The march was sponsored by El Campo no Aguanta Más (the countryside can’t bear it any more), El Barzón, and the Permanent Agrarian Congress (CAP). The National Union of Workers and the Association of Rural Organizations of Women also endorsed it.

This was the largest to date of the protests that began last year against the 2003 extension of NAFTA provisions removing tariff protection on 20 Mexican agricultural crops and farm products, including wheat, rice, potatoes, and coffee.

Sara de los Reyes Pérez, a peasant from Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, told the press that "the products that we sell are worth less every day. To the contrary, when we come here and we want to buy a cup of coffee, it sells for 7 pesos. Over there [in Chiapas] we sell it at 2 pesos a kilo" (1 peso = US$.9 cents).

Raúl Godinez, also from Tapachula, said that "in coming into Mexico, all the big foreign companies take over our land, they offer us a salary as workers which we will accept, because we will have nothing else. We are here because we need subsidies in order to not lose the land."

"The land is my life and now I have nothing. I want to work but without money, the animals die and the land goes dry," said Tranquilino Galván Rodríguez, from Querétaro.

NAFTA first went into effect in 1994. While the signatory governments touted the agreement as a boon to the economies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, the implementation of this trade pact by imperialist Ottawa and Washington--especially the latter--is making it increasingly difficult for Mexican peasants to survive on the land.

Goods can be produced more cheaply in the United States using advanced agricultural techniques. Small farmers in Mexico are unable to get a competitive price for their products and are forced off the land. One of the main demands of those protesting in the capital city at the end of January was for increased subsidies from the government that will enable them to resist this assault.

The Mexican government estimates that between 1990 and 2000 farm employment in Mexico was reduced by 1.2 million farm jobs. Thirty percent of the population in the countryside lives under the poverty level today, more than double the national figure of 13.5 percent. The World Bank and the United Nations officials set the poverty level at an income of $1 a day per person.  
 
Rise in protests by working people
The protests by small farmers and farm workers have been building since the beginning of December, including incidents where farmers have blocked the roads to trucks carrying farm products from the United States into Mexico.

Seeking to undercut the protests, Mexican president Vicente Fox has called "for the launching of a great engagement of the Mexican state with the countryside and the rural communities." He invited the organizations of agricultural producers, state governors, municipal authorities, and federal and state legislators together for a "dialogue" starting February 10. Fox said that his goal is to have an agreement by March 15.

Following the president’s announcement, the agricultural producers’ organizations announced on February 7 that they were suspending protests as proof of their goodwill in these negotiations. The suspension of protests will last until March 15, they say.

The Mexican government, however, has already rejected the farmers’ main demand for a review of NAFTA agricultural conditions, claiming that the agreement offers opportunities to producers.

"Today we sell more than we buy from our NAFTA partners," Fox said. "Every year we sell to the United States 30 billion dollars more than what they sell to us."

To bolster his claim the president cited statistics showing that Mexico exports 157 agricultural products to the United States, including two out of every three mangos consumed there, two of every three papayas, one of three eggplants, 60 percent of broccoli and cauliflower, and 25 percent of peppers.  
 
Fox: ‘raise productivity’
The Mexican producers need to raise their productivity in order to compete, Fox said. The Mexican government stated that they grow only 14 percent as much food and fiber as farmers in the United States.

The increased influx of farmers and farm workers into the United States is a manifestation of the dislocation affecting the Mexican countryside. The Mexican government has pressed Washington for a new agreement on immigration without success.

"The long-term answer for the migration issue is to work in a way that encourages commerce on both sides of the border so people can find jobs here in Mexico," stated U.S. president George Bush in rejecting the proposal for a new pact, "to develop industry together in the midst of Mexico, in the south of Mexico, so that people are more likely to find work at home."

Recently U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell floated the idea of a guest-worker program. In the past such schemes have guaranteed a supply of cheap Mexican labor, on short-term contracts, to agricultural capitalists in the United States.

Rollande Girard is a sewing machine operator in San Francisco.  
 
 
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