Mexican Agriculture

One has to read about post-NAFTA developments in the agricultural sector in order to understand the issue of "illegal" immigration to the United States. At least that's what I think.

So for today, I'm linking to two sources on the subject.

One is an interesting, but rather bloodless World Trade Organization report:

"Mexico’s Agricultural Trade Policies: International Commitments and Domestic Pressure"

and the other is:

"Mexico: Agriculture
Migration News Vol. 5 No. 3, July 1998"

Which is kind of old, but has a quick, easy-to-grasp description of the problems of the communal plots of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the failure of the post-NAFTA adjustment programs:

The 27,000 ejidos in Mexico in the early 1990s included half of Mexico's arable land and provided homes for about three million farmers or ejidatarios. With their families, some 15 million Mexicans--one sixth of the population--were directly affiliated with ejidos.

Ejido farmers and their heirs retained the right to the land only as long as they actively worked and lived on it, which anchored many rural Mexicans to the land.Ejidos internalized rural population growth, resulting in ever-smaller plots as the rural population increased. The ejido system clearly failed to prevent rural poverty, and increasingly was unable to produce enough food for Mexico. However, land for the peasants had been a rallying cry of the Mexican revolution and preserved rural peace, so there was a tension between those who wanted to maintain the status quo and those who wanted to abolish the system.

Corn played a special role in the debate over ejido reform. Fifteen million Mexicans depend at least in part on corn production. Most are dry-land farmers, meaning that, if there is insufficient rain, they get a small crop. Until 1994, the government offered to buy at about twice the world price all corn produced and delivered to Conasupo offices. In 1994, the Procampo program substituted cash payments to land owners of about $100 an hectare for delivered corn.

The hope was that farmers would use the cash payments to invest in irrigation and other improvements necessary to switch to other crops. Some hoped that corn farmers would quickly switch to labor-intensive fruits and vegetables that could be exported to the US. But producing high-profit and high-risk fruits and vegetables requires more than labor. It also requires seeds suited to local lands, inputs such as water, fertilizers and pesticides, and a capacity to quickly cool and ship harvested crops long distances. In many cases, dryland corn farmers did not have the capital or expertise to produce fruits and vegetables for export markets.

And, I know that I said there'd only be two links, but what the hey ...

"Mexico's corn farmers see their livelihoods wither away
Cheap U.S. produce pushes down prices under free-trade pact"

Happy reading.

Have a super day.