September 13, 2019

Mexico’s Wonder Plant

2 minutes

In 1979, an American naturalist named Thomas Hallberg visiting a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico was amazed to find a type of local maize – or corn – that grew nearly 20 feet high in poor-quality soil even though the local farmers did not use any fertilizer.

The unique corn plant had aerial roots that grew a mucous-like gel

just before harvest season. It seemed

totally implausible, but the plant seemed to be fixing its own nitrogen: extracting it from the air and somehow making

it useful to the plant.

In 1992, Hallberg returned with a group of Mexican scientists and

collected samples to study in his lab.

His research showed that the maize indeed received nitrogen from the air

through its aerial roots. It took over

20 years to figure out what was going on in the plants. It turns out that bacteria that thrive in the

low-oxygen environment of the maize’s mucus pulls nitrogen from the air and

feeds it to the plant.

Scientists will probably spend years figuring out if a commercial

application of this indigenous maize is viable.

It isn’t guaranteed that the self-fertilizing trait of the plant can be

bred into a commercial crop. But if it

can, the payoff would be huge. Farmers

spend more than $3 billion a year on corn fertilizer in the US alone.

A vexing problem is who should reap the financial benefits of the

maize. The isolated village where the

plant is grown has already signed an agreement to share in any such

benefits. But there are other Oaxacan

villages that also grow the plant.

Mexico’s wonder plant is likely to be caught up in the growing issue of biopiracy, which is the exploitation of indigenous knowledge and biological resources without permission.

**********

Web Links

Indigenous Maize: Who Owns the Rights to Mexico’s ‘Wonder’ Plant?

Photo credit: ALLEN VAN DEYNZE/UC DAVIS

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

...more

View all episodes

By Randy Simon

4.7

1515 ratings