The Specter of Rural Development

...They offer ways in which people can begin to use the natural resources at hand to protect not only the resources themselves but the m re a n s io n t very economic viability and social integrity of communities whose exismunities tence is in question...

...Local producers throughout the country are already beginning to enter into various kinds of production agreements with Mexican and foreign interests to produce under contract for export and local specialty markets, accelerating a process that was evident 30 years ago...

...Furthermore, technological advances will offer opportunities for other farmers to take advantage of special programs to increase productivity in basic food-producing sectors...

...of people whose struggle to survive is becoming more desperate-and perhaps even more hopeless-as the well-publicized recovery of recent years produces a cornucopia that only feeds a few Mexicans and their designated foreign partners...

...8 Afew years ago, I proposed a "war economy" as a complementary strategy for rural development...

...Post-Cdrdenas administrations accorded less attention to this program and did not finance any significant technical assistance for these communities...

...This approach must offer a new development strategy that explicitly redresses the inherited imbalance between rural and urban areas...

...The gains were real, as the purchasing power of minimum wages increased almost five-fold from a post-war low in 1946 to its apogee in 1976, while workers and peasants were able to claim an increasing share of national income, rising from 25% to 37% in the same period...

...A similar approach involves an abandoned "geyser" which is spewing brine over the lands of a Michoacin commercial farming community...

...This deliberate role began as early as 1943, when the government joined with international groups to facilitate the development of what would become an imposing global structure of research institutions creating and encouraging the "green revolution...

...Because of important shifts in the world market, occasioned by the competition to subsidize food exports among the advanced industrial countries, basic food production itself has been devalued...

...These are examples of the ways in which people are attempting to confront the growing imbalance between rural and urban development, and the resulting polarization in the countryside...

...There is no doubt that the new, more flexible institutional structure will offer profitable opportunities for important groups of farmers...

...These displaced farmers were the forerunners of large contingents of small-scale landowners who became contract producers and day laborers for a new agroindustrial complex serving domestic and transnational interests...

...They forget the lesson of another popular saying: "simply by waking up earlier, the sun won't rise sooner" ("No por mucho madrugar, amanece mdcs temprano...

...This is a complex activity, because the community requires outside assistance to develop a proposal and to determine its feasibility, and the CFE must acknowledge that it has abandoned the geyser and give the land back to the community...

...Pundits in Washington were joined by colleagues in Paris and Geneva to usher the nation into the hallowed circle of well-behaved and wealthy nations, the GATT, NAFTA, and now the OECD...

...The new program probably will be very effective in pushing a select group of farmers into export production and facilitating urban expansion...

...Whether in the colorful and well-known communities in the tourist centers among the Pure'hpecha of Michoacin, the Mayas of Yucatan, the Mixtecs and Zapotecs of Oaxaca, the Tzotziles and Tzetzales of Chiapas, or in the less accessible territories of dozens of other ethnic groups, the local pattern of cacique control was reinforced by draconian systems of official "justice" and police control, supplemented where necessary by Workers load freshly ha the arbitrary exercise of military near lxmiquilpum, Mexi force, sometimes camouflaged by a real or invented search for drugs...

...ural areas, Yet the present economic program of modernization and integra- tion offers the prospect of a bright it feels are future for a small but significant segment of the population...

...Because of the lack of such a commitment, most foreign investors are unwilling to contribute to the conservation activities that-for local farmers everywhere-are normally a part of the production process...

...In one way or another, this requires a recognition of the importance of rural society for national-and urban-welfare...

...This new investment will install the most modern work "processes and produce high-valued products for the international markets...

...he Mexican government has for half a century channeled resources into the physical and institutional infrastructure necessary to consolidate the development of a modern rural sector...

...The three cases dd itional cited above are only examples of approaches that might encourage othactivities ers to look for different projects with the same goal: to diversify the pros forms ductive base so that rural communiployment, ties can continue to exist, even to thrive, and to continue to produce e food food as part of a broader strategy for rural development...

...in Mexico, using strategies that also encourage the preservation of the extraordinary reserve of cultural diversity that has managed to survive in spite of the systematic attack to which it has been subjected during the past centuries...

...Linocut on paper, 11 1/2x 18 1/2...

...In this new context, traditional food production will become one of a number of enterprises in which peasant communities engage as part of their overall strategy to survive, to improve their standard of living, and to defend their social and cultural integrity...

...So they collaborated with others, with more venal motives, to terminate programs that were helping dry-land beneficiaries of land-distribution programs...

...The winning groups will be dispersed throughout rural Mexico...

...The stimulus of having their own land to work was sufficient, however, to encourage most farmers to dramatically improve their productive conditions...

...For Mexico, this integration will mean more trade and some new jobs...

...Although the producers' groups are presently experiencing substantial difficulties in obtaining financing, it seems obvious that these obstacles will be reduced through the complex political negotiations that the NAFTA process stimulated...

...The country is beginning to realize the nature of the changes underway, though it is still too soon to predict the modifications that people will demand...

...By 1990, rural development had left more than half the country's total rural area and its cultivated land to ejidatarios, colonists, and indigenous communities...

...Although it modified this governme policy later in the 1980s, when annual food imports rose to an alarming "redunc $5 billion and the popular outcry for blocking change became widespread, supports for maize and beans were channeled rural I mainly to the nation's richer farmers, working in the irrigation districts and the fertile plains of the north, rather than to the peasant farmers who traditionally sowed these crops on rain-fed lands...

...Policymakers today are unwilling to "darle tiempo al tiempo"-give time a chance, as the popular Mexican expression has it-to allow society to adjust to the process of international integration that is linking nations and cultures...

...The new production systems, requiring the intensive use of irrigation and agrochemicals, have had environmental effects that are still being sorted out...

...but only effectively implemented during the presidency of Lizaro Cdrdenas, from 1934 to 1940...

...These outside pressures on resources were exacerbated by tensions created by growing population and poverty that often forced the communities to violate their own norms of resource conservation...

...As recently as 1990, they accounted for more than one half (55%) of the total domestic maize production, and controlled 20 million hectares (49 million acres) of arable land-more than half the total, though much of it of marginal quality...

...1 But in Mexico, the claims that global integration will bring prosperity ring hollow for a large and growing segment David Barkin is currently senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...The salinista modernization strategy is based on the presumption that foreign investors will bring sufficient resources to Mexico to pay to correct the problems, but this seems like a major gamble...

...6 Past experience also suggests that private investors are generally unwilling to sustain long-term commitments as market, production and technological conditions change...

...In early 1992, a constitutional reform of Article 27 was promulgated that paved the way for a reorganization of land tenure and the introduction of corporate capital into farming...

...Nowhere were these obstacles to progress more imposing than in the regions inhabited by the nation's many indigenous peoples...

...In the face of the narrowly focused model of industrial modernization, there is a critical need for a more diversified productive base, taking advantage of abundant and varied natural resources and the enormous reserve of inherited knowledge stemming from Mexico's cultural diversity...

...the showcase collaboration between an ejido and the transnational food conglomerate GAMESA in the northeastern part of the country was recently dismantled because of disagreements about the way to account for investments and to distribute profits...

...Lorracor oe Lana (Lane Lurueri, Karael iunno, i , i'zL...

...Little concern, however, was expressed for the traditional wheat farmers who groped for new ways to eke out a living as their traditional seeds, sown in rain-fed lands in the central plateau, could not compete...

...This lack of long-term A recent arrival from the countryside plays an accordion for coins outside a new Kentucky Fried Chicken in Mexico City...

...He is on leave as professor of economics at the UAMXochimilco, Mexico City...

...search for these solutions is the basis for the present research agenda of the author and several colleagues...

...It is likely, however, that the neoliberal dreams of today's ruling elites will not survive the vigorous rejection of Mexico's diverse, but impoverished peoples...

...Its goal was to modernize rural production in a way that a corrupt and underfinanced bureaucracy could not...

...industry...

...Agricultural development over the half century following Cirdenas' reforms created a highly polarized rural society...

...In fact, the present Unaer-Secretary of Agriculture, Luis T611ez, has stated unequivocally that it is the government's intention to encourage the emigration of more than 13 million people from the rural areas during the remaining years of this decade, people who not only were "redundant," but were actually preventing progress in rural Mexico...

...In the ensuing decades, rural policies became more complex but their objectives remained the same: to promote newer, higher-valued crops cultivated by a group of better-schooled farmers...

...Two examples of communities working to protect endangered species are in nesting areas of the Monarch butterfly and the marine turtle...

...The original program to develop dwarf wheat varieties, cultivated under irrigated conditions in the northwest, was acclaimed a success by 1960 and its group leader, Norman Borlaug, was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for feeding the hungry...

...As the men left in search of wage incomes, women were obliged to join the wage-labor force in increasing numbers, exposing themselves and their children to heretofore unknown health risks associated with the use of pesticides and sewage water in irrigation and a wide variety of hazards in other occupations...

...In rural Mexico, the battle lines, now so sharply drawn, can probably be traced to the mid-1960s...

...This polarized reality encompasses all parts of the country and all dimensions of society: local cultures and fiefdoms, regional marketplaces, national culture, and internationalized consumption...

...7), he vividly details the problems created by the confrontation between the trend towards neoliberal globalization and the possibility, indeed the necessity, of a different, more pluralistic world, if humanity and the earth itself are to survive...

...This strategy n alone draws part of its inspiration from the ger allow need to protect the rich heritage of natural diversity that is so important o live...

...With the uprising in Chiapas, Mexico was rudely reminded that many groups in rural society had been permitted to participate neither in the fruits of the revolution nor in the rv coc benefits of more recent material progress...

...In the new-world process of economic integration, they must find additional productive activities as well as forms of paid employment that offer greater income, because food production alone will no longer allow them to live...

...In the meantime, however, in 1993 a transitional income-support program, Procampo, was substituted for the traditional price supports, as a way of accommodating popular demands for assistance with international pressures against subsidies...

...In most of the country, the rural bourgeoisie channeled its struggle to control the countryside through the public-investment program...

...4 The environmental, *ation political and social problems that another massive rural-urban migra- "e than tion would occasion are beyond the n people capabilities of the system to manage...

...By producing consumer goods for the elite and more popular items for the masses, it contributed to general welfare by creating a rapidly growing demand for labor at a time when migration from the countryside was just beginning...

...A proposal is being developed to enable the community to participate directly in the transformation of the site into a tourist attraction, a spa, a training area for sporting activities, and even a showplace for alternative energy sources...

...Over-irriVOL XXVIIi, No 1 JULY/AUGUST 199431 VOL XXVIII, NO 1 JULY/AUGUST 1994 31REPORT ON MEXICO gation has initiated a destructive cycle of salinization, while the use It is the g of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides has produced a good deal of inten water and land contamination...

...Such an approach requires programs to productively employ a significant part of Mexico's population that still struggles to remain in the countryside...

...The most significant development in this regard is the increase in organizing efforts by the many regional peasant groups who, in turn, are members of national and provincial coalitions...

...Financed by generous agricultural credit-subsidy programs, and encouraged through a broad array of private and public incentives, these commercial farmers forged a new economy in the areas in which they operated, quickly transforming Mexico into an important participant in the international market for fruits and vegetables as well as for cattle...

...With their new products and markets, the neolatifundistas, as they were labeled by Mexican academics, began a cumulative process of investment and social differentiation that facilitated new forms of social control in the countryside...

...The land reform redistributed hacienda land by creating rural communities-ejidos-whose members could work the land individually or collectively, depending on political circumstances...

...Despite this encouragement, however, the peasants were condemned to poverty by a rigid system of state control of credit and by the prices of agricultural inputs and products...

...The more than three million people in these communities, who make up the "social sector" in Mexican agriculture, were a major factor contributing to the country's political stability...

...Behind this seemingly benign label, "naive" foreign scientists decided that tradi,ested garlic in a field tional research institutions in Mexico were a brake to progress...

...The import-substitution industrialization scheme of the post-Cdrdenas period was also part of the development strategy...

...Contrary to what many experts predicted, these poor, unschooled peasants were able to increase the productivity of their lands at an average annual rate of more than 3% following the redistribution of the 1930s, doubling their meager yields to more than 1.2 tons per hectare by 1960.2 The system put in place by Cardenismo encouraged the peasants to achieve substantial improvements in productivity by the back-breaking application of inherited cultivation practices, together with the fruits of local experimentation with seeds, fertilizers, and soil and water conservation techniques...

...It is evident, however, that these joint ventures are less attractive to 32 NAL1A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 32 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON MEXICO investors and more difficult to manage than originally imagined...

...To reverse this pattern, ways must be found to help rural communities diversify their economies, and to rebuild their patterns of diversified production which have long been an integral part of their survival strategies...

...Multi-purpose river basin development schemes, strategically placed throughout the country, opened up vast territories for commercial cultivation of crops destined for a new animal-feed industry and nascent fruit and vegetable markets in the United States, and later in Europe and Japan...

...Official programs for local development, together with private concessions for the exploitation of natural resources, combined to threaten the traditional systems of resource management with a logic and pattern of extraction frequently incompatible with the social needs and ecological possibilities of the area...

...This is evidence of the official decision to promote domestic food production without tying it to the traditional producing groups who, in the official view, would hold back the pace of modernization...

...The community is thinking about how to transform this "nuisance" into something productive...

...12 Clearly, the economies of North America are integrating...

...At first, the adminis- 13 milli tration of President Miguel De la Madrid channeled resources to pro- from the ducers of export crops, abandoning its commitment to food self-suffi- peol: ciency...

...production will continue to increase in certain privileged sectors, like automobiles and consumer products for export...

...Another example, also in Michoacin, involves a group attempting to create an agroindustrial park powered with geothermal energy, as part of a plan to diversify rural production and to reduce losses from spoilage and inadequate marketing channels...

...In one of Bonfil's last articles (in Ojarasca, April, 1992, No...

...Similarly, for those organized groups of ejidos willing to accept production agreements with the private sector, generous flows of resources will be available to promote technological change in which members of the "social sector" can participate...

...With declining real incomes and fewer job opportunities, internal and international migration became a significant feature of Mexican life...

...The historical pattern of discrimination against rural producers imposes an unacceptably heavy burden on society as a whole...

...The new negotiating strategy of the agriculture ministry clearly demonstrates its preference for dealing directly with the coalitions, rather than with individual producer groups...

...The incomes generated by product using conservation funds to employ will no lo local people and to construct appropriate tourist facilities to stimulate them visitors will allow rural communities to strengthen important environmental programs while at the same time diversifying their traditional productive activities as a means of defending their communities...

...Although the community members-ejidatarios-did not have the right to sell, rent or mortgage the land, their parcels were considered to be private property, to work as they pleased within the guidelines established by the community itself...

...A well-financed campaign had proclaimed the country ready to join the ranks of the advanced industrial nations, and the official criers were not only Mexican...

...As a result, indigenous communities and their regions were commonly even more devastated than other regions of the country in the name of economic progress and survival...

...This was the period when the country finally proclaimed itself self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, an historic achievement made possible by the successful application of the agrarian-reform program put in place in the 1930s...

...Recent advances in the achievement of food self-sufficiency, for example, are based on important advances in yields, resulting from the use of new seed varieties and agrochemicals...

...Further improving the lot of workers and peasants, the populist state was offering important educational opportunities and medical care to virtually every segment of society...

...They will be concentrated in the northern irrigation districts, but many investors will choose to improve productive infrastructure in other parts of the country in order to get around the labor bottlenecks that frequently occur in the North...

...The simulation exercises conducted in conjunction with this proposal demonstrated the substantial linkage effects of this approach in generating income and new employment opportunities throughout the economy.1 0 The peasant-based food self-sufficiency strategy offered by this proposal, however, now seems insufficient, in light of the further intensification of the official assault against peasants in rainfed agricultural areas...

...3 They are now engaged in an increasingly difficult struggle to survive, as the neoliberal policies of modernization through international economic integration threaten their very existence...

...Meanwhile, a highly capitalized commercial agricultural sector emerged as a result of substantial public investments in irrigation, rural road networks, agricultural research, production of high-yielding varieties of seed, and new cropping systems...

...The "geyser" was created by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) in its search for exploitable geothermal resources, but the engineers did not consider it important enough to harness for power generation...

...They were highly constrained by an inefficient and corrupt federal bureaucracy, and unable to introduce modern farming systems or new crops for lack of credit or capital...

...To many thoughtful critics, the country can ill afford the ion to effects of a narrowly defined proage the gram like the one presently being implemented...

...The remaining millions of farmers, whose plots are too small and/or whose land is of marginal quality, will be isolated from the institutional and financial supports that allowed them to continue to t r r r r r p N farm in the face of unfavorable marvernment's ket conditions...

...The accelerating process of international economic integration is weaving urban and rural differences into a single battleground of conflicting interests, thrusting modern systems into traditional backwaters, and leaving important parts of Mexican society unprepared to com- nPte in an fcnnnnmic and social environment that offers fewer, though more attractive rewards to a small elite...

...9 Building on the experience of Great Britain during World War II, this strategy suggests that a concerted effort to mobilize idle domestic capacity for food production among small-scale producers in Mexico would contribute to stimulating the growth of the domestic market for consumer goods by the country's workers and peasants...

...encou The impoverishment of the peasantry heightened with the imposi- emig tion-beginning in 1984-of neoliberal programs of economic of mo stabilization...

...Traditional industries, if left to themselves, will continue to wither with a further weakening of the labor market, increasing social polarization...

...That is, Mexico-the country, its people, its culture-will not magically change its course, its very essence, simply because the President orders its industrial structure modified, its resources sold or leased, or foreign goods imported on a massive scale...

...Small- productive scale projects, for instance, are underway involving groups who can con- as well tribute to the essential task of of paid er protecting endangered species as a way of generating additional incomes becau in traditional food-producing communities...

...So, for more than a quarter century it has simply been cordoned off and left to contaminate the land...

...commitment has ominous consequences for the preservation of natural resources...

...5 Foreign ant" and investment will flow into the country to create numerous new enter>rogress in prises, both in agriculture and lexico...

...By the time the Administration announced the decision to negotiate NAFTA, however, there was an explicit commitment to eradicate the traditional forms of cultivation of basic food crops in rain-fed areas...

...By permitting ejidal title holders to enter into a wide variety of commercial contracts, the private sector is expected to finance land improvements and cultivation...

...Social control was now imposed by the marketplace and enforced by a racist caste structure that made it more difficult for an NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30REPORT ON MEXICO indigenous and mestizo peasantry to participate in the modernization of rural Mexico...

...At the same time, with the "shrinking" of the public sector, there are fewer institutions prepared to deal with the problems that the neoliberal strategy is creating and with the people that it is leaving behind...

...This land reform, based on the breaking up of the colonial hacienda system, was the result of one of the most important demands of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1917, the redistribution of land-written into Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, A highly capitalized commercial agricultural sector transformed Mexico into an important participant in the international market for fruits and vegetables...

...Most ejidatarios were relegated to their traditional cultivation systems, producing maize and beans and a variety of other products for domestic consumption...

...7 This expansion of the arena for negotiation, and the active participation of local groups in complex discussions about the way in which they will be included in the modernization-integration process, offers an important new channel for well-organized regional coalitions to attempt to obtain privileged access to new productive opportunities in the neoliberal environment...

...VOL XXVIII, No 1 JuLYIAuGusT 1994 33 VOL XXVIII, No 1 JuLY/AuGusT 1994 33REPORT ON MEXICO In Mexico, one way to begin this process is to identify small projects that might help individual communi- Rural co ties and regional groups use the must find resources they have, in as creative and must find productive a way as possible...

...it no longer can offer a viable option for economic advancement for most people in rural Mexico...

...We might even anticipate that part of this production will be directed to local markets where it will drive out less modern producers unable to compete, either because of low productivity, inadequate capitalization, or the inability to survive the intense marketing battles...

...This current of thought has become increasingly influential in Mexico and elsewhere in the Third World, where people of many different persuasions and approaches have adopted this approach in social analysis, action programs, and political platforms...

...For a discussion of the role of cultural diversity in world development, and the threats that the internationalization of the economy represents for both nature and people, see Bonfil, Mexico Profundo, with regard to Mexico, and Eric Wolf's different approach in Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, California: University of California, 1982...