Global Policy Forum

By Armando Saliba

A report published Monday named agriculture as the nation's most crisis-ridden industry, on the eve of high-level talks with the United States, where farm subsidies and migration will likely top the agenda. In the article, La Jornada newspaper sites failed reforms initiated in the early 1990s, under then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, as one of the key causes of rising rural poverty and mass exodus from the nation's countryside.

According to World Bank data cited by the daily, in 2000, 73.9 percent of rural dwellers lived in poverty compared to 69.3 percent in 1989. The number of rural poor has remained above 1980s levels despite attempts by Salinas to introduce reforms meant to spur agricultural development.

His 1992 constitutional amendment opened traditional, farm cooperatives, known as ejidos, to private investment that led to the removal of price controls and disputes over land, owned communally for generations. But the World Bank called the results of those reforms "disappointing."

La Jornada quoted the international lending institution as saying, "It can be said that during the last decade, the (Mexican) agriculture sector has been the object of the most drastic structural reforms ... but the results have been disappointing."

Since the early 90s, the agro industry has been contributing less to the nation's overall economy, the result of a loss of almost 100,000 farming jobs and declining productivity and competitiveness during the period. In 1992, agriculture made up 7.3 percent of the country's gross domestic product, compared to just 5 percent this year.

Though widespread, the poverty plaguing the Mexican countryside is largely concentrated in the nation's indigenous communities, most of which are rural and dedicated to subsistence farming. Despite making up only 10 percent of the national population, Indians represent 60 percent of Mexicans living in extreme poverty.

According to recent figures from the federal Social Development Secretariat, in all, 53 percent of Mexicans live poverty. That fact helps explain the unrelenting flow of northward-bound migrants looking for opportunities in the industrial north or in the United States.

Last week, President Vicente Fox announced a 4.3 billion-dollar "shield" for the agricultural sector. The purpose of the "shield" is to reintroduce price supports in anticipation of tariff removals on imported food from the U.S. and Canada in January 2003, part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Officials here say the mammoth subsidies that large-scale U.S. farmers receive will enable cheap American goods to flood the domestic market, throwing their smaller Mexican competitors out of business. However, critics argue the shield won't work and point to a 3.9-percent decrease in the Agriculture Secretariat's 2003 budget as proof the Fox administration isn't doing enough to support farmers.

Last weekend, farmers in the central state of Morelos staged a two-day blockade of the Mexico City-Cuernavaca highway to protest the government's rural policy.

There is little hope for quick or easy solutions to the crisis in the Mexican countryside. Even before the beginning of the Mexico-U.S. Binational Conference, high-ranking U.S. officials said there is no chance of renegotiating NAFTA to postpone January's tariff removals and that the possibility of a migration accord is still far off.

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