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Mexico’s President-elect, Climate Scientist Claudia Sheinbaum, PhD Offers Opportunity for Dramatic Change and International Leadership
Image: EneasMx, CC-BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
(Beyond Pesticides, July 19, 2024) Former mayor of Mexico City and climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum, PhD was elected President of Mexico on June 2, making her the first female and Jewish citizen to hold the highest political office in the nation. She will be inaugurated on October 1, 2024. Dr. Sheinbaum’s ascension to the presidency comes at a time of increasing pressure from the United States government to acquiesce to its demands to open agricultural markets to genetically engineered (GE) crops (particularly corn) and the use of the carcinogenic weed killer glyphosate. With the formal review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) approaching in 2026, Mexico will soon decide under Dr. Sheinbaum’s leadership whether it will be an international stalwart against the unfettered spread of GE corn amidst pressure from the U.S. Trade Representative and as industry continues to enable the cascading crises of the climate emergency, public health crisis, and biodiversity collapse.
With new administrations in the United Kingdom and France, and the upcoming election in the U.S., how governments around the world, independently and collectively, choose to seriously confront or soft-pedal the existential environmental crises will determine the livability of the planet. According to The Washington Post, despite a complicated record on green energy, “Her election has given hope to environmentalists and diplomats who’ve despaired as Mexico has gone from a global leader on climate change to a laggard.” Dr. Sheinbaum’s environment secretary in her mayoral administration told The Post that for the President-elect, “Environmental improvements have to be accompanied by social justice.”
Academic, Political Background, and Climate Record
Who is this new president? President-elect Sheinbaum holds a doctorate in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico City. President-elect Sheinbaum was a co-contributor to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Working Group III: “Mitigation of Climate Change” in 2007; consequently, the team went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Sheinbaum also contributed to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report in 2015.
Moving beyond academic literature, observers will be evaluating if President-elect Sheinbaum will build on the pro-environmental aspects of the previous environmental policies of her mayoral administration. As mayor of Mexico City, she launched a six-year Environmental and Climate Change Program focusing on urban and rural revegetation, sustainable water stewardship and management, zero-waste, public transit, air pollution, and solar development. In a 2024 progress report, several accomplishments indicate progress such as planting over 15 million plants and trees since 2019, the creation of 450 pollinator gardens in 2019 and 2020, and the expansion of the public bus system to over 173 new vehicles (however only 10 are fully electric) and a new “Electric Transportation Service” of 193 new electric trolleybuses (only 50 so far are in use). In spite of these accolades, Climate Home News interviewed Xochitl Cruz Núñez, PhD—Dr. Sheinbaum’s colleague on the fifth IPCC report—“criticized the city’s diesel-powered bus system, water scarcity and increased urbanization under Sheinbaum’s leadership, saying it had caused ‘uncontrolled’ construction in surrounding conservation areas.” Mayor Sheinbaum did begin converting city buses to electric power.
“Peasant organizations have raised the need for a national strategy for agroecological transition to Claudia Sheinbaum,” Fernando Bejarano, Director at Action Network on Pesticides and Alternatives in Mexico (RAPAM), shares his perspective on the incoming administration. “It is expected that the next government will reformulate and continue supporting small and medium-sized farmers to achieve food self-sufficiency in basic crops with support for agroecological practices, but also greater dialogue with agribusiness organizations where transnational pesticide and seed companies participate.
“In the opinion of RAPAM, an inter-ministerial state policy is needed that articulates two objectives: the agroecological transition of the food system and the gradual prohibition of highly dangerous pesticides. This gradual ban with measurable and quantifiable goals is a Recommendation of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) 82/2018, issued in December 2018, which has not yet been fulfilled.”
USMCA, GE Import & Glyphosate Bans, and Mexico Food Sovereignty
USMCA replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2020 as the trilateral trade policy for North America. That same year, AMLO announced that Mexico would phase out glyphosate from use or importation into the country by 2024, joining other nations that have issued bans, including Germany, Luxembourg, and Vietnam. As the 2024 deadline loomed near, AMLO indefinitely delayed the glyphosate ban ahead of April 1. See the Daily News article that calls out advocates’ frustration on this policy change and the Action of the Week calling for the U.S. Trade Representative and U.S. Secretary of State to formally withdraw their opposition to Mexico’s ban on imported GE corn and glyphosate use.
There have been over a decade of judicial and executive actions in Mexico against the spread of GE crops and the use of toxic petrochemical pesticides. In 2013, a judge in Mexico issued an injunction against the planting and selling of GE corn seed within the country’s borders. The decision came nearly two years after the Mexican government temporarily rejected the expansion of GE corn testing, citing the need for more research and prohibited agrichemical biotech companies, including Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta, PHI Mexico, and Dow AgroSciences, from planting or selling GE corn seed in Mexico.
As a presidential candidate, Dr. Sheinbaum “promised farmers to end the use of glyphosate, a herbicide harmful to the environment, but gradually because ‘we have already seen that its replacement is not so simple.’” She made this promise to a crowd of four thousand or more people representing twenty agricultural workers and peasant organizations nationwide. Reporting also indicated that “the presidential candidate endorsed that transgenic corn will not be planted or brought into the country.” It seems like President-elect Sheinbaum wishes to build on the legacy of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “Fourth Transformation” speech in 2019 upon the first-year anniversary of his 2018 election win to move beyond a neoliberal governance system with the goal “to strengthen the popular economy” by “prioritiz[ing] agricultural recovery.” Mexico Business News shared that Sheinbaum will build on the legacy of her soon-to-be predecessor López Obrador (AMLO) through a proposed initiative dubbed “National Project for Rural Development.” According to this report, “Sheinbaum emphasized ensuring non-GMO grain for human consumption.”
Glyphosate use and genetically modified crops pose threats to public health and biodiversity, as well as the erosion of Indigenous food systems and cultural preservation through seed and food sovereignty. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) designated glyphosate as a “probable” carcinogen. This determination builds on substantial peer-reviewed science that links glyphosate exposure to non-Hodgkins’ Lymphoma and several other diseases and chronic health conditions including but not limited to diabetes, obesity, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and Parkinson’s disease.
Allowing GE crops to be grown close to organic and non-GE conventional crop fields increases the risk of genetic drift, as pollen from GE crops has the potential to spread to non-GE crops and produce offspring. Genetic drift undermines the integrity of organic certification since GE crops are prohibited under organic standards. See Genetic Engineering and Herbicide Tolerance to learn more about genetic drift. See Daily News for an analysis of the U.S. government’s proposed framework for GE crops and biotechnology.
Environmental advocates are looking to the incoming Mexican president to embrace a holistic, systems-based framework for agriculture and land management practices. Embracing organic standards will immediately ban the use of glyphosate and other toxic petrochemical pesticides that undermine human health, ecosystem stability, and deepen farmers’ reliance on industry products. See Action of the Week to learn more about how to advocate for a transformation of policy at state, national, and international levels.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Source: Reuters
