• IMPORTS: Mexico’s corn imports reached a new high of 4.2 million metric tons, mainly from the US, during the first quarter of 2021, as a severe drought settled in nearly half of the country. The increase in imports puts into doubt president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s goal to achieve self-sufficiency in corn.
• CORN: According to GCMA consulting firm, Mexico’s corn imports grew 16.8 percent from the same quarter last year. The vast majority of Mexico’s imports are of US yellow corn used primarily for livestock feed. Yet, white corn imports from the US for human consumption also grew 55.3 percent.
• PROTEST: “Day Zero is very close. The economic crisis is deepening along with a broad drought that we suffer in Mexico: 15 states are about to run out of water”, said Álvaro López Ríos, head of Mexican farmers’ organization UNTA at a sit-in outside Mexico’s National Water Commission.
• GOAL: On the last day of 2020, the López Obrador administration published a decree ordering the phase-out of the use of genetically-modified corn for human consumption by 2024. According to the US government, 95 percent of the US yellow corn exported to Mexico was genetically-modified.
