AGRICULTURE-MEXICO: From Poverty to Promises

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Apr 28 2003 (IPS) - The hype and glitz that surrounded the ceremony in which the Mexican government and farmers’ associations signed a new rural development agreement Monday stood in contrast to its content, which hardly resembled the far-reaching measures demanded by small farmers.

In the presence of more than 1,000 guests, including state governors and the heads of several of Mexico’s farmers’ movements, President Vicente Fox said the national farm accord marked the start of a ”new era” for rural Mexico, where 75 percent of the country’s poor are concentrated.

Interior Secretary Santiago Creel said the pact would fulfill a long-standing debt to Mexico’s small farmers, who contribute five percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), three times less than 30 years ago, according to official statistics.

But the National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organisations (UNORCA) refused to sign the new accord, arguing – as did a number of analysts – that it was too ”superficial.”

Rafael Galindo, a representative of the Permanent Agrarian Congress, a group aligned with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which did sign the document, said that ”the pact will not change the reality of the poverty” that plagues the country’s small farmers, and warned that ”this accord does not imply a halt to the struggle of peasant farmers.”

The new pact, signed after numerous nationwide protests by small farmers and nearly four months of negotiations, contains promises by the government. But it does not specify where the funds for the new measures are to come from, nor when they are to go into effect.

”Some of the points of the accord are sensible, but most of them simply reiterate good intentions and previously existing plans,” Sergio Maestre, a professor of agricultural law at the La Salle University in Mexico City, told IPS.

The heads of farmers’ associations with ties to the two main opposition parties, the PRI and the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), took part in signing the agreement at the ceremony in the National Palace, the seat of government. Fox described the event as ”historic.”

”The national farm accord is the fruit of a broad, all- inclusive, respectful and plural process, generated from the very entrails of rural society and supported by a presidency that has opened up to society, that listens to its demands, that accepts proposals, and that responds with commitments,” he added.

According to the new pact, the government will provide 1.8 billion dollars in additional aid to farmers in the medium-term, which will come on top of this year’s agriculture budget of 11.7 billion dollars.

Part of the 700 million dollars in windfall oil export revenues, the result of the rise in international petroleum prices, will also be earmarked for the country’s agriculture sector.

The agreement includes government commitments to support agricultural production and sales, and to provide solutions for some 30,000 disputes over land titles and property boundaries between states, local farm communities, and private owners.

In addition, the pact pledges support for improving rural health systems and education and building rural housing, as well as special assistance for women and the elderly.

But the revolutionary changes that the farmers’ groups said they would negotiate with the government are nowhere to be seen in the accord.

For example, agreements to lift tariffs on farm products in trade with the United States and Canada, Mexico’s partners in the North American Free Trade Agremeent (NAFTA), will not be suspended, as farmers had loudly demanded with roadblocks and demonstrations in which they even herded livestock into public buildings.

Under NAFTA, Mexico removed some of the last remaining tariffs on U.S. farm imports in January.

The government merely promised to push the United States and Canada for safeguards designed to protect Mexico’s corn and beans, products that are to be opened up to free trade in 2008, and to ”review” the rest of the agreements reached under NAFTA.

Mexico’s annual food imports rose from 7.79 billion dollars in 1982, when the country began to adopt free trade policies, to more than 11 billion dollars by 2001, noted researcher José Luis Calva at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Around 20 percent of Mexico’s labour force lives in the countryside, compared to just 2.6 percent in the United States. And productivity per hectare is 16 times higher in the United States than in Mexico.

In the United States, the average state subsidy for farmers is 122 dollars per hectare, against 53 dollars per hectare in Mexico – a situation that the new pact will do little to change. Farm organisations had demanded a doubling of subsidies.

Farm associations complain that because of NAFTA, Mexico now imports 95 percent of the soy beans consumed in the country, 58.5 percent of the rice, and 40 percent of the beef.

Among the demands set forth by farmers that were not addressed by the agreement were a curb to the freeing up of trade in farm products on the domestic market, the adoption of a system of price guarantees, a ban on imports and sales of transgenic crops, and a call for an amnesty for rural activists jailed on various charges.

Also ignored by the accord was the call for passage of a law on indigenous rights and culture that reflects the demands and grievances of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, a poorly- armed indigenous insurgent group in the southernmost state of Chiapas.

In fact, none of the organisations that signed the accord represents Mexico’s indigenous people, who comprise 10 percent of the population of 100 million, and who live mainly in rural Mexico.

According to official figures, 90 percent of the 25 million people who live in the countryside are poor.

The age-old problems plaguing the rural areas of Mexico persisted and were even aggravated despite the early 20th century agrarian revolution, in which around one million people died, and the seven decades of rule by the PRI (until the elections of 2000), a party that espoused rural causes and the ideals of the revolution, such as land reform.

”In spite of the government’s optimism, this accord is incomplete and overly vague, and it is yet to be seen whether it will be complied with,” said Maestre.

The most powerful rural groups taking part in the negotiations with the government were the National Campesino Confederation and the Permanent Agrarian Council, both of which are linked to the PRI, as well as the umbrella grouping The Countryside Can’t Take Anymore.

UNORCA and the Central Union of Peasant and Grassroots Organisations participated in the talks but refused to sign the pact.