Mexican farmers protest NAFTA

[Judi Lynn]

Source: CNN

February 1, 2008 -- Updated 1049 GMT (1849 HKT)
Mexican farmers protest NAFTA

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) -- Hundreds of thousands of farmers clogged central Mexico City Thursday with their slow-moving tractors, protesting the entry of cheap imported corn from the United States and Canada.

On January 1 Mexico repealed all tariffs on corn imported from north of the border as part of a 14-year phaseout under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

The farmers want the government to renegotiate the 1994 free trade agreement, which removed most trade barriers among Mexico, Canada, and the United States, saying livelihoods are at stake.

"NAFTA is very bad, very bad for Mexican consumers and for Mexican producers," said Victor Quintana, head of Democratic Farmers Front, which organized the protest.

The farmers complain that U.S. and Canadian grains are heavily subsidized and therefore undermine Mexican products.



Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/02/01/mexico.farmers/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Mexican Farmers Protest US Trade Pact

Mexican Farmers Protest US Trade Pact
By MARK STEVENSON – 13 hours ago

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Led by a column of tractors, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through downtown Mexico City on Thursday to protest recent trade openings that removed the last tariff protections for ancestral Mexican crops like corn and beans.

Chanting "Without corn, the country doesn't exist!" farmers and farm activists from across the nation demanded the Mexican government renegotiate the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, to reinstate protection for basic crops.

Farmers here say the can't compete with bigger U.S. farms which receive more government support. Under the terms of NAFTA, Mexico got a 15-year protection period to improve its farms, but that phase-in period ended Jan. 1, and Mexican farms — mostly tiny plots of 12 acres or less — still lag behind.

"The truth is, we can't compete, that is why we're demonstrating ... because we're really getting hit hard," said Telespor Andrade, 44, a weather-beaten farmer from central Mexico who grows corn and beans on about 7 acres of land.

More:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hsQLkOcDCsC5g_dzm3g6AqwuoS7QD8UH97GG1

[jwirr]

3. A bush/clinton legacy that helped noone.

[One_Life_To_Give]

13. 14 Acre Farms?

Are there any US farms that are less than 10 times that size?

[Judi Lynn]

14. Can't believe there would be! From what I've heard the only ones left in the States on farms

are running enormous tracts of land.

You can see these whoppers looking down from the air, and they are HUGE.

[Tumbulu]

25. Yes, there are many 14 acre and less organic and biodynamic farms

There are plenty of them. They tend to sell direct, you won't see them at any big chains. Especially those that produce specialty items such as olive oil, medicinal herbs, mushrooms, free range eggs, wine, etc.

[havocmom]

2. NAFTA the gift that keeps on taking.

Governments co-oped by the Corporations, for the corporations, fuck the people.

[flashl]

4. K&R n/t

[Canadian_moderate]

5. That's funny

Much of the produce I see in Canadian grocery stores is from Mexico. I can guarantee that we import more from Mexico than we export to them.

If anything, Canada is more open to Mexican imports because the USA has its own agricultural sector to protect. Canadians buy Mexican-grown avocados cheaper than Americans pay for their American-grown avocados. I'm familiar with Avocados because our baby son loves to eat avocados. He eats about 5 or 6 a week. We buy them for 50 to 59 cents each.

While we're on the topic, I've noticed how expensive fresh produce is in US supermarkets compared to what I pay here in Toronto. Everything from salad, grapes, oranges, limes, lemos, etc, etc, seem to cost more in the USA. The crazy part is that we import a lot of our produce from the USA. That said, milk and meats tend to be cheaper in the USA. I know this stuff because usually do the grocery shopping in Canada and when we visit our family in PA.

[Xipe Totec]

10. Unfortunately, those imports benefit corporations not farmers

Consider the implications of Mexico having to import it's staple food, corn, because so much land has been turned over to the industrial production of cash crops for export.

[Judi Lynn]

11. The greater cost of American corn is born in the form of US taxes, when taxpayers here are forced to

subsidize these crops BEFORE they flood the Mexican market, undercutting the cost the Mexican farmers need in order to make a living at all!

Hordes of Mexican farmers and farm workers have been turned out of generations-old family-owned farms without anywhere to go, no jobs to fill, after having spent a lifetime working for themselves. They say they can't even begin to afford to put so much of their money into crops which have been grown in Mexico for thousands of years now, as the cheap product from the U.S. has stolen the market in their own homeland, and they are going, or have gone bankrupt.

The same thing happened to sugar cane already, and is happening to another age-old Mexican crop, good old beans. What a damnedable pity.

(As an example of US taxpayers and consumers footing the bill for crops, it's easy to grasp if you do any reading on the Cuban "exile" sugar baron family, the family Fanjul, Alfie and Pepe. One gives money to Democrats, one to Republicans, and they have been named "America's First Family of Corporate Welfare." They have sugar cane plantations on former swamp land which was drained and cleared by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers in South Florida, and sugar cane plantations in the Dominican Island.

They have made a practice of importing Caribbean workers to do their excessively dangerous and exhausting sugar cane harvesting, and have kept them in conditions so hazardous, and brutal they have been the subject of investigations, and a very long C.B.S. documentary, as well as group action law suits.

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com.nyud.net:8090/socialdiary/2005/01_18_05/images/DR/Pepe-Emilia-Fanjul-Alfo.jpg

Pepe in the striped shirt, Alfonso in the blue at a party
at their property in the Dominican Republic.

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com.nyud.net:8090/socialdiary/2005/01_18_05/images/DR/Saturday-night-dinner.jpg

More photos:
http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/socialdiary/2005/01_18_05/socialdiary01_18_05.php

Broward-Palm Beach New Times article on the Fanjuls, "Bitter Sugar."
http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2004-08-26/news/bitter-sugar/

THE POLITICS OF SUGAR

S U G A R ' S
F I R S T F A M I L Y

http://www.opensecrets.org/pubs/cashingin_sugar/sugar08.html

Article:
Click on: In the Kingdom of Big Sugar
http://mariebrenner.com/articles.html

[Xipe Totec]

12. You know it n/t

[Canadian_moderate]

24. The cost of corn is up because of ethanol production

We're trying to clean up our act by turning corn into ethanol. Not exactly the most efficient way I may add. Sugar cane is much more efficient, but it's not grown in the American heartland.

[Gormy Cuss]

6. Good for the farmers.

I wish that more people in the U.S. would connect the dots to trade policy and the increase in illegal migration from Mexico and Central America. If it was possible to make a decent living at home fewer people would be interested in migrating here without the protection of a visa.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Farmers clog Mexico City in corn tariff protest

Farmers clog Mexico City in corn tariff protest
17 hours ago

MEXICO CITY (AFP) — Tens of thousands of farmers on foot and on lumbering tractors clogged Mexico City Thursday to protest the lifting of corn tariffs under a free trade agreement, which they say is hurting their pockets.

"No corn, no country" was the byword of the protest plastered in signs on tractors and buses, as the angry farmers, some of them leading herds of cattle through the streets, demanded equal treatment with farmers in the United States and Canada.

While it was mostly peaceful, there was some tension late Wednesday when a column of slow-moving tractors ground to a reluctant halt before a phalanx of anti-riot police that barred access to the Zocalo, the city's main square.

By late Thursday, however, the protest was allowed to move on Zocalo, where organizers said some 50,000 people congregated, while police put the crowd estimate taken by helicopter at between 20,000 and 25,000.

Some 1,500 police fanned out across the city to prevent any unrest stemming from the protest. Farmers from across the country have made their way here, some on foot for 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles), since January 18.

More:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hDUCfa3JCjUuDZcRUdkTGGP3dRvg

[gravity]

8. Cheap corn is good for the poor, but bad for the farmers

The problem is that there isn't an easy solution to the problem. Tarrifs could benefit the farmers, but at the expense of the non-farming poor.

The best thing that the Mexican government can do is increase the subsidies for its farmers.

[DCKit]

15. The Capitalist Model

Infiltrate a sector, destroy the competition then charge whatever price the market will bear.

It's a given that corn prices in the U.S. have nearly tripled in the past five years. Unless the price of corn exported to Mexico is, in fact, subsidized by the U.S. government, there would be no threat to small, local farmers. It's obvious that this trade is unfair.

In addition to the economic damage this is clearly doing to Mexico, I am concerned about the fact that most of the corn now grown in the U.S. is comprised of various strains of GMOs. What are the health effects from eating corn with unnaturally high levels of BT toxin? What proteins are in the various Round-Up ready crops that have never been tested for their effects for allergies and toxic reactions in humans?

Every human is different and every ethnic sub-group has different reactions to different chemicals and proteins. People of various African and Asian lineages are far more likely to be lactose intolerant because their cultures evolved without dairy products. Many common drugs are effective, as labeled, in only 85% of the population. In the other 15% they are either ineffective or cause an adverse reaction.

The drug companies have been able, thus far, to use the excuse of racism to deflect criticism of their lack of research into the effects - and ineffectiveness - of some drugs on various populations. However, it is finally coming to light that many common chemotherapy drugs have little or not effect on the type(s) of breast cancer(s) which develop in many women of African descent. Every woman with breast cancer is (or should be) far more concerned about receiving appropriate treatment with drugs that work than they are playing the PC and race cards and that message is finally getting out.

I only bring race and ethnicity into the argument because we're talking about a largely indigenous population (Mestizos and ethnic Indians) to whom the introduction of new and untested food products may be harmful. Far more research has been done on existing food products and drugs than on the effects of GMOs on ANY population. The introduction of new and different food and chemical substances to any population that has not evolved with them bears far more study than it's been given.

Anyone who doubts we are all being used as test subjects in a very large experiment need only be reminded of how long it took for independent testing to uncover the presence of GMO corn in the tortilla chips of a famous, world-wide producer/distributor - After we were told, repeatedly, that no GMO corn would ever get near the human food chain. And that, soon after, the U.S. government and the GMO creators brought the full weight of these trade agreements to bear against every country and farmer who refused to import GMO food products and seeds.

"Free Trade" is NOT "Fair Trade" and NAFTA and every other Free Trade agreement ONLY benefit the corporations who own or rent our elected officials. There is no benefit to the countries, farmers and citizens who get in their way. Even our own.

[Judi Lynn]

16. Yup, it's subsidized, all right. I did a quick trip to google for confirmation:

Andean FTA: Threats to Development by Karen Hansen-Kuhn

~snip~
Andean citizens’ organizations, and at leastone government ministry, have expressed alarm over the impact that a wider opening of their markets to U.S. goods might have.Many of them point to the Mexican experience under NAFTA, where there was a huge influxof lower-cost, subsidized corn imports from the United States, which put severe pressureon Mexican farmers. During the NAFTA period, Mexican agricultural employment has dropped by more than 1.3 million. The currentU.S. subsidy system leads to over-production of many crops, thus depressing world prices,something that hurts family farmers in allcountries, including the United States.
(snip)

~~~~ link ~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

May 10 “Deal” Does not Alter Peru and Panama FTA NAFTA-style Agriculture Rules that Promote Hunger, Destruction of Legal Rural Livelihoods and Displacement

The Peru and Panama FTA agriculture provisions are almost identical to those in NAFTA, which resulted in the destruction of 1.3 million Mexican peasant farmers’ livelihoods and a 60 percent jump in immigration.

The agricultural provisions in both the Peru and Panama “free trade agreements” (FTA) are nearly identical to those in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The agreements remove tariffs on U.S. imports and forbid various price ceilings on staple foods and price floors for farmers, but do not discipline U.S. subsidies – meaning they would cause enormous distortions and disruption to the farm and food systems in Peru and Panama, where millions live as subsistence farmers. Under NAFTA, the same package of policies led to 1.3 million Mexican peasant farmers losing their livelihoods as subsidized U.S. food imports flooded the market.1While the price paid to Mexican corn farmers fell by about half following NAFTA, the deregulated retail price of tortillas shot up hundreds of percentage points over the pact’s first five years.2Mexico negotiated 10- or 15- year tariff phase-outs for staple foods (similar to Peru, which negotiated 10- to 17- year tariff phase-outs, and Panama, which negotiated 9- to 19-year phase-outs), but after NAFTA passed, U.S. agribusiness giants began pressuring for and obtained accelerated Mexican tariff cuts over three years.
(snip)

~~~~ link ~~~~

[roody]

23. Unfortunately, much of the corn dumped on Mex.

is genetically modified.

[dmosh42]

9. The only beneficiaries of NAFTA are the giant corporations! Scrap it! n/t

[cascadiance]

18. Exactly, those subsidized at US the taxpayer's expense are corn companies

And look at how the WTO ruled against Mexico putting tariffs on non-cane sugar-based soft drinks, even though arguably the US's subsidization of corn products (including those soft-drinks we export laced with HFCS) are in effect "dumping" those products below cost where Mexican farmers can't compete.

The WTO isn't there to support "free trade" but trade that favors U.S. multi-nationals and whoever can put up the most bucks worth of influence.

http://piehead.livejournal.com/311911.html

Not only do they have a beef with unfair trade practices, but it doesn't allow them to protect their people's health, which will get more screwed up with diabetes, etc. if they are forced to drink soft drinks that have HFCS instead of cane sugar.

And the bottom line is what happens is that:

1) Underpriced corn exports compete unfairly against Mexican farmers, and the WTO and NAFTA does nothing to PROPERLY enforce trade agreements and penalize those who are unfairly subsidizing their products.
2) Mexican corn farmers are forced out of business and forced to sell their land.
3) Mexican elites can run in and grab their land CHEAP and turn around and lease it to American multinationals to build companies that they can outsource labor to cheaply.
4) These new "maquila" company locations build stuff cheap with cheap labor that are composed of the very same desperate farmers that have been driven out of business (and therefore out of work).
5) These companies that cannot legally own property in Mexico later find that they can perhaps get labor even cheaper in the far east, pack up their bags and leave the company vacant.
6) The labor that was working there are stuck and look for work elsewhere. Guess where they go! Right up here! And THAT is why we have an illegal immigrant problem too now!

Only people that are benefitting from this are the fat cats that run and own the multinationals, and the elites (that probably work with World Bank and IMF money to build those plants).

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. According to the movie Life and Debt, U.S. ag products dumped on the

Jamaican market wiped out a lot of farmers on that island.

[depakid]

19. Say hello to millions more immigrants

Thanks Bill -thanks DINO's and Republicans!

Another fine bequest.

[lonestarnot]

20. Hell yeah renegotiate it!

[McHatin]

21. The thing about free trade

is that there are always winners and losers in all countries, especially in certain industries. We are seeing that here in the US as many Mexican farmers are feeling the crunch in their home country as well.

[Critters2]

22. And who are the winners? nt

[eridani]

26. Winners are bosses, and losers are workers n/t

[countryjake]

27. K&R