A series of protests began December 2 against the implementation of provisions of the NAFTA agreement that will have further devastating consequences for peasants and other agricultural producers in this country.

NAFTA went into effect in 1994. While its signatories touted the agreement as a boon to the economies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, the results of this imperialist trade pact are making it increasingly difficult for Mexican peasants to survive on the land.

Eighty-eight busloads of peasants arrived in Mexico City December 2 accompanied by 20 cows. The peasants are demanding more financial aid from the federal government and a moratorium on implementation of the section of NAFTA regarding agricultural production and trade. As part of these protests, dozens of small farmers demonstrated inside the Mexican parliament and were attacked by police.

The next stage of the NAFTA provisions to go into effect January 1 requires that Mexico remove tariffs on an additional 20 food imports including wheat, rice, potatoes, and coffee. Powdered milk, corn, and beans are scheduled to be added to this list in 2008.

The protesters were members of the National Union of Autonomous Regional Organizations of Peasants (UNORCA), which includes 30 organizations of cattle ranchers, coffee farmers, and beekeepers. Other organizations protesting NAFTA were the National Union of Agricultural Workers (UNTA), and the National Confederation of Peasants (CNC).

A quarter of Mexico’s 100 million people live in the countryside. While the National Agricultural Council, a boss organization, reported that 700,000 jobs could be lost in rural areas after the new NAFTA provisions are implemented in January, the CNC estimates that 600,000 jobs have already been lost since the implementation of NAFTA in 1994.

The peasant organizations represented at the Mexico City protests presented a National Program for the Economic Development with six demands designed to protect Mexican farmers from the competition of their imperialist neighbors to the north, who can produce goods more cheaply than the small producers in Mexico. The demands include a moratorium on implementing the agrarian clauses of NAFTA, emergency programs to provide government subsidies to Mexican farmers from 2003 to 2020, assigning 1.5 percent of Mexico’s Gross National Product for the productive development of the land and 1.5 percent more for the social and environmental development of the rural sector, and recognition of the rights and culture of Mexico’s indigenous population.  
 
‘Lost our food sovereignty’
"We’ve lost our food sovereignty," said Alberto Gómez Flores, the president of UNORCA, pointing to the jump in U.S. food imports between 1997 and 2001, whose value doubled from $1.6 billion to $3.2 billion.

A decade ago, Mexico was largely self-sufficient in food, producing 80 percent of its basic food needs. Today the figure has dropped to 68 percent. About 65 percent of the meat is imported.

Gómez explained that "the members of this organization are not used to mobilizing in Mexico City, but their presence here shows the uncertainty and the desperation that exist in their land, towns, and communities."

Valentín Citlahua from Veracruz said, "I came to support the my brothers.... What they are saying is, ‘we don’t have money to eat.’"

The Mexican government has offered only limited protection, including a raise of 19 billion pesos in farm subsidies for a total of 53 billion pesos for the year 2003. ($1=10 pesos.)

While Mexico is importing more U.S. goods at cheaper prices, what a worker or farmer has to pay for them is increasing. In the early 1990s, a worker earning minimum wage could buy 15.9 kilos of tortillas, 9 liters of milk, and 3.8 kilos of beans. Today the same wage can only purchase about half that amount of food.

Juan Manuel Maya told the Los Angeles Times that he had to give up the hog farm he had been working for 20 years because he couldn’t compete with U.S. farm products. Over the past 20 years, U.S. pork imports to Mexico have taken over 40% of the market share, up from just 5 percent before NAFTA. Grain to feed hogs is 20 percent higher in Mexico than in the United States. Enrique Domínguez, director of the Mexican Hog Farmers Association said that 85 percent of the remaining members of his organization are losing money.

The situation for farm workers is also worsening. Of the 3.2 million farm laborers in Mexico, some 1.2 million are migrant workers. About half of their children are not vaccinated, 60 percent do not go to school, and most farm worker families have no access to medical services.

A document by the Commission for Rural Development states that 71 percent of the national population suffers from malnourishment

The crisis in the countryside is part of the economic crisis facing Mexico as a whole. That crisis is compounded by the fact that 12.3 percent of the country’s national budget goes to pay the interest on its foreign debt to imperialist creditors.

Many factories that make parts for U.S. companies have left Mexico for China over the past two years because of lower wages there. These factories, commonly called maquiladoras, were lost 287,000 jobs since their peak in October 2000. The electronics industry alone saw a drop in employment of 8.8 percent last year.

The third-largest source of income in the country, after oil and manufacturing exports, is remittances sent home by family members living in the United States. Some 22 million Mexicans live there today.

For their part, the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico all argue that NAFTA has been beneficial for the population and for their economies. Mexico’s secretary of the economy boasted recently that thanks to NAFTA $120 billion was invested in the country.

U.S. government officials are quick to deflect the blame for the rural crisis in Mexico away from NAFTA. A U.S. official said Mexican agriculture faces "structural challenges that existed before NAFTA," citing the high cost of credit and production, and the lack of markets, transportation and refrigeration that U.S. agribusiness does not face.

But the reality of capitalism reveals that the face of Mexican agriculture is undergoing rapid changes--changes that are not caused by NAFTA but are accelerated by its implementation. More than a million peasants have left the land over the past decade and the hold of capitalist agricultural enterprises continues to increase throughout the country. But the capitalists are running into resistance to their course, as the Mexico City protests of peasants show.

In the southern state of Chiapas, where the indigenous population exploded in rebellion a decade ago, peasant organizations are vowing to take over and close the 48 border entries and ports if the government implements further provisions of NAFTA in January.

Alfonso Elías Cardona, of the Commission for Rural Development, said 80 percent of food producers in Mexico are close to bankruptcy. "We can anticipate," he said, "that the Mexican countryside is brewing many social conflicts."

Rollande Girard is a sewing machine operator in the San Francisco Bay Area and was a participant in the 16th Guadalajara International Book Fair.  
 
 
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