AGRICULTURE: Future of Mexico’s Small Farmers Hangs on Talks

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Mar 4 2003 (IPS) - Mexican farmer Luis Rosas hopes the current dialogue between the government and small farmers’ groups will lead to new subsidies and a renegotiation of the timeframe for the lifting of tariffs under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but his hopes will likely be dashed.

The aim of the talks, which got under way in February, is to agree on temporary protective measures and hash out new policies that would save Mexico’s farmers and pull them out of the poverty in which 90 percent of the 25 million people living in the Mexican countryside are trapped.

The rural leaders ”tell me that the government will soon begin to provide help, which would be good. I sure hope it’s true,” Rosas told IPS.

Rosas, a poor 71-year-old farmer, is a member of the Democratic Campesino Union (UCD). He and 300 others are attending the negotiations with the government in the capital, which both sides hope will end with an agreement in mid-March, as an observer.

Mexico’s secretary of agriculture, Javier Usabiaga, said ”The government will only respond to viable proposals.” He also stressed that the terms of NAFTA – the free trade deal that has linked Mexico, Canada and the United States since 1994 – are not up for discussion.

The troubles facing Mexico’s agriculture sector worsened despite the agrarian revolution of the early 20th century, and 71 years of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governments that claimed to defend the tenets of that revolution, such as land reform.

Rosas explained that he grows corn on a two-hectare plot of land in the rural district of the state of Mexico, near the capital, which ”no longer gives me enough to live on.”

The left-leaning UCD is pressing for a renegotiation of NAFTA, which its members blame for most of the woes plaguing the Mexican countryside today. Rosas said his fellow union members have reassured him that their demand for assistance would be met.

The government has received more than 2,000 papers during the talks, many of which call for an increase in farm subsidies, temporary protective tariffs, and a review of NAFTA’s chapter on trade in agricultural goods.

Others urge a modification of water and irrigation policies, a curb on the importation and consumption of transgenic products, an amnesty for peasant farmers accused of various criminal offences, and a ban on the purchase of ”ejidos” by private companies.

Mexico’s 1917 constitution created ejidos, land owned by the government and farmed by communities. In 1991, a controversial amendment to the constitution permitted the sale of ejido lands.

Other suggestions are passage of a new law on indigenous culture and rights, similar to the demands set forth by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a poorly-armed indigenous group that emerged in 1994 in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas.

Proposals that are currently unworkable but ”make sense” will be the focus of a future discussion, said Usabiaga.

The government of Vicente Fox, the first Mexican president to come from outside the ranks of the PRI in seven decades, has offered to compile all of the demands and proposals put forth by small farmers, but said the state did not have the funds to shell out more subsidies.

It is also adamant that there is no possibility of renegotiating the timeframe spelled out by NAFTA for the lifting of tariffs on agro-products.

The government’s representatives at the negotiating table have been booed on a number of occasions, when they stated that subsidies could only be expanded if taxes were raised, and that the structure of the free market could not be modified ”by decree.”

The farmers’ associations won talks after holding demonstrations and staging roadblocks around Mexico in the last few months of 2002, and marching from all over the country to the capital in January to protest NAFTA’s latest phase of liberalisation of trade in agriculture.

In January, import duties were lifted on 21 farm products, including potatoes, wheat, apples, onions, coffee, chicken and lamb.

NAFTA outlined three stages for phasing out tariffs on agricultural products. The first began in 1994, when the free trade agreement went into effect, and the third is to begin in 2008.

The Fox administration has promised to live up to any accords it signs with the small farmers. But observers say it will only accept agreements that are based on free market policies and do not threaten fiscal equilibrium.

”If the government intends to negotiate vague agreements that lack substance, it will receive in response further mobilisations and demonstrations, and we will break off the talks,” said UCD leader José Durán.

Of the groups taking part in the talks, the most influential are the National Campesino Confederation (CNC), affiliated with the PRI, and a coalition of around 12 organisations of small farmers, which calls itself ”The Countryside Can’t Bear It Anymore!”

The government would be well advised not to downplay the problems facing rural Mexico – which is home to one- quarter of the population – or seek ”superficial” solutions, because it runs the risk of a major social outbreak, warned the CNC.

The majority of the groups of small farmers blame the problems of the rural sector on the opening of trade in agriculture and ”abandonment” of the countryside by the state.

Over the past two decades, Canada and the United States continued to provide generous subsidies to farmers as they opened up their markets. Mexico, on the other hand, slashed its support for agriculture during that period.

Public funding in support of farmers shrank by 95.5 percent between 1982 and 2001, said researcher José Luis Calva, at the Autonomous National University of Mexico.

In 1982, when the country began to adopt policies to free up trade, food imports amounted to 7.8 billion dollars a year – a figure that rose to over 11 billion dollars by 2001, Calva pointed out.

Twenty percent of the country’s workers live in the countryside, compared to just 2.6 percent in the United States, while U.S. productivity per hectare is 16 times higher than Mexico’s, according to studies.

The average state subsidy for farmers in the United States is 122 dollars per hectare, compared to 53 dollars per hectare in Mexico.

In Mexico there are 20 tractors for every 1,000 people working the land. In the United States, the ratio is 1,484 tractors per 1,000 workers.

According to Usabiaga, the gap between the level of agricultural development in Mexico and the United States is enormous, and this country must modernise if it hopes to compete.

To illustrate that it is possible to do so, he cited the experience of local fruit and vegetable producers who successfully incorporated technology and penetrated the U.S. market by means of large investments, leading to a more than 400 percent increase in exports of broccoli and other produce to the United States between 1994 and 2001.