In 2016 Maya beekeepers engaged in protests against the planting of genetically modified (GM) soy in Campeche. The Mexican federal government had financially supported GM soy plantations, grown in Yucatan predominantly by Mennonite...
moreIn 2016 Maya beekeepers engaged in protests against the planting of genetically modified (GM) soy in Campeche. The Mexican federal government had financially supported GM soy plantations, grown in Yucatan predominantly by Mennonite communities, due to the high price soy could fetch on international food markets. These plantations, however, were soon linked to deforestation, water contamination, and human and bee illness and death. The conflict between Maya beekeepers and the Mexican government was triggered by the European Union’s rejection of Mexican honey exports due to statutorily unacceptable levels of GM pollen contamination in 2011. This led to significant financial losses for the beekeepers of Yucatan—most of whom were and are of Maya ethnicity. The Maya beekeepers demanded of the state authorities that GM soy be forbidden on basis of their “right to culture,” a constitutionally protected right in Mexico, and in 2017 the Mexican Agency SENASICA (Servicio Nacional de Sanidad, Calidad e Inocuidad Agroalimenaria) revoked its original 2011 permission to plant and commercialize GM soy in seven Mexican states, including all states on the Yucatan peninsula, where Maya beekeepers are concentrated. GM soy growers appealed this decision, and the pesticide and seed corporations lobbied the government until this prohibition was once more lifted in August 2019. In the first week of November 2019, however, the newly nominated director of the powerful state agency CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología), Elena Álvarez Buylla, herself a world-renowned plant geneticist, announced her support for Mayan bees and blamed GM soy for their decline. Soon after, the government of Andres Manuel López Obrador promised to prevent plantation of GM soy.
Our research in Yucatan brought to light many of the complexities that are not obvious in this story. Our conversations with Maya people revealed that they are equally concerned for the Apis mellifera bees that produce honey for export as they are for the sacred Melipona stingless bees, which are dependent on Yucatan’s diminishing forests, and their milpas, the subsistence form of polyculture agriculture that can restore an entire forest in a period of 30 years. Maya people are also worried about the toxic flow of pesticides and sewage from crop fields and animal farm enclosures as it enters underground water basins, threatening health and contaminating their sacred cenotes (Polanco and Beilin, 2019). Overall, the Mayas see industrial agriculture as an encroachment on their land, and indeed a continuation of centuries of European-American colonization. They have come to realize that unless they mobilize their cultural knowledge to react to these threats, their livelihood, heritage, and memory will become collateral damage. In this way, the struggle for bee health has initiated an ongoing process of political organization and cultural revival within Maya communities that has roused various social actors, such as artists, poets, scientists, business leaders, politicians, lawyers, international foundations and activists who built an alliance in support of the Maya people “bioculture” (Rosado May, 2016).
