24 Honduras
Zaitchic
Nine thousand years ago, give or take, Mesoamerican farmers bred the first maize cobs from a wild grass that grew thick in the river valleys of central Mexico. They were followed by farmers further to the south, in what is now Guatemala and Honduras, who developed other maize varieties around the time African farmers began to cultivate the cowpea. These ancient crop breeders did not know of each other’s existence, but their descendants have been drawn together into a global movement to defend the genetic survival of their agricultural inheritance.
This fight has reached the most isolated corners of maize’s expansive “region of origin,” such as Concepción de María, Honduras, a village high in the mountains near the country’s southwestern border with Nicaragua. Most residents are Indigenous or mestizo descendants of early maize breeders, eking out livelihoods on tiny mountainside plots that look down on fertile, well-irrigated valleys devoted to commodity crops owned by land barons such as Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the corrupt former Honduran president, who signed his country’s hated seed law in 2012.
A dirt road winding uphill from the village square leads to the shack office of the Association of Ecological Committees of Southern Honduras. For a decade, as the battle over the seed law gathered momentum, the tin-roofed structure served as the war room where a wiry farmer named Feliciano Castillo Avila led the local resistance to it. Recalling the protests with a reporter today, the 58-year-old Avila, normally earthy and quick with a joke, turned somber and businesslike at the mention of what he will always call “the Monsanto law.” (In 2018, the German conglomerate Bayer paid $63 billion for Monsanto and its scientific assets.)
“The law attacked our patrimony, our right to feed ourselves,” Avila said. Opening a desk drawer, he removed a manila folder marked “LEY UPOV,” or “UPOV law,” a reference to the Geneva-based, industry-dominated NGO that drafts model “plant variety protection” laws for the Global South. Avila’s file contained a dog-eared, soil-stained printout of Honduras’s 2012 Law for Protection of Plant Varieties.
The high fines are a tactic to deprive farmers of their land.
Five thousand farmers showed up and drafted a statement rejecting GMOs and the Law for Protection of Plant Varieties.
In the fall of 2021, the Honduran Supreme Court struck down the seed law in a decision that cited the farmers’ rights enshrined in the national Constitution and in the UN Declaration of the Rights of Peasants, adopted in 2018.
(A bloodier version of the Honduran story played out in Guatemala in 2014)