NAFTA an Empty Basket for Mexican Farmers Brittany Elena Morris - Cronkite News Service
go to original May 19, 2014

BUENA VISTA, Chiapas, Mexico – Moises de la Cruz grows corn on 7 acres of mountainous land 120 miles north of the Mexico-Guatemala border, just as his father did and his father before him.

He has never heard of the North American Free Trade Agreement but is profoundly aware that his life as a farmer has drastically changed in the past 20 years.

Moises now has to pay for costly pesticides and rent tractors to keep pace with neighboring farmers. He has taken a second job as a construction worker in San Cristobal de las Casas almost two hours away to make ends meet because the market for locally produced corn has dried up.

He, like other small-scale farmers in southern Mexico, is feeling the impact of modernization and the expanded trade brought on by NAFTA.

“Farming is not the same,” Moises said with an ear of corn in his dirt-caked hands. “If my father could see it today he would die again, this time from shock.”

When the agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada went into effect in 1994, it removed nearly all trade barriers between the countries. Among the industries affected was agriculture, forcing small Mexican farmers into direct competition with big American agribusiness. Cheap American corn — heavily subsidized, mechanized and genetically modified — soon flooded the Mexican market to the detriment of local farmers.

As U.S. farmers exported their subsidized corn to Mexico, local producer prices plummeted and small farmers could no longer earn enough to live on. Rural farmers left southern Mexico in droves and migrated north, spurring increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. from southern Mexico states.

Read the rest at Cronkite News Service

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