US Aid To El Salvador Came With Strings Attached: Monsanto Seeds Required

US Aid To El Salvador Came With Strings Attached: Monsanto Seeds Required

El Salvador previously took steps toward banning glyphosate, the potential carcinogen found in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

By MintPress News Desk | July 13, 2015


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A protestor demonstrates against Monsanto in the annual world March Against Monsanto.
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SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Farmers and activists for natural agriculture in El Salvador successfully resisted efforts by the U.S. government to tie foreign aid to the use of GMO seeds, in the latest attempt to link relief money with profits for Monsanto, the controversial multinational agribusiness giant.

In 2013, the U.S. offered El Salvador $277 million in aid through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a foreign aid agency established under President George W. Bush. Then, in 2014, Dahr Jamail reports for Truthout, U.S. officials started putting increased pressure on the Central American country to make “economic and environmental policy changes” in return for receiving the next phase of the aid package. A key part of the disagreement involved programs to provide locally produced seeds to poor farmers, which officials argued violated the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement by favoring local products over those produced by multinational corporations.

For his 2014 article, Jamail interviewed Nathan Weller, policy director for the NGO EcoViva, who argued that when Salvadoran farmers are allowed to grow traditional crops, they outproduce modern GMO alternatives. “Domestic producers have proven their ability to cultivate a quality product to government standards, offered at a significantly lower price than what the government had historically paid for conventional seed supplied, by-in-large, by a singular Monsanto affiliate,” Weller explained. Efforts to encourage use indigenous corn seeds locally put millions into the local economy and produced record corn yields in 2013, he also noted.

Armed with evidence of the effectiveness of traditional agriculture when supported by the government, El Salvador successfully pushed back against the U.S. government, allowing it to continue to provide non-GMO seed to subsistence farmers while still receiving the valuable aid. According to Jamail’s latest report, published last week, the most recent round of contracts to provide seeds for farm aid programs relies exclusively on these local producers.

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