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 Editorials | Issues | January 2008 
Mexico's Protection for Farm Goods Over
 Associated Press
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 |  | 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.
- Vicente Martinez |  | |
Mexico City - 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. But as Jan. 1 drew near, farmers said the damage 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 are suffering.
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, Felicitas, 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.
"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 smuggler in Arizona.
Corn, beans, sugar and milk were granted special 15-year import protections when the North American Free Trade Agreement was negotiated in 1993, time that was supposed to be used to prepare Mexico for competition. But many say that didn't happen.
Farmers such as 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.
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. Mexico also has been slow to modernize.
The spike in corn prices has given Mexico's farm sector is "a little more breathing room," said Cruz Lopez, leader of the National Farmers Confederation.
It has also reduced the apocalyptic talk.
"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. His group is trying to join farmers together to sell their crops on a contract basis to large consumers, like food companies. |
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