"Los campesinos"

by Paul Harris

22 April 2003

On January 31, 2003, a march took place in Mexico, not against what was then an impending war with Iraq fomented by Mexico's northern neighbor, not to protest against some local injustice, not to speak out about global warming or about abortion or any of the other glamorous issues.

Marches in Mexico are certainly not a rare event, but these were mainly farmers and not since the agrarian reform movement of the nineteen-thirties under President Cárdenas had so many farmers hit the bricks. The campesinos showed up to express their anger over an issue that is critical to them and critical to the world. Furthermore, they did not show up alone; they were joined by people from trade unions, universities, and social activists who have appreciated the scourge of globalized free trade.

In an earlier article I wrote for YellowTimes.org, I discussed that Mexico probably did the worst out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), despite the whining in Canada and the United States about all the jobs moving to the sunny south. The march of these farmers in January arose out of that situation. For unlike traditional complaints and appeals by farmers, these folks were not looking for handouts or government programs to alleviate their poverty or to help them sell their products; they were looking for solid national policy on rural development and, most important, a renegotiation of the agricultural portion of NAFTA.

In fact, the concerns of the campesinos constitute, simply, the world in microcosm. The Mexican farmers' movement reveals a serious crisis in Mexico's rural community, to be sure, but the real underlying problem is a disbelief in the principles of free trade itself held by the people worldwide who are most ravenously hurt by it.

It is a myth to assert that free trade exists in the first place, in Mexico or anywhere else. The logic behind free trade is that prices are determined by supply and demand and that the most efficiently produced goods or services will always win out. In reality, subsidies, financing factors, and industrial oligopolies have created conditions that service only the needs of the powerful trans-national corporations. In the United States, just looking at the agricultural sector, the 2002 Farm Bill authorized farm subsidies totaling $248.6 billion, or about 40 percent of the net farm income. Much of that subsidy flows to major agricultural corporations rather than to farmers.

To put this in some perspective, according to the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP), it cost an average of $3.41 a bushel to produce corn in the United States and it sold internationally for $2.28 a bushel; it cost between $700-$800 an acre to produce rice which then sold internationally for $650 an acre. In economic parlance, this is called "dumping" and although it is supposedly illegal under NAFTA and the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is a political expedient within the United States. According to the United Nations Development Program, U.S. farm subsidies cost poor countries around $50 billion annually in lost agricultural exports.

This is only part of what has the campesinos so upset. They cannot compete with U.S. farm products sold at less than U.S. production costs; they lack the financial credit facilities of American farmers and farm corporations; chemicals and fertilizers and equipment are far more expensive, if available at all. And they have precious little support from their own government in large measure because the Mexican government has followed the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) whose sole purpose seems to be that the rich get richer. At every turn, when financial crises struck Mexico, they turned to help from abroad (IMF and USA, mostly) and obtained assistance that provided short-term relief while shackling them to long-term obligations that would merely perpetuate the problems.

The free marketers insist that all of the needed "shaking out" of the various economic sectors will happen if only we all buy into their view of how the world ought to work. The farmers of Mexico who are suffering the comparative disadvantages wrought by agreements such as NAFTA and heavy subsidization in the United States are not in a position to simply move to other parts of the workforce; they don't move from growing corn to mangoes because they cannot; they don't move from farming to manufacturing because they cannot.

Laura Carlsen (an associate of the IRC's Americas Program) has written that the insistence of the free marketers that Mexican agriculture only needs social safety net programs to assist with employment adjustments is completely wrong. She says: "What they [the free market supporters] fail to realize is that small-scale corn production is the millennia-old safety net for all of Mesoamerica. Trying to fit this maize-centered campesino economy – based on cultural preservation, subsistence, and small-scale sustainable agriculture – into the free trade model of comparative advantages is like trying to cram a square peg into a round hole."

The U.S. Grains Council has estimated that less than 2 million hectares of Mexico's arable land has the capacity to produce even close to the U.S. standard of 8 tons of corn per hectare. They suggest that farmers who are tilling the other 6.5 million hectares currently producing corn should simply find other work. Fruits and vegetables were to be Mexico's "winners" under NAFTA. Unfortunately, the areas suitable for those crops are concentrated in the north of the country which leads to additional polarization of the Mexican landscape, with the poorest people already concentrated in the south. It has also not been helpful that even those few crops which are successful in Mexico often find themselves blocked at the U.S. border to protect U.S. growers.

One of the major premises of NAFTA was that Nirvana lay at the end of the road prescribed by the IMF and other such groups. It didn't; it doesn't; and it can't.

Mexican farmers don't believe there is any way they can successfully compete with the U.S. agricultural model, and they don't want to. It is entirely possible that Mexican farmers are smarter than their American counterparts; they present a long list of why they believe the U.S. agricultural model is flawed, starting with social and environmental concerns.

It is the belief of many Mexican farmers, among others, that the U.S. model of agriculture is not environmentally sustainable. They point to monocropping, excess use of herbicides and pesticides, and forced growth through heavy fertilization. To quote Carlsen again, the Mexicans think the American model "destroys biological, agricultural, and cultural diversity; it decimates rural employment (2 percent of the U.S. population make a living farming compared to 25 percent of the Mexican population); and it increases social inequities by concentrating land holdings."

Another objection, and all nations should be concerned about this, is that NAFTA and similar existing and proposed agreements affect sovereignty and dependency. There is a food dependency (40 percent of Mexico's food comes from imports since the advent of NAFTA); the rural sector is now at the whim of corporations, often trans-nationals, rather than relying on the nations' consumers and producers; there is an encouragement of dependency on foreign seed and chemical conglomerates.

Mexican farmers are also convinced that the U.S. agricultural model encourages the production of "junk food" and lowers the overall quality of agricultural production. Visiting the food court in any North American shopping center makes that an argument that is easy to accept.

What the campesinos are seeking is pretty simple and should be an easily accepted goal for most nations: self-sufficiency. They don't want to be like the United States, to be competitors of the United States, or to be a vassal state of the United States. They want their own government to introduce policies that have as their basic goals sustainable development, social equity, and a decent living standard for all Mexicans. They say, in so many words, that a nation's first moral and political obligation is to assure a decent standard of living for its inhabitants by developing national policies that respond to national needs. "This includes ensuring the long-term viability of small farmers rather than negotiating their demise; recognizing the environmental, cultural and social contributions of agriculture; and actively defending food security and quality." (Carlsen)

Mexican farmers are prepared to stand up and tell the IMFs and NAFTAs of the world that their models have failed and never had any chance of succeeding. The governments of the three signatories to NAFTA have responded that the almost Biblical sanctity of the NAFTA agreement means modifications cannot be discussed, even though the law clearly provides for just that. Governments will only get away with that for so long.

Paul Harris is self-employed as a consultant providing Canadian businesses with the tools and expertise to successfully reintegrate their sick or injured employees into the workplace. He has traveled extensively in what we arrogant North Americans refer to as "the Third World," and he believes that life is very much like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. Paul lives in Canada.

Paul Harris encourages your comments: pharris@YellowTimes.org

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