Mexican farmers’ protection ending

MEXICO CITY (AP) — For 15 years, Mexican farmers have feared the day when the last import protections end for the country’s ancestral crops of corn and beans.

But as Jan. 1 draws near, farmers say the damage has already been done: Mexico has plunged deeply into a model of globalized agriculture where farmers are ill-prepared to compete, and even people who don’t farm for a living are suffering.

Nobody knows that better than Vicente Martinez, who grows corn, beans and some coffee in the green mountains of Tepetlan, Veracruz. In July, his daughter Felictas died trying to cross the desert to enter the United States. Martinez blames a combination of free trade and dwindling government farm-support programs that leave rural families with little choice but to migrate; his daughter found no work in their farming town to support her four children, other than cleaning houses for little pay.

“The only thing left to do is run for the United States ... or sit around looking like idiots, because there’s nothing to do here, nothing,” said Martinez, whose daughter was abandoned by a people smuggler in Arizona.

Corn, beans, sugar and milk were granted special 15-year import protections when the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was negotiated in 1993, time that was supposed to be used to prepare Mexico for competition. But many say that didn’t happen.

And while global prices for these commodities are booming, Mexico’s farm parcels tend to be tiny and only marginally productive, so higher prices internationally have done little to improve people’s lives here.

Farmers like Juan Antonio Lopez, who plants corn on about 7.5 acres in Pino Suarez, Durango, have little corn left over to sell, and often must buy grain at higher international prices for their families and animals.

Even somewhat larger farms have trouble storing crops and getting them to market, in part because the government has allowed state purchasing agencies, granaries and distribution networks to wither, preferring instead to rely on market forces.

Mexico also has been slow to modernize to take advantage of ethanol demands and genetically-modified crops.

Mexico’s government has already allowed global market forces to be strongly felt in Mexico. For years, it has allowed more corn imports under lower tariffs than NAFTA requires. This is why the U.S. ethanol boom caused a spike in tortilla prices early this year, which in turn sparked street protests in Mexico.

For a country long used to a highly regulated agricultural market, the “tortilla crisis” was a bitter taste of the power of agribusiness consortiums that allegedly hoarded corn and speculated with prices.

But the spike in corn prices has given Mexico’s beleaguered farm sector is “a little more breathing room,” said Cruz Lopez, leader of the National Farmers Confederation.

It has also reduced the apocalyptic talk and strengthened the realization that Mexican farmers may have to depend on themselves.

The National Corn Producers Federation is trying to get farmers to join together to sell their crops on a contract basis to large consumers, like food companies.

Such efforts to build agricultural cooperatives — similar to the Grange halls and dairy cooperatives formed in the United States in the 1800s and 1900s — may be key to Mexican farmers’ survival.

“They have only one way to survive, and that is by understanding the need to organize,” said Hugo Garcia, an academic and co-author of the book “The Corn and Tortilla Crisis in Mexico.”