WHAT NAFTA HAS DONE TO AGRICULTURE IN MEXICO

NAFTA undermined traditional agriculture methods and created a dependence on pesticides. It took away government price guarantees for corn and other products. It left the free market to regulate prices. To keep up, Mexican farmers sowed more corn. Diversified crops were substituted with monocrops. The government and agribusinesses encouraged farmers to use pesticides to increase yield from the fields.

The Mexican government also approved the experimental planting of GMO corn. Our native corn was contaminated with genetically modified corn and farmers stopped using native seeds.

As a result, farmers abandoned traditional, sustainable farming practices. Their soil was contaminated by the use of agrochemicals. It became dependent on the pesticides, so farmers had to pay more to buy them. Many could not make ends meet. They abandoned their lands, left to work in maquiladoras, and emigrated to the United States.

In 2003, out of every 100 agricultural products that Mexicans ate, 93 were bought from the United States -even corn, beans, and rice, the staples of Mexican diets. Despite the free trade agreement, the U.S. continues to subsidize its farmers, allowing them to dump huge amounts of corn into Mexico and driving Mexican farmers to abandon their crops.

NAFTA benefits the rich Wall Street investors in the USA and a handful of Mexican Billionaires

In Oaxaca there are no positive effects of NAFTA. There may be some positive effects in other parts of Mexico, but usually it benefits people who are close to the government, people who have money, and not farmers. We are told Mexico has reduced the amount of corn it buys from the U.S. But those who sell corn in Mexico these days are not farmers, and often they’re not even Mexican. They are business people who are making money in this new reality.

Here in the United States, we criminalize the migrants. We talk about protecting our borders, being more vigilant because immigrants are dangerous. But there is no clear public policy to find real solutions to real problems. Migration will continue as long as Mexican farmers are loosing their way of life. Even if some are now returning from the U.S. to Mexico because of the economy, there are others in Mexico getting ready to cross the border. The loss of food sovereignty is growing, and the people who are coming back from the U.S. are not used to working in the fields. What we really need is to urge the government to renegotiate NAFTA.

Here in the U.S. and elsewhere, only those who have money have access to good food. At one point in time, it was the poor farmers who had access to it. We should go back to that. First, farmers should not sow to sell. They should think about growing healthy food. Second, we need to understand that we’re part of a system, a globalized food market, and we can harm the farmers that grow our food.

In the United States, most people don’t have food sovereignty. They buy it. But if you really want to eat healthy, every family should try to grow some of their food. This would reduce dependence on large corporations that produce food at the cost of the small farmer. And it would give people options to decide what to eat. Many already grow their own gardens. It’s better to grow your own. Just because you see organic produce at the supermarket doesn’t mean that the farmer gets a fair price from the sale of that product.

And those who can’t grow their food can also do something. The idea of fair trade doesn’t mean you have to sow your own food. It can mean choosing to eat local foods and thinking about how your food gets to your kitchen table. We know there are many people who want to change their way of life. If every time there is more of us, change will come.

Maria Ibarra is about 40 years old. She works in the maquiladora factory of Maxell of Mexico–an American tape cassette corporation located in New Jersey. She  lives in a barrio with a  street that turns to mud after a rain.  Her home that she shares with another family is made from castoff material from the factories–scrap metal, a wooden frame built from cast off wooden pallets.  READ MARIA’S COMPLETE STORE HERE.

Remember the old mining “company stores” from the 19th century?  Well they are alive and well in the Maquiladora neighborhoods.  Maria makes about $5.00 a day for her labor.  The Company give a weekly bonus of food coupons that are worth 55 pesos (about $8.00).

ABOUT THE MAQUILADORAS- Maquiladoras flourished under NAFTA.  Simple-minded American investors don’t understand what really happens in the Maquiladoras–not as long as they get their dividend checks.  They comfort themselves with the lies that Corporate minions tell them regarding ‘scales of economy’–the Wall Street euphemism to cover the truth that they are using what amount to not only child labor in Mexico, but also slave labor at slave wages. That is the truth.  But on the USA side of the border, they sit in their Baptist and Methodist churches every Sunday and absolve themselves of the responsibility that the horror of their “investments” bring daily to humanity just a few hundred miles from their doorsteps.  Indeed, many of these people are the very ones who advocate shutting Mexicans out of our country permanently.

A maquiladora is a labor-intensive assembly operation. In its simplest organizational form, a Mexican maquiladora plant imports inputs from a foreign country—most typically the United States—processes these inputs and ships them back to the country of origin, sometimes for more processing and almost surely for marketing.

The maquiladora program itself permits the inputs and the machinery used to process them to enter Mexico without payment of import tariffs. On the return to the country of origin, again most typically the United States, the shipper pays only such return import duties as are applicable to the value added by the manufacturing process in Mexico. The return trip is not under the jurisdiction of the maquiladora program. The tariff arrangements involve the law of the country to which the processed product is reshipped. Even though most Mexican maquiladora activity entails shipments from and to the United States, it is important to emphasize that other nations are permitted to operate under the maquiladora program.

THE CHILDREN OF NAFTA–Labor Wars on the US Mexico Border

David Bacon, a journalist and photographer, has written a book about the children of NAFTA.

“We can’t live if we don’t all work,” one 12-year-old boy, laboring alongside his parents, tells Bacon in “the tone of someone explaining the obvious.” Indeed, explaining what should be obvious is something that Bacon and his interviewees do with great skill. Typical conditions in the border factories are horrendous, they tell us, and the labor “side agreement” to NAFTA-the rider meant to protect workers’ rights-has done nothing.

Han Young, a Mexican factory making chassis for Hyundai cars, where workers who tried to form an independent union were not only fired, but blitzed by the local SWAT team and chased for months as fugitives. In response to the workers’ grievance, the National Administrative Office (NAO)-the labor board created under the NAFTA side agreement-merely mandated a seminar on labor conditions. Then there are the jonkeados-the junked workers-”who became so sick, so chronically disabled” from inhaling fumes from glue and solvents at two auto trim factories that one had a baby born with no kneecaps and an enlarged heart.

Proclaim the Queen!

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