Mexico’s Protection For Farm Goods Runs Out, Squeezing Farmers

LOCAL, INTERNATIONAL REPORTS — Farmers from Mexico spent the day on Tuesday marching to the top of the Bridge of the Americas to protest changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement, changes which they said will bring them more hardship as they try to make a living.

For 15 years, Mexican farmers have feared the day when the last import protections end for the country’s ancestral crops of corn and beans. Those protections expired January 1, 2008, and farmers say they alreadly recognize the damage that has been done: Mexico has plunged deeply into a model of globalized agriculture where farmers are ill-prepared to compete, and even people who don’t farm for a living are suffering.

One of the demonstators at the border was Victor Quintana, a state congressman from Chihuahua, said the farmers want to control the importation of certain items from the United States, especially corn.

The anti-NAFTA rallying cry is “Sin maiz no hay pais,” or “Without corn there is no country.”

“This is going to hurt the Mexican campesinos and Mexican consumers very bad,” he said. Quintana said American corn farmers have unfair advantages over Mexico.

Nobody knows that better than Vicente Martinez, who grows corn, beans and some coffee in the green mountains of Tepetlan, Veracruz. In July, his daughter Felictas died trying to cross the desert to enter the United States. Martinez blames a combination of free trade and dwindling government farm-support programs that leave rural families with little choice but to migrate; his daughter found no work in their farming town to support her four children, other than cleaning houses for little pay.

“The only thing left to do is run for the United States … or sit around looking like idiots, because there’s nothing to do here, nothing,” said Martinez, whose daughter was abandoned by a people smuggler in Arizona.

Corn, beans, sugar and milk were granted special 15-year import protections when the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was negotiated in 1993, time that was supposed to be used to prepare Mexico for competition. But many say that didn’t happen.

And while global prices for these commodities are booming, Mexico’s farm parcels tend to be tiny and only marginally productive, so higher prices internationally have done little to improve people’s lives here.

Farmers like Juan Antonio Lopez, who plants corn on about 7.5 acres in Pino Suarez, Durango, have little corn left over to sell, and often must buy grain at higher international prices for their families and animals.

Even somewhat larger farms have trouble storing crops and getting them to market, in part because the government has allowed state purchasing agencies, granaries and distribution networks to wither, preferring instead to rely on market forces.

Mexico also has been slow to modernize to take advantage of ethanol demands and genetically-modified crops.

Martinez was among a group of farmers demonstrating this month in Mexico City to demand the government take a greater role in assuring farmers a fair price, as well as networks to store and sell their grain.

But even that wouldn’t benefit most Mexican farmers, whose plots are so small – under 6 acres – that they engage in subsistence agriculture, not even producing enough to eat.

“It isn’t enough to live on, and besides, we have to plant with mules and a hand plow, because there have not been any programs to provide us a tractor,” Lopez said.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Officials in 1993 said the 15-year transition period would give farmers here a chance to modernize, diversify their crops and begin to export them, or at least find seasonal work at a new wave of factories the trade pact was expected to bring to the Mexican countryside.

None of that happened, says Victor Suarez, the leader of a farm cooperative group that works to start storage silos and direct farm-to-consumer sales of corn tortillas.

“There was no transition period like they promised 15 years ago,” Suarez said. “We are not ready (for the trade opening), the only ones who are ready are the 20 big agribusiness corporations.”

In fact, Mexico’s government has already allowed global market forces to be strongly felt in Mexico. For years, it has allowed more corn imports under lower tariffs than NAFTA requires. This is why the U.S. ethanol boom caused a spike in tortilla prices early this year, which in turn sparked street protests in Mexico.

For a country long used to a highly regulated agricultural market, the “tortilla crisis” was a bitter taste of the power of agribusiness consortiums that allegedly hoarded corn and speculated with prices.

But the spike in corn prices has given Mexico’s beleaguered farm sector is “a little more breathing room,” said Cruz Lopez, leader of the National Farmers Confederation.

It has also reduced the apocalyptic talk and strengthened the realization that Mexican farmers may have to depend on themselves.

“We have changed our rhetoric. Remember that 15 years ago, we were saying that on Jan. 1 … we would be flooded with corn, that all the corn farmers in Mexico would disappear,” said Hector Salazar, secretary of the National Corn Producers Federation. Now, instead of talking doom, his group is trying to get farmers to join together to sell their crops on a contract basis to large consumers, like food companies.

Such efforts to build agricultural cooperatives – similar to the Grange halls and dairy cooperatives formed in the United States in the 1800s and 1900s – may be key to Mexican farmers’ survival.

“They have only one way to survive, and that is by understanding the need to organize,” said Hugo Garcia, an academic and co-author of the book “The Corn and Tortilla Crisis in Mexico.”

Mexican farming is important for environmental and social reasons as well as a brake against emigration. When forced to work odd jobs or migrate, many rural residents lose their farming skills, making them poorer stewards of the land precisely when Mexico faces threats of erosion, desertification and deforestation.

And Joost Martens, the regional director for Oxfam, notes that what happens in Mexico may presage the fate of farmers in much of the developing world.

“NAFTA has been the model not only for the United States, in negotiating with Andean nations, Central America and the Caribbean, but the European Union, as well, is following the NAFTA model in its “association agreements,” said Martens. “The basic thing has been ‘NAFTA parity’.”

— The Associated Press contributed to this report