Seeds, GMOs and Sovereignty: A Conversation with Esquisa Omaña

Esquisa Omaña is a Venezuelan biologist and ecologist, a researcher at the Transdisciplinary Ecology for Human Wellbeing Laboratory at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC), and a doctoral candidate in Agrarian Social Studies at the University of Córdoba (Argentina). She is a long-time activist in movements including the GMO-Free Venezuela Campaign and the Pueblo a Pueblo Plan.

In the first of this two-part interview, Omaña talks about Venezuela’s landmark Seed Law, the different “knowledge systems” behind seeds, and the impact and dangers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

You were part of a movement that led to Venezuela’s Seed Law in 2015. Why was such legislation needed?

The movement harkens back to the Biological Diversity Congresses, around 2010. These meetings were very productive, they brought together a lot of people from agrarian struggles and land struggles that were still very active at the time. That spawned the Venezuela Libre de Transgénicos campaign (Venezuela GMO-Free), which alongside other collectives eventually built the movement known as Semillas del Pueblo (Seeds of the People).

Such a law is an absolute necessity in terms of sovereignty. The agribusiness model that was developed and imposed in the country, especially when it comes to cereals and corn, hinged on imported seeds. And the law is an instrument to boost or encourage national production. During the Bolivarian Revolution there were several institutional initiatives, some better than others, to advance in this direction, but this legal instrument was necessary.

At one point there was another law proposed, one that was very permissive towards genetically modified organisms (GMO), and this drove us to accelerate this process. We had some support from state institutions and criss-crossed the country, discussing and learning in the territories. Blanca Eekhout was an important ally at the National Assembly at the time, on behalf of the Great Patriotic Pole. This grassroots-driven process culminated with the law’s approval in late 2015.

What are some of the main principles established by the law?

One of the law’s features, which sets it apart from any similar seed law around the world, is that it contemplates two main seed systems that stem from two different knowledge structures. The 2015 Seed Law acknowledges what we could call a more formal system, with the certified seed. It also recognizes the system of local, traditional and ancestral knowledge, with the campesino, Indigenous and Afro-descendant seeds. The grassroots meetings and discussions produced this context and proposed the incorporation of these cultural elements to present seeds in their plurality.

Therefore, the law establishes two paths: certified seeds and local ones. This is key for us, because instead of denying a knowledge system, it acknowledges these two different ones. At the time, some critics claimed the law was against progress, but it promotes progress. It proposes participatory research processes and the improvement of local seeds and the generation of local varieties, which is something that campesinos have done for centuries.

And alongside this traditional knowledge system, the law recognizes the system that is borne out of the green revolution, which is the origin of certified seeds. This is the process that establishes that a seed must fulfill certain characteristics of homogeneity, stability and purity in order to be certified. All these things are developed in laboratories and trials, and the law promotes them via a certification system.

The other fundamental aspect is, of course, the anti-GMO character of the law. It forbids the use, multiplication, and sowing of genetically modified organisms. Importing is not forbidden, for example, GMO corn for consumption, but it can’t be sown. The Polar [private food and beverage] conglomerate has historically imported GMO corn, and we are eating that in our arepas. Investigating the presence of GMOs in the market is a pending task.

Going back to that system of campesino, Indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledge which you mentioned, what was the plan in order to implement it?

It’s important to highlight that the law emerged from this wonderful bottom-up construction process. A process that took place all over the country and directly involved at least 6 thousand people. It was an example of true participatory and protagonistic democracy as well as popular parliamentarism. One of the ideas laid out is the creation of local seed plans. For example, there could be seed plans in the Portuguesa-Barinas axis, or in coffee-producing circuits, coordinated with organized communities. These plans would focus on producing, preserving, and improving seeds.

There is also the proposal of creating “Seed Houses.” The law does not call them “banks.” And these would be accompanied by exchange systems. And what was to come after the Seed Law’s approval was taking the law to the territories. But this project ended up overrun by the crisis, which made us all focus on surviving. In the end, our momentum —all the popular thrust that we carried— faded away.

At the same time, from an institutional standpoint the topic was not part of the public discourse anymore. There were some efforts to kickstart this territorialization idea when Jorge Arreaza headed the Ministry of Communes, which we feel is the entity that needs to “wed itself” to this project. It would make perfect sense to consider a seed house in every commune, or every communal economic circuit. After the law’s enactment we made a map of producers, but this documentation had no impact beyond a few research articles.

There is no official information, only suspicions of the use of GMOs, for example, from very high crop yields. How can this control be implemented? What mechanisms exist?

The Seed Law, as well as the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol, both of which Venezuela is a party to, all these instruments coincide in the need for a national biosecurity commission. This commission would prioritize prevention while also following up on the complaints over suspected use of GMOs.

According to our law, the biosecurity commission should gather representatives from the Eco-socialism Ministry, which is the leading body, the Science and Technology, Communes and Agriculture ministries, and from popular power organizations as well. 

The other priority is a GMO-detection laboratory. In Venezuela, there are two possible candidates for that. One is the Advanced Studies Institute (IDEA), the other is the Eco-Socialism Ministry’s detection laboratory, which to date has not been inaugurated.

Regarding the detection of genetically modified organisms, it follows genetic detection techniques like PCR, which, after Covid-19, is something we are all familiar with. What it does is verify the existence of a specific GMO genetic sequence in the sample, just like Covid tests determine if our bodies carry a certain virus, its DNA. Nowadays, there are even kits to run this analysis on the field. So carrying out this research into the presence of GMO crops in the country would not be so complicated to implement, provided there is political will and an institution willing to take on the responsibility.

Staying on GMOs for a moment, there can be some confusion about the terminology, or accusations that opposition to GMOs amounts to a rejection of modernity. What are the main concepts that we should understand?

One of the most important aspects of this collective process that led to the Seed Law was its pedagogical component. It’s essential to talk to the people, and this includes understanding and debating the differences between the different seed-improvement techniques.

We have the campesino, local and traditional practices to improve seeds, and these are known as “variety” seeds. These are seeds that adapt to local conditions, which campesino families and organizations collectively develop, improve and safeguard over time. These seeds have a wide genetic diversity, which in turn makes them more resistant to pests and climate change. And above all, these are reproducible seeds, so you can sow them and the grain is fertile. For example, you sow a corn variety, from there you extract a seed and sow it again.

Campesino peoples have developed these seeds since the dawn of agriculture.

Later, what the Green Revolution did was take this process and reshape it with modern science techniques. Genetic improvement gets off the ground, we learn about the structure of DNA, and scientists start playing with it: selecting some traits to make them prevalent, suppressing others, with the goal, for instance, of making the fruit bigger. That’s when modern hybrid seeds appeared and started being sold to farmers. These are sterile seeds or with a very low rate of reproduction, and therefore they need to be purchased for every cycle.

In certain cases, there are ways of “going back” and rescuing the “wild” root of a certain hybrid, but this is far from simple. And hybrid seeds practically took over the entire market.

Then, in the 1990s, the progress in genetic techniques introduced transgenesis, which is defined by mixing genes from different species. Whereas hybrid seeds might mix different varieties, or have changes to the DNA itself, the transgenic or GMO seeds have genes from other species, introduced via genetic engineering into their DNA.

Seeds like Bt corn have genetic content from a bacteria [Bacillus thuringiensis] to boost protection against pests. In this case the foreign gene produces a protein that works like a pesticide. Another example, Roundup Ready “RR” corn, Monsanto’s cash cow, has the gene of a bacteria that produces an enzyme that makes the plant resistant to glyphosate, which is a wide-use agrochemical pesticide produced by the same company (Roundup is the brand). This means that everything can be bombarded with glyphosate. The plant survives, and we end up eating all that poison. So it’s not just about the genetic modifications, but the entire chemical package that makes it viable.

This extends to GMO soy and wheat, which is concerning because we are talking about a significant portion of staples consumed in our country.

GMO seeds get patented and sold, and like hybrids before them, they also took over the market. They did so because they represented extremely high crop yields, but at the cost of poisoning everything and destroying soils. Apart from the dependence on agrochemicals, there is also “horizontal” and “vertical” contamination, which is the transfer of genetic materials to other plants and animals, to the point where even local varieties get contaminated. Nearby fields get affected and this is dangerous for agro-biodiversity. 

There are no barriers in nature, and GMO contamination can produce problems like superweeds, resistant insects, and even bacteria with very dangerous consequences for ecosystems and human health. By now, it is also more than established that the consumption of GMO foods has very negative consequences for people’s health.

Beyond the impact on human health, what does GMO agriculture mean for the land?

This is something important to keep in mind, which is that high crop yields, already hinging on all these chemicals, cannot be sustained because the soil is destroyed. What is the solution for agribusinesses? They simply go and sow somewhere else. In Argentina, for example, major corporations are now renting land as opposed to buying it. Then they squeeze the life out of the soil for a few years to recover the investment before moving somewhere else. In the end, people are left with rotten and contaminated land.

Going back to detection, it is not that complicated to identify the presence of GMOs, but it would require a nationwide sampling, for example of corn. It could be done with the plants or even with corn flour, because we know that there are imports of GMO corn, but it is a bit more involved. There is a lot of speculation over the percentage of GMO corn in Venezuela, which makes the diagnosis all the more important.

It is key that the Eco-Socialism Ministry activates the biosecurity commission, which would have the immediate tasks of setting up the detection lab and undertaking the diagnosis we were talking about. Right now, a corn shipment arrives and we have no idea whether it is genetically modified or not.

The Agribusiness Atlas explains the strategy that was used in Brazil and Argentina. In a nutshell, the markets were flooded with GMOs so that there was no alternative except to regulate them; it was too late for an outright ban. The result is food labels everywhere with a “T” for transgenic. People keep consuming them, if nothing else due to a lack of alternatives, but it is identified.

From hybrid seeds to GMOs, with their toxic packages, these have all been advances in the agribusiness model. Now when we talk about “climate-smart agriculture,” or new advances in genetic engineering, everything is driven by corporate interests. We should not just think about the environmental impact, or how consumers’ health suffers, but also on the dependence that it imposes on campesinos. That and the progressive erasure of their knowledge, which is precisely what the Seed Law seeks to uphold.

I think that in Venezuela we have been somewhat fortunate, perhaps paradoxically. A consequence of the economic crisis has been a smaller penetration of the more advanced agribusiness models, while at the same time we saw advances in processes such as the rescuing of native seeds. The goal is to sustain them, and not leave them aside once conditions improve.