Agrarian Apocolypse Looms in Mexico

At the stroke of midnight this past January 1, 100 or so farmers and day laborers from both sides of the border converged on the Cordoba Las Americas bridge that connects El Paso and Ciudad Juarez to mark the demise of Mexican agriculture. In accordance with the timetables set by NAFTA—signed by Mexico, the U.S., and Canada 14 years ago—as of January 1, 2008, all tariffs on corn, beans, powdered milk, sugar, and 200 agricultural products were reduced to zero, setting in motion a doomsday scenario that farmers’ organizations here say will inevitably lead to crisis in the Mexican “campo” or countryside, mass abandonment of unsustainable plots, increased hunger, and even armed rebellion by the nation’s beleaguered small farmers. 

“If they build steel walls to keep our people from entering the United States, we will make walls of people to keep their products out of Mexico,” a leader of the militant farmers’ front El Barzon Popular growled into his bullhorn as the protesters spread out in the frigid dark to block the lanes of the bridge over the river the U.S. calls the Rio Grande and Mexico calls the Rio Bravo. Strung across the roadway, each protester carried a letter of the alphabet in his or her hand, but despite the fear in the Mexican countryside as the tariffs plummet to nothing, the farmers could barely muster enough people to spell out “Sin Maiz No Hay Pais, Y Tampoco Sin Frijol”  (“Without Corn, There Is No Country, And Also Without Beans”). 

Despite the midnight deadline, the immediate impacts of this premeditated apocalypse may be postponed for a while—at least until the spring planting when farmers have to calculate how many hectares they can afford to plant crops. Unlike the U.S., farm subsidies in Mexico are a thing of the past, stripped away years ago in the rush to NAFTA. 

Reduction to zero tariffs is not in fact a steep drop. Fourteen years of incremental decreases had wiped out 90 percent of all protectionist barriers by 2007. Moreover, NAFTA-driven dumping by lavishly subsidized U.S corn growers that allowed them to drop their loads in Mexico below cost and still make a boodle is being blunted by skyrocketing ethanol subsidies as maize climbs to record quotes on U.S. commodity markets—the grain hit an all-time record $177 a metric ton last spring, but has begun to slide as storage capacity for ethanol corn is saturated and distribution lags far behind production. 

Meanwhile, the uptick in world corn prices ripples out in the global marketplace with tortillas topping at nine pesos per kilo on New Year’s Day. Tortilla prices in Mexico have risen 126 percent under NAFTA from 1994 to 2007 despite, or because of, massive corn imports from the U.S. (44 million tons in the same period). 

According to the World Food & Agricultural Organization (FAO), the world has only 11 weeks of consumable corn reserves left, the lowest inventory since record keeping began. Corn prices will remain unstable until producers can sort out the relationship between food cropping and biofuels, the FAO cautioned in a recent report. Low reserves and high prices are a sure formula for social upheaval, underscores the UN organization, pointing out that grain riots broke out in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Guinea, Mauritania, and Senegal last year. 

Despite the New Years protest on the Cordoba Bridge, the truth of the matter is that formal notice of the death of Mexican agriculture is long overdue. The damage was done even before NAFTA (TLCAN in Mexico) was a gleam in Ronald Reagan’s eye. As Mexico decapitalized the “campo” following the 1982 default crisis, which allowed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to annex the Mexican economy and initiate “structural readjustment” of the agricultural sector, the nation ceded its nutritional sovereignty to U.S. imports. 

The migration of impoverished subsistence farmers from southern Mexico that swelled the Mexico City misery belt in sprawling slums like Nezahualcoytl was the first evidence of the evisceration of the “campo,” ventures Harvard professor John Womack in a recent email. Womack is author of the definitive biography of Emiliano Zapata, the farmer-general who remains emblematic of the campesinos’ struggle for land. 

NAFTA-TLCAN, which, after all, is an integral part of the same scheme of “structural adjustments” to globalize Mexico’s agricultural sector and force dependence on export cropping, has only accelerated the stampede from the countryside and into the migration stream. By the trade treaty’s 10th anniversary in 2004, NAFTA-TLCAN had driven 1.2 million farmers off the land, according to a Carnegie Endowment evaluation of the pact’s impacts issued that year. Since each farm family averages out to six people, the total number of expulsees from the campo hovers around six million. 

In 1993, just before NAFTA-TLCAN became fact, Mexico’s secretary of agriculture contracted UCLA professor Raul Hinojosa to calculate the fallout among poor farmers. The researcher’s worst-case scenario was the diaspora of ten million campesinos. Now, with the reduction of NAFTA-TLCAN tariffs to zero, that “goal” is just around the corner. 

Where do they go? During ex-president Vicente Fox’s 6-year term in office, 2.4 million Mexicans, 70 percent of them reportedly displaced farmers, migrated to the U.S. despite the formidable barriers erected by Washington to keep them out. U.S. anti-immigration pundits like Lou Dobbs and Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls that beat up on undocumented Mexican workers might do better to pin the tail on the correct donkey—NAFTA-TLCAN. 

According to CONAPI, Mexico’s Council on Population, 29 million Mexicans and Mexican descendants now live in the United States, 2 million more than live in the Mexican countryside from which so many of them have fled. Ironically, those 27 million who remain on the land back home are sustained by the $22 billion in “remisas” that those who have gone north send back, Mexico’s second source of Yanqui dollars behind $100 barrel petroleum. Which is to say the Mexican agricultural sector is supported by those who have abandoned it. 

Since NAFTA-TLCAN started in 1994, the same month the Zapatistas rose in Chiapas to remind Washington just how desperately poor and unstable its new trading partner really was, four Mexican presidents—Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, and now Felipe Calderon—apparently rendered dumb by Washington’s dominance, have turned a deaf ear to demands by farmers’ organizations to re-open the treaty-agreement’s agricultural chapters for renegotiation. Indeed, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s insistence on renegotiating NAFTA-TLCAN was a nuts and bolts factor in the campaign to deny him the presidency. 

Calderon, who was awarded high office amid widespread fraud, and his cohorts, like Agriculture Secretary (SAGARPA) Alberto Cardenas never tire of chanting the mantra that the trade pact has nearly tripled Mexican agricultural exports to the U.S. But what these neo-liberal mouthpieces forget to point out is that Mexico has run a $2 bilion deficit in agricultural exports to the U.S. every year since the late 1990s as U.S. imports overwhelm the Mexican market. 

Moreover, the Calderon-Cardenas happy stats disingenuously inflate the numbers. For example, Mexican beer on its way to transnational distributors who now invest heavily in breweries south of the border, accounted for 18 percent of $8.5 billion in agricultural exports to the north through October 2007. Under NAFTA, beer is considered an agricultural export. 

The president and his cronies don’t identify who is actually benefiting from the NAFTA-TLCOM boom. According to the National Farmers Confederation (CNC), a creature of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party and once gung-ho for the trade treaty, only 2 percent of all Mexican producers are sharing the largesse. The other 98 percent, including 3.5 million corn farmers, 85 percent of whom grow on 5 hectares or less (average U.S. corn spreads are 270 acres), have no access to the NAFTA-TLCAN market whatsoever. The big winners? About 20,000 corporate tomato growers, avocado and tropical fruit moguls, and specialty crop niche market sharpies (organic coffee, etc.), plus the beer barons. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, two out of the three top chicken suppliers to Mexico are U.S. headquartered—Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson. Mexico now imports 22 percent of its corn, 55 percent of its wheat (which went to zero tariff in 2003), and 72 percent of its rice from U.S. growers. Wal-Mart, with over 700 megastores and now the largest employer and retail food seller in the country, provides a ready-made distribution system for getting U.S. agricultural products to Mexican homes. Wal-Mart, Mexico’s leading tortilla seller, is the poster child for the NAFTA-TLCAN credo of “convergence”—selling the same product in the same stores at the same price on all sides of the border.

But if Mexico’s agricultural apocalypse has already come to pass, new ones are lighting up the radar screens. The zero tariff deadline will particularly play out on southern Mexico’s mid-level sugar growers, mostly “pequenos proprietarios” or “small land owners” and their huge workforces of underclass campesinos. In respect to the beloved “frijol”—although Cardenas’s SAGARPA insists that Mexicanos no longer eat beans and the inundation of U.S.-grown legumes will have little impact on diet—beans are an emblematic commodity which combined with maize form a protein that has sustained the Mexicans for centuries. 

But the most lethal blow from zero tariffs will be a speeded-up abandonment of their plots by small corn farmers and their immersion in an already-swollen migration stream, a tale that does not presage a happy ending. Traditional migration routes are now shut down by U.S. militarization of the border, ICE raids in U.S. Mexican communities, and the anti-Mexican hysteria sweeping the northern neighbor as the presidential campaigns peak. 

With this safety valve shut off, rural youth have little option but to turn to drug cropping. “It’s the only sector where there is any profit,” writes National Autonomous University researcher Simon David Avila Pacheco. A hectare under poppy (“amapola”) yields 11 kilos of heroin worth about $3.5 million pesos. Marijuana, which is bulkier and harder to transport, brings in about $1.7 million pesos, 10 times what a campesino will make with a legitimate crop. But even drug cropping runs the risk of confronting U.S. market forces as we are swimming in cut-rate Afghani heroin, the bitter fruit of Washington’s war in that devastated country, and homegrown now accounts for the bulk of marijuana reserves in El Norte. 

Secretary of Agriculture Cardenas, a former governor of Jalisco state, is an agro-tycoon from the central Mexican “Bajio,” a fertile swatch of land from which big growers reap fortunes in export agriculture. A holdover from the Fox administration (Fox too made his fortune in Bajio export agriculture), he is a stocky, pugnacious, and not very bright man who represents the right wing of the right wing PAN party, the “Yunque,” a secretive Catholic cabal based in the Bajio from which Fox drew many of his cabinet members.  

So when he had to sell Mexicans on the “benefits” of zero tariffs, Cardenas came up with the brilliant gimmick of getting Lorena Ochoa, the world’s number one woman golfer and a Guadalajara native, to extol the health of the Mexican “campo”—an unfortunate play on words (a “campo de golf” is a golf course), which incited farmers’ organizations to schedule a national march on Mexico City on January 31. 

For the Mexican underclass, “campos de golf” are the playgrounds of their “patrones” or bosses. Ten years ago, speculators secretly bought community land in Tepotzlan up in Zapata country in Morelos state to build a country club and golf course and began sucking up what little ground water the farmers still had left. Wild protests—the so-called “Golf War”—ensued. In the midst of flying rocks and burning construction machinery, a U.S. reporter asked the newly-elected mayor (the old one had sold out to the golfers) why the people were so agitated about a golf course. Lazaro Rodriguez paused, put his hand on the reporter’s shoulder, and stared him in the eye like he was from Mars. “John,” the exasperated mayor made it clear, “we don’t play golf here.” 

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John Ross is author of Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible.