Battle escalates over cheap U.S. corn popping into Mexico

[Robbien]

PUEBLA STATE, Mexico —

But these days, the crop that is still the centerpiece of the Mexican diet is fueling a clash between Mexico and the United States as cheap American corn has inundated Mexican farms and marketplaces under the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

"They should not send their corn here. They can send it somewhere else," says farmer Luis Damaso, tending his milpa, or corn patch, outside the town of Santa Ana Xalmimilulco in the central state of Puebla. "No one will pay for (our corn) now."

The politics of corn continue to escalate, as a 2008 NAFTA deadline looms for Mexico to scrap its corn and bean import tariffs. And the disputed July 2 presidential election here has only heightened those tensions.

On the campaign trail, runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he would renegotiate NAFTA provisions to protect the nation's corn and bean farmers. He has put NAFTA supporters on the defensive and raised the hopes of farmers across the country, many of whom have rallied around Obrador and promise a long, hard fight ahead if rival Felipe Calderón, a staunch supporter of NAFTA, is certified as president. That decision is in the hands of an electoral court, which has until Sept. 6 to rule.

"(Corn in Mexico) is one of the areas that has the potential to become extremely explosive," says Jon Huenemann, a former assistant U.S. trade representative who helped negotiate many agricultural provisions under NAFTA. "U.S.-Mexican trade is huge and getting bigger and more significant to producers and consumers. And yet, for the same reason, the sensitivities are getting potentially more complicated. ... It's a bit of a tinderbox."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2006-08-08-corn-battle-usat_x.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. This filthy treatment of Mexican farmers has been happening behind our

backs, just the way it always goes when neo-liberal scums are in charge of U.S. policy. Everyone gets raped other than a few elitists who make out like the bandits they are, on our dime, and on the wrecked lives of people in other countries:

~snip~
More than a million Mexican farmers lost their land since the passage of
NAFTA and the subsequent dumping of surplus US corn, cotton, wheat and other
crops (according to Via Campesina and the Mexican farmers¹ organizing
committee). The dumping of subsidized corn and cotton into the Mexican
markets drove prices below the cost of production. Small farmers could not
compete and were driven out of business and off the land.
(snip/...)

http://www.organicconsumers.org/clothes/willallen011504.cfm~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~
Then there is the cost of agribusiness to the workers. The life expectancy of a farm worker in California is still not much above fifty years. Subsidized corn floods Mexico, driving peasants from the land and into the United States. At great risk to life and limb and for a large fee, they flee their homelands and sneak into the United States to work the fields.
(snip)

http://www.monthlyreview.org/nftae0804.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

U.S. Imports Bury Family Farms
TIM WEINER / New York Times 26feb02
MANZANILLO, Mexico -- For many generations, corn has been the sacred center of civilization in Mexico, the place where the grain was first cultivated some 5,000 years ago.

Gods and goddesses of corn filled the dreams and visions of the great civilizations that rose and fell here before the Spaniards came five centuries ago. Today the corn tortilla is consumed at almost every meal. Among the poor, sometimes it is the entire meal.

But the modern world is closing in on the little patch of maize, known as the milpa, that has sustained millions of Mexicans through the centuries. The powerful force of American agribusiness, unleashed in Mexico by the North American Free Trade Agreement, may doom the growing of corn as a way of life for family farmers here, agronomists and economists say.

Lorenzo Rebollo, a 53-year-old dirt farmer, works two and a half acres of corn and beans here on the slopes of the eastern state of Michoacán, in Mexico's central highlands, where corn was first grown as a food crop, archaeologists say. Mr. Rebollo is one of about 3 million Mexicans who farm corn and support roughly 15 million family members.

His grown sons have left for the United States to make a living, and Mr. Rebollo says he may be the last man to farm this patch of earth. It is the same story all over Mexico: thousands of farmers pulling up stakes every year, heading for Mexico City or the United States. Some grew coffee or cut sugar cane. But most grew corn.

Roughly a quarter of the corn in Mexico is now imported from the United States. Men like Mr. Rebollo cannot compete against the mechanized, subsidized giants of American agriculture.

"Corn growing has basically collapsed in Mexico," Carlos Heredia Zubieta, an economist and a member of Mexico's Congress, said in a recent speech to an American audience. "The flood of imports of basic grains has ravaged the countryside, so the corn growers are here instead of working in the fields."
(snip/...)

http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/Corn-Subsidized-Imports26feb02.htm

[Trillo]

2. Curious,

The Free Trade Agreements likely benefits corporate farms when the corn gets to Mexico. So where's the benefit for U.S. citizens? When do we get to benefit from U.S. trade policies, instead of a bunch of elite corporatists sucking on Federal corporate welfare?

[acmavm]

3. WE were never meant to benefit. The American farmer

gets bupkiss for his crops. Same as the American rancher gets next to nothing for his beef on the hoof. It's the big corporate processors and vendors that get the bucks.

NAFTA didn't do a damn thing for the farmers/ranchers on either side of the border. But it sure as hell was a gift to corporate America.

[Broadslidin]

6. Federal Corporate Welfare Recipient: Archers Daniel Midland (ADM).....

A.D.M.,
an extreme hack and slash right wing corporation,
controlling the
pathetic, decaying remnants of U.S. public broadcasting.

[hedgehog]

4. Fair Trade indeed: we send them corn, they send us cheap labor

Two years after NAFTA, there was an incredible increase in the number of Mexicans entering the US illegally looking for work.

It gets even better - US corn has been bred to up the sugar content which is one reason diabetes has become such a problem. We're sending Mexico corn from a monoculture and wiping out the small farmers who have preserved all the older, more nutritious varieties of corn.

[krkaufman]

5. Right. Many of those immigrants used to be farmers ....

... who can no longer make a living in Mexico as farmers. Thank you, NAFTA.