Panama, the Guna people decided that their General Congress, which represents dozens of communities, should approve any research project, commercial or otherwise. 
Since Nagoya came into force, some scientists have raised concerns that countries have imposed onerous requirements on researchers, discouraging scientific research. But indigenous communities and their advocates are concerned that exploitation will continue. Because the details of the agreement negotiated between the Totontopec community and UC Davis/Mars remain mostly confidential, a number of journalists, scientists and advocates for farmers in Mexico have spoken out against the deal, and even some of them have accused the US side of biopiracy. 
But Alan Bennett, a plant science professor at UC Davis and a leader of the maize research project, dismisses that view, stating that his team worked in good faith, requested the participation of the Totontopec community and followed the guidelines of the Nagoya Protocol. “We really created something i’d be proud of,” Bennett said in an interview, while acknowledging that he hadn’t seen the final version of the deal. 
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A Mars spokeswoman added: “We have worked hand-in-hand with the Mexican community in this research.” Mars claimed that he shared information in community assemblies and consulted with the Mexican federal government. And Howard-Yana Shapiro, Mars’ chief agricultural director, stated in an interview that the decision to work only with a community was made “at the behest of the government,” as it was considered the most effective way to comply with Nagoya. 
A preliminary version of the access and profit-sharing agreement, which was seen by Yale Environment 360 and Food & Environment Reporting Network, UC Davis holds the rights to patents and net income received from patent royalties would be shared equally with the Totontepec community. Bennett claimed that community leaders requested that the deal remain confidential, but confirmed that Mars has already paid $100,000 (2 million pesos) to Totontepec as part of the deal. 
The Mexican government has not played an active role in ensuring that the rights of the Totontepec community are safeguarded. In 2015, when Mexico issued a Certificate of Compliance in favor of BioN2, the federal government did not have a standardized process for handling applications from companies and universities to access the biological resources of indigenous communities. Bennett said both investigators and the federal government were learning on the fly. The Mexican government adopted a “transitional process” in 2017. The Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources of Mexico, in charge of the implementation of Nagoyand the National Seed Inspection and Certification Service (SNICS) rejected various interview requests. 
The current municipal president of Totontepec, Luis Adolfo Alcántara Nuñez, states that he does not know the details of the final agreement and that the four agricultural commissioners of the community are the only persons authorized to comment on it. Yale e360 he was unable to interview the commissioners, as they were not in session during a visit to the community and have not been available by telephone since.
Corn sales. Photo: Quartercuro
Totontepec is a small village in the misty mountains of Oaxaca, southern Mexico. It is a 4-hour drive, full of steep curves and panoramic views, from the capital city of Oaxaca. Totontepec looks up at zempoaltepetl mountain, one of the highest points in the state and a sacred site for the Mixe people, made up of approximately 119,000 people. 
It is an indigenous farming community, and its land is communally owned. Many residents are subsistence farmers who depend on the three harvests of milpa, the foundations of indigenous agriculture in Mesoamerica: corn, pumpkin and beans. The Oloton is one of 59 corn breeds in Mexico. Indigenous farmers domesticated native crops for millennia, selecting and sending seeds carefully for generations to meet their specific climatic and culinary needs.
Juan Arelí Bernal Alcántara grew up in a farming family in Totontepec. Remember that the village children followed their parents to the crops and played with the strange mucus that forms in the aerial roots of the maize, and even ate it. After studying agronomy in Chapingo, Bernal became the unofficial agronomist of Totontepec. Bernal hosted Thomas Boone Hallberg and a group of scientists when they went to town in 1992. “The idea was for more scientists to see our corn and encourage research,” Bernal says. 
Read: Mexico safeguards world’s largest collection of corn and wheat
Ronald Ferrera-Cerrato, one of the scientists who made the trip in 1992, is a microbiologist at the Colegio de Postgraduates de Montecillo, whose campus is located in Texcoco. He tested the gel he took with him, finding evidence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. But after a 1995 publication, he did not continue with the research due to a lack of funding for complex analyses that would prove nitrogen fixation. 
More than 20 years later, Jean-Michel Ané, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin, resumed where Ferrera-Cerrato had left off, even though both men had never heard of each other. Ané says he met Shapiro and Alan Bennett in 2009. Metagenomics, the study of genetic material recovered from environmental samples, offered new possibilities for understanding nitrogen fixation. Shapiro and Bennett invited Ané to study the variety of Oaxaca corn they suspected fixed nitrogen. Intrigued, Ané agreed. 
Bennett had already begun collecting corn samples in 2006 at Totontepec under a simple material transfer agreement with the community. He claims that he and Mars were always transparent, presenting updates at community agricultural assemblies and taking votes into account. Residents of Totontepec confirmed that investigators attended assemblies assiduously.
Azarel Rivera Bernal grew up in Totontepec and currently resides in the City of Oaxaca. But he participates in local government and attended assemblies where scientists spoke. Still, he was surprised to see the Nagoya Protocol certificate of compliance for the first time and wondered what it would really mean for his community. “My fear is that they deprive our seeds and that we can no longer plant them,” he said. 
UC Davis/Mars researchers exported corn samples from Mexico for at least nine years before receiving a permit from the Mexican government in 2015. Bennett said the U.S. side did not think it was necessary to consult with the federal government, as indigenous communities are autonomous under the Mexican Constitution. 
Shapiro says it could take more than a decade for Mars or another company to reproduce the nitrogen fixation feature in a commercial maize variety, if this is possible. Bennett points out that research continues at UC Davis in order to better understand the bacteria that fix nitrogen in the corn gel and isolate it.
Photo: Quartercuro
People familiar with the Totontepec case say that it highlights some important limitations of the Nagoya Protocol, which entered into force in 2014. (Although the United States is not a signatory, U.S. companies must adhere to their principles if they operate globally.) One is that Nagoya allows confidential agreements, even though transparency is one of the main objectives of the protocol. For companies and universities, confidentiality is critical to preventing their research from being copied.
But for communities and their advocates, it can prevent outside observers from assessing the fairof agreements between communities and multinational conglomerates. News of the maize agreement only began to spread in Oaxaca when Political Animal published a story in November, years after the deal had been signed. Some countries, such as Peru and South Africa, have taken action towards greater transparency, stating that when a company applies for a permit, the name of the species to which access is available, as well as the applicant, must be made public.
Researchers have documented that nitrogen-fixing maize is grown in other parts of Oaxaca and even Guatemala.
Advocates of indigenous communities say it is important that they have access to third-party mediators to ensure that they are fully informed and that their rights are safeguarded. “In any negotiation that has very different resources and unequal access to information, it is useful to have independent parties that can offer support or mediation,” says Maria Julia Oliva of the non-profit organization, Unión Biotrade Ethics.
An important point in the Totontepec case is the decision of Mars Inc. and UC Davis researchers not to consult or compensate other communities that grow Oloton. Ané and other researchers have documented that nitrogen-fixing maize is grown in other parts of Oaxaca and even Guatemala. Shapiro referred to Totontepec as the “protagonist” of the region and stated that the community has been “sharing its material with other communities” for a long time, despite no research indicating that the Oparrot which produces aerial roots originating in Totontepec. 
The only time being compensated for the marketing of a crop that is a regional natural resource affects other communities and some outside observers would find it unfair. Once Ané realized that nitrogen-fixing maize was not unique to Totontepec, he claims to have had mixed feelings about the investigation. When his contract with Mars was terminated at the end of 2017, he did not renew it. It believes that maize should continue to be in the public domain and made available to small-scale farmers around the world. 
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Other countries have found ways to compensate multiple communities for a geographically dispersed resource. The Hoodia plant, used in appetite suppressants, grows in the Kalahari Desert and has traditionally been used by The Bushmen of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. After initially being excluded from benefits from patented Bosnian medicines, Bosnians and non-profit allies negotiated an agreement in the 2000s to create the Participation Trust Fund in the Benefits San Hoodia, which could ultimately mean economic benefits for the San people. The Sans also decided that the benefits should be collective, rather than exclusive to individual communities, since Hoodia is not “owned” by a single community. 
Laurent Gaberell of the Swiss non-profit organization Public Eye states that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, a simultaneous agreement with Nagoya, aims to regulate access to basic crops spreads among different communities. The treaty recognizes that these resources are not owned by a single community and that the benefits must be shared. Maize is one of the crops covered by the FAO treaty, but Mexico has not ratified it. Mexico does not have a legal procedure governing how to consult and compensate communities, and in the absence of national legislation, companies have significant freedom.
“It’s a failure on Nagoya’s part and it’s a failure on the part of the Mexican government,” says Jack Kloppenburg, a seed expert at the University of Wisconsin. “If both parties are allowed to operate in this way, the whole exercise is meaningless. Nagoya is legitimizing biopiracy.”
The administration of Mexico’s new leftist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has spoken for the rights of small-scale farmers and indigenous people. Victor Suárez, a long-standing leader of various farmers’ organizations in Mexico, is now undersecretary of the newly opened office for Food Self-Reliance. “In this new government, we will not allow policies that privatize our genetic resources to continueto the population, especially the collective resources of indigenous communities,” he said in an interview. 
Meanwhile, as U.S. researchers continue the arduous task of trying to transfer the genetic characteristics of nitrogen fixation to commercial maize varieties, Oaxaca farmers will continue to plant their corn miraculous as they have for thousands of years.
This article was prepared in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a non-profit investigative journalism organization.
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Original source in Spanish

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