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 Business News | December 2007 
Mexican Farmers Struggle to Survive
 Claudia Melendez Salinas - Monterey County Herald
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Francisco Cruz gave up his farm more than a decade ago.
Then 20, Cruz had been earning a living as a sharecropper in Oaxaca, giving half his harvest to the landowner. It was a subsistence living that he supplemented by working in construction.
But when his wife Azucena announced she was pregnant, he realized his fledgling family could not survive on his meager earnings from the cornfield. Cruz emigrated to Monterey County, a year after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
His story is not unique. In the last 13 years, 2 million peasants left Mexico's countryside in search of better opportunities in larger employment centers in Mexico or in the United States, according to Mexico's Statistics Institute. The undocumented population in the U.S. is now estimated at 12 million.
Some experts believe the immigration dilemma could be better understood and perhaps resolved if more attention was paid to the economic circumstances that bring people here.
According to analysts, millions of farmers like Cruz are the casualties of a tide of multinational circumstance: NAFTA, the U.S. Farm Bill and a dearth of effective economic initiatives in Mexico.
The combination, which allows for the consolidation of markets, has made it easier for large corporations and farm operations to expand their reach but almost impossible for small producers to survive. These subsistence farmers in turn have abandoned their land in search of better opportunities.
Critics point to NAFTA as the biggest example. The "free trade" agreement was promoted as a win-win for both Mexico and the United States, expected to spark an economic renaissance in Mexico and slow the migration of job-hungry Mexicans to the U.S.
Instead, according to the critics, NAFTA actually launched a new wave of immigration among undercapitalized farmers in Mexico's agrarian countryside who found it impossible to compete with subsidized U.S. products.
"What essentially happened was, as peasant farmers found it harder to make a living, ... more family members were sent off the farm to make money to support the family," said Timothy Wise, deputy director of the Global Development and Environmental Institute at Tufts University. "More of those family members headed for the United States because Mexico was not creating jobs at the rate NAFTA promised."
In the balance of farm trade, the majority of Mexican farmers were at a distinct disadvantage, unable to compete with the modern might of U.S. agriculture.
"In our country we still find farmers who use oxen to pull carts to farm," said Congresswoman Susana Monreal Avila, who represents one of the largest agricultural states in Mexico.
"This is what they use because they don't have the access to other tools and that places (them) at a disadvantage."
Speaking to a group of U.S. activists and students touring Mexico with Food First, a Berkeley-based advocacy group that promotes policies to eradicate hunger, Monreal Avila said she's heading a group lobbying to renegotiate the agricultural provisions of NAFTA, which she blames for the deterioration of Mexico's agrarian industry.
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox defends NAFTA as a program that has brought progress to the country and increased agricultural trade with the United States.
"We are now exporting more than ever," Fox told The Herald during a recent visit to Monterey County. "Maybe those who didn't modernize couldn't compete."
Fewer in agriculture
Before NAFTA, agriculture in Mexico accounted for 25 percent of the country's work force. Today, agriculture accounts for 19 percent of employment in the country, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, an international group.
It's not the first time Mexico has fallen prey to the vagaries of trade policies that have affected its farmers.
During the 1980s, United States farmers gained access to new markets under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and used their technological superiority to gain the upper hand in those markets.
"The costs of sustaining its own national food system and the availability of subsidized grains from the U.S. ultimately resulted in Mexico becoming even more dependent on grain imports from the United States," according to Ann Aurelia Lopez, a research associate with the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
But U.S. policies are not solely to blame for the destruction of Mexican small farms, some analysts say. The Mexican government has allowed the deterioration of the peasant economy to take place, and it has been slow to react with economic development policies of its own.
"People are leaving for the U.S. because Mexico is not creating jobs at the rate NAFTA promised," said Wise. "There's not enough jobs for the people entering the work force and exiting agriculture. That's the real push factor. If there were ... jobs in other parts of Mexico, that's where these migrants would go."
NAFTA in place since 1994
Even though NAFTA has been in place since 1994, its impact on Mexico may not be complete. Its remaining trade barriers put in place to soften the blow to Mexican farmers are scheduled to be lifted in January. Some fear those changes, coupled with the Farm Bill that continues to subsidize U.S. growers, will spark another wave of immigration from Mexico.
"The consequences will be worse," said Victor Quintana, researcher with Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez. "We have tariffs on corn but they're going to be eliminated, so there will be a lot more importation of corn. (Local farmers) can't compete with those prices. They can't compete."
The Farm Bill a massive legislative package designed to rule everything in U.S. agriculture from subsidies to rural credit to nutrition programs expired in September. The new bill is currently being debated in Congress.
While controversial on several fronts, small farming advocates believe continued corn-subsidy policies in the bill could put Mexican farmers at a disadvantage again.
They say the subsidies help large agricultural operations in the U.S. sell their commodities abroad at reduced prices. Similar subsidies in previous farm bills have indirectly contributed to the demise of small Mexican farmers, said Alexandra Spieldoch, director of the Trade and Global Governance Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Police in Minnesota.
"It's definitely related," said Spieldoch. "Looking at the Farm Bill's overall agenda is to increase exports and expand trade, while Mexico made clear reforms to dismantle domestic supports."
Faced with few or no options, many of those farmers have abandoned their land and moved to the United States.
"There's a growing awareness in general that the Farm Bill is much more than a farm bill," Spieldoch continued. "People in the U.S. tend to not know a whole lot about trade policy and its impact elsewhere."
Debate centers on corn
In particular, the debate centers around corn, which is Mexico's primary food staple. The average Mexican consumes about 280 pounds of corn a year, the second-highest per capita consumption in the world. It is Mexico's primary crop, covering about 60 percent of the country's cultivated area and employing more than 3 million campesinos, according to Mexican researcher Alejandro Nadal.
Corn is the largest grain crop grown in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, corn is grown on 80 million acres and about 20 percent of the production is exported to other countries.
Mexico is its second-largest buyer, and the flood of U.S. corn has pushed down local prices. Nadal estimates that the price of Mexican corn dropped 33 percent during a five-year period ending in 2003, while the cost of supplies in the country increased 169 percent.
Farm Bill subsidies to corn producers in the United States, coupled with the opening of trade between countries after the North American Free Trade Agreement created a double whammy for corn growers in Mexico, according to critics.
But Jack King, manager of national affairs and research for the California Farm Bureau, said that the exodus of Mexicans to the United States should not be blamed on the Farm Bill.
"I think Mexico may have some limitations on the crops they can grow, their amount of resources and water," he said. "My guess is that people from Mexico would try to enter the United States for job opportunities even with (a) change of our farm support programs. I can't necessarily draw a straight line between cause and effect there."
The Senate is scheduled to continue its debate on the Farm Bill in the coming weeks, but few believe the legislation will be approved by the end of the year.
Claudia Melιndez Salinas can be reached at 7053-6755 or cmelendez(at)montereyherald.com. |
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