Final stage of NAFTA prompts Mexican farmers to rattle scythes
Posted on Sunday, December 30 @ 11:20:33 EST
Topic: NAFTA CAFTA FTAA
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 Final stage of NAFTA prompts Mexican farmers to rattle scythes
By JEREMY SCHWARTZ
Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Sunday, December 30, 2007
MEXICO CITY — Farmers and activists are planning a series of protests as NAFTA enters its final stage on New Year's Day, when the last tariffs and quotas on corn, beans, milk and sugar melt away.
Opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement warn that the final lifting of trade barriers could spark even more migration from Mexico's devastated countryside and leave Mexico dependent on the United States for corn and beans, staples since the age of the Aztecs.
At least one peasant group has said the NAFTA expansion could spark armed rebellion in the countryside if President Felipe Calderón's government doesn't do more to protect small farmers.
TOPICW: Illegal Immigration, Illegal Immigrants, NAFTA, CAFTA, Mexican farmers, rattle scythes, MEXICO CITY, protests, Mexico, North American Free Trade Agreement, United States, corn and beans, armed rebellion, President Felipe Calderón, government, United States, Canada and Mexico
Corn and beans were considered especially sensitive to the Mexican economy when the United States, Canada and Mexico signed NAFTA in 1993, and officials buffered them with 15 years of gradually dwindling protections.
Government officials insist that the Jan. 1 opening is largely symbolic because corn and bean tariffs mostly have been phased in already.
NAFTA supporters in Mexico say protesters are exaggerating the effect in an at tempt to wrest more aid from the government.
"It's an important date because it marks the end of the process," said Luis de la Calle, a Mexico City economist who helped negotiate the original agreement in the early 1990s. "But in terms of the market, there will be very little impact."
But members of Mexico's left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party the second-largest party in Congress, have called on Calderón to renegotiate the final opening and remove corn and beans from the list of unprotected trade goods.
Calderón, however, has shown no inclination to tinker with the agreement.
José Romero, a NAFTA expert at the College of Mexico, said, "The government is scared of renegotiating (corn and bean tariffs) because renegotiating part could mean renegotiating the whole thing. And they worry renegotiating could send bad signals to international financial markets."
Mexican farm associations contend that their farmers are woefully unprepared to face an onslaught of U.S. corn and they decry the large subsidies that U.S. corn farmers receive.
In December, the World Trade Organization launched an investigation into whether the U.S. has surpassed international limits on so-called trade distorting subsidies for its farmers by billions of dollars since 1999.
U.S. farmers are far more productive than their Mexican counterparts.
According to the Mexican Institute of Competition, U.S. farms produce an average of 22 tons of corn an acre, compared with 6 tons in Mexico.
Cruz López, president of Mexico's National Farmers Confederation, said domestic corn producers fear they will go out of business, unable to compete with American imports, and leave Mexico reliant on the U.S. for its basic food needs.
"There is an abyss between the (subsidies) that we receive and those of the Canadian and U.S. farmers," he said. "For us, it is very important to guarantee to the Mexican people that we can produce corn and beans."
Mexico imports about 10 million tons of corn annually, adding to the 22 million tons it produces domestically.
Mexican farmers are pushing for more subsidies from their government and predicting dire consequences if they aren't helped.
"If this refusal to protect the national producers continues on the part of the government ... the countryside could take the path of weapons and the guerrilla," Max Correa, leader of the Central Campesina Cardenista Peasant, a farmers advocacy group, told the Mexican press recently.
Since Mexico entered into NAFTA, it has lost nearly 3 million farm jobs and seen a massive migration from the countryside to the U.S. An estimated 80 percent of the 400,000 Mexicans who migrate to the U.S. annually are from rural areas.
Many experts say that the great bet of NAFTA - that peasant farmers would find jobs in a burgeoning Mexican manufacturing industry - hasn't been realized.
"The U.S. doesn't want them, the manufacturing industry can't absorb them, so where do they go?" Romero said. "They don't have the political strength to influence policies."
Experts say the high worldwide price of corn, attributed partly to the increased ethanol production, should provide a buffer for Mexican farmers, but that could prove temporary.
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