Zero Hour: NAFTA and Mexico’s Agrarian Apocalypse

By John Ross
January 15, 2008

At the stroke of midnight this past January 1st, a hundred or so farmers and day laborers from both sides of the border converged on the hump of the Cordoba Las Americas bridge that connects up El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, to mark the demise of Mexican agriculture. In accordance with the timetables set by the North American Free Trade Agreement signed by Mexico, the U.S. and Canada 14 years ago, as of January 1st 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 grizzled leader of the militant farmers’ front El Barzon Popular growled into his bullhorn as the protestors 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 the Rio Bravo. But traffic was slow and few trailers were lined up to ferry the thousands of tons of U.S. agricultural products that pass over the Cordoba Las Americas into Mexico every day.

Strung across the roadway, each protestor carried a letter of the alphabet in his or her hand but despite the palpable fear and loathing afoot out in the Mexican countryside as the tariffs plummet to nothing, the farmers could barely muster enough troops to spell out “Sin Maiz No Hay Pais - Y Tampoco Sin Frijol”, including the appropriate spacing between words (”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 put under crops. Unlike the U.S., farm subsidies are a thing of the past here, stripped away years ago in the rush to NAFTA.

Reduction to zero tariffs is not in fact a steep drop. 14 years of incremental decreases had wiped out 90% of all protectionist barriers by 2007 and U.S. corn growers were only shelling out 18% of the value of their exports to get their grain into Mexico. 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 USD 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 out at nine pesos the kilo on New Year’s Day here - tortilla prices in Mexico have risen 126% under NAFTA from 1994 to 2007 despite - or because of - massive corn imports from the U.S. (44 million tons in the same period.) The tortilla remains the household measure for basic food prices in Mexico.

According to the World Food & Agricultural Organization or 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 U.N. organization, pointing out that grain riots broke out in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Guinea, Mauritania, and Senegal last year.

Despite the farmers’ 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 long before NAFTA (or the Treaty of Free Trade With North America - TLCAN - here in Mexico) was a gleam in Ronald Reagan’s eyeball. 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.

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