DEVELOPMENT-MEXICO: Farmers Agonise in Land of Inequality

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Feb 5 2003 (IPS) - Farmers are demanding urgent government action to prevent the total ruin of the agricultural sector in Mexico, where the 12 richest individuals represent more wealth than that produced by eight million rural families.

The deterioration of the rural social fabric – which farm activists say is accelerated by the expanded trade liberalisation process that Mexico began this year with United States and Canada – prompts an average of 600 rural residents to leave their land each day, fleeing poverty and heading to urban areas.

The country’s eight million farmers currently contribute five percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), three times less than they did 30 years ago, according to official figures.

Meanwhile, the 12 Mexicans included on the list of world’s richest people, compiled by the U.S. financial magazine Forbes, are worth the equivalent of 4.9 percent of GDP.

Mexico’s dramatic social inequalities survived the agrarian reforms of the early 20th century, brought about in the context of the Mexican Revolution, which cost approximately one million lives.

The great disparity between rich and poor also continued through 71 years of one-party rule under governments of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which claims to be the heir and defender of the revolutionary process.

Peasant organisations, which claim to represent the millions of descendants of those who fought in the revolution, have been staging protests since the end of last year to demand that the Vicente Fox government establish an emergency plan to save rural Mexico from ruin.

Fox, Mexico’s first non-PRI president, has promised to open a dialogue with farmers to attend to their requests. Talks could begin as soon as the end of this week.

The protesting farmers demand a reformulation of the agricultural trade liberalisation process under way with the United States and Canada, Mexico’s partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the treaty they say is responsible for their demise.

In January, in keeping with the NAFTA timeline, the three- nation bloc eliminated tariffs on 21 farm products, including potatoes, wheat, apples, onions, coffee, chicken and veal.

That step is part of the treaty’s chapter on regional integration, which establishes three phases for liberalising trade in farm products and livestock. The first phase began in 1994, when NAFTA took effect, the second started last month, and the third phase enters into force in 2008.

The deep disparities in income and the widespread poverty of rural Mexico are a timebomb that NAFTA is helping to detonate, says Víctor Quintana, researcher at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, a state bordering the United States.

Official figures show that 75 percent of Mexico’s poverty is found in the countryside. Half of the Mexican population of 100 million lives below the poverty line.

According to World Bank studies, the poorest 20 percent of the population receives 3.8 percent of total national income, while the wealthiest 20 percent takes in 55.3 percent.

But Fox says there is no relation between NAFTA and poverty, but rather, he argues, the treaty has proved beneficial, creating jobs and improving Mexico’s standard of living.

Mexican exports jumped from 60.9 billion dollars in 1994, when NAFTA took effect, to 158.4 billion dollars in 2001, while imports also more than doubled, from 79.3 billion dollars to 168.4 billion dollars in that period.

Historian Lorenzo Meyer, however, believes trade liberalisation plays a role in the growing social gap and increased poverty in rural Mexico, as do other elements like corruption, concentration of political power and the poor distribution of land.

The Superior Agrarian Tribunal, created 10 years ago, reports it has a caseload of some 30,000 land-related cases – border disputes between states, communities, farming colonies and private landowners.

At least 1,000 people have been killed in the last decade as a result of the agrarian conflict, according to the National Indigenist Institute.

The Permanent Agrarian Council, Mexico’s leading peasant organisation, for decades was co-opted by the powerful PRI and did not engage in major protests.

But now the Council and other groups – whether independent or linked to the political left – are working together to stage massive mobilisations to press the Fox administration to change its farm policies.

It is the first time in 70 years that farmers organisations of all stripes have come together to demand action to preserve the agricultural sector, and the first time that the government has offered to listen to them, notes Meyer.

“Something interesting might come out of this,” commented the historian.