Desolation: Mexican Agriculture and Campesinos in the 21st Century
Zermeño, Sergio
Desolation: Mexican Campesinos and Agriculture in the 21st Century Indigenous migrant workers prepare food during the tomato harvest on a farm in the northwest mexican state of Sinaloa. the...
...15...
...10...
...5. Norberto Bobbio, El futuro de la democracia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986), 25...
...Imelda García, “Crece importación de fertilizantes,” Reforma, May 3, 2008...
...9. Alejandro Nadal, “Maíz, cosechar tempestades,” La Jornada, January 17, 2007...
...12 (May–August 1992): 189–206...
...Mexico subsidizes its agricultur- tional, Anderson Clayton, Cargill, Pilgrims Pride, Maseca, al industry with $3.5 billion each year, versus $20 billion Bachoco, Purina, Bimbo, Nestlé, Sabritas—which sold in the United States...
...was in the hands of big industry, among which vegetable imports...
...19...
...20...
...agricultural output were meant only and tequila—which together account for some to influence the fall in prices for staple goods $5 billion of exports each year, representing produced in Mexico by small- and medium80% of its agricultural exports—Mexican capi- size farmers, and to essentially drive those tal has very little invested in the most impor- farmers out of business.6 tant agro-exporting companies (Dole, Chiquita, A great blow to this latter sector came during Fisher, and Del Monte).3 As the Mexican econo- production was the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari mist José Luís Calva affirmed long ago, if Mex- (1988–94), which promoted the production of ico throws its hat into the ring of comparative industrialized tortillas...
...3. Víctor Quintana, “Saldos del TLCAN,” La Jornada, December 31, 2002...
...Although Mexican agriculture is farmers in order to feed the world...
...11...
...16...
...17 (5) the reduction in food reserves in developed countries because of the high costs of storing perishable foods and adverse climatic conditions in countries where grain exports are very important, like Argentina...
...Moreover, take the piling, establishing guaranteed prices, distribution, and following into account: In Mexico, each acre of planted importing grain...
...190 (March/April 2004): 37–50...
...8. “México es tercer país receptor de remesas en el mundo, según Banco Mundial,” July 15, 2008, www.informador.com.mx...
...its profits by 86% in the first The rise in general costs of production and transport associated with the increase in gas prices...
...NarcoNews, April 10, 2007, available at narcosphere.narconews.com...
...2. Thomas Shannon, speech to the Council on the Americas, April 3, 2008...
...and Syngenta, 28%.21 The point here, then, is that if Mexico is already facing a massive trade deficit in primary products —almost $6 billion in 2007—it is obvious that, given the world food market’s new tendencies, the country’s food dependency will severely trimester of 2008...
...What is new about millers and nixtamal producers will leave the market, or this phenomenon of informal migrant farm labor is the exremain on its fringes...
...For such tasks nies make the profits, as Mexico slips ever deeper into food as transplanting, harvesting, and packaging, women and dependency—during the Fox administration the country children are underpaid by up to 30% to 40% compared to spent more than $42 billion on importing basic foods, men...
...5. Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development, “Unauthorized Migration: An Economic Development Response...
...22 World Bank president Robert Zoellick, concerned about unrest in Haiti and Africa, held up a loaf of bread, explaining that it cost a quarter of a family’s income in Yemen, and a two-kilogram sack of rice, saying it cost a family in Bangladesh half its daily income.23 Thus, food dependency is not an alarmist issue recognized only by defenders of the countryside and campesinos, but by the very stalwarts of neoliberalism themselves...
...See also testimonies on the CCIODH video at cciodh.pangea.org...
...7. Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, “Fact Sheet: Fair and Secure Immigration Reform,” January 7, 2004...
...25 Long live comparative advantage...
...and the Mexican government promotes dump- depressed prices from Mexican producers, and after subing against its own producers, having charged no duties jecting them to fairly simple processing, sold them at ever on corn imports that exceeded quotas since NAFTA was higher prices: While the real price of corn fell 45% in five instituted—duties that would have equaled $1.3 billion years, the cost of tortillas (which provide 75% of caloric between 1995 and 2000, and $429 million from 2000 to intake for 45 million poor people) went from 1.9 pesos 2002...
...8. Adam Prezeworski, Michael Álvarez E., José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 164–68...
...What’s from subsistence farming, many others, faced with less than more, these monopolist groups receive strong support self-sufficient production, must now travel long distances to from President Felipe Calderón...
...by 2003, almost half of tortilla production In the 1980s, we accounted for 70% of U.S...
...José M. Maravall, “Economía y regimenes políticos,” Working Papers, Instituto Juan March, no...
...Ibid...
...4. Silvia Gómez Tagle, “Public Institutions and Electoral Transparency,” in Kevin Middlebrook, ed., Dilemmas of Political Change in Mexico (San Diego: Center for U.S...
...report: mexico ii keep costs low and increase competitiveness...
...and Syngenta, 28...
...Better that the 3 many campesinos, faced with less than selfsufficient production, must now travel eral the 25 million Mexicans connected to the report: mexico ii Auchan, and Carrefour, taking over a retail business that nies oriented toward the domestic market...
...11...
...Rubio, Explotados y excluidos...
...2. Chantal Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Community (Verso, 1992), 13...
...3. Jorge Carpizo, El presidencialismo mexicano (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1994), 121– 22...
...Antonio Sánchez, “Entrevista: Fernando Canales Clariond: comercio, la prioridad,” Reforma, January 22, 2003...
...For many years, half of the informal workers in Mexi- 55% more than under his predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo.14 can agriculture have been women, and they can easily be Extrapolating, we may calculate that this figure could apfound migrating all around the country in small teams.12 proach $100 billion in the 2006–12 presidential term if T Mexico 2002, ound ar by Even alone...
...But the Mex- and insecure...
...Desolation 1. This article is a revised, updated version of Sergio Zermeño, “Desolación en México...
...59 (1994...
...If we considerably increase the Gruma corporation (owners of the Maseca our supply of exportable agricultural goods, company) controlled 70...
...Mario Marín, governor of Puebla, was recorded discussing the apprehension and harassment of human rights defender Lydia Cacho with a Puebla industrialist allegedly connected to the pedophile rings Cacho wrote about...
...28 (July–December 2006): 117–58...
...13...
...5. Comisión de Desarrollo Rural de la Cámara de Diputados, La soberanía económica de México en riesgo, cited in La Jornada, November 28, 2002...
...16...
...Mexico’s smallbefore had been in Mexican hands.8 The massive rise in and medium-size producers lose, and the campesinos prices for corn and tortillas that was unleashed in 2007 either migrate or remain, surviving on subsistence concan thus be explained in this context: The large retail- sumption and the unprofitable sale of their surpluses...
...Also new is the importance of female and child labor, representing an effort to The agro-industrial exporters win, as do the big compa30 FridA HArtz SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 In January, marchers in mexico City denounced nAFtA’s role in driving up the price of food...
...This has pushed many small- and medium-sized corn farmers toward products that demand less of these costly inputs or toward simply abandoning their fields...
...12...
...Latin American Working Group, the Center for International Policy, and the Washington Office on Latin America, “Blurring the Lines: Trends in U.S...
...In mid-2008, these factors combined with the world food crisis, as we will see below...
...15...
...10 80% of all agricultural labor in Mexico...
...food and having to pay welfare in the core countries, harm developing even greater subsidies than it already does to countries: According to a study by the Internaprotect its own important agricultural sector— tional Food Policy Research Institute, dissemiand to prevent the very probable collapse of its nated by the World Trade Organization, the rich SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Already by 2003, almost half of tortilla report: mexico ii countries’ agricultural dumping, made possible by gener- real prices for corn and wheat declined by 45%, sorghum ous subsidies, result in the loss of about $24 billion each by 55%, and seeds and fertilizers by 50% and 60%, reyear in developing countries, and the European Union spectively...
...Víctor Suárez Carrera, “La economía agroalimentaria, un desastre,” La Jornada del Campo, April 8, 2008...
...Ulises Ruiz, governor of Oaxaca state, stands accused of authoritarianism and violent repression of the social movement...
...22...
...These and gasoline cost up to 60% more than in the United companies bought corn, sorghum, wheat, and beans at States...
...18...
...Bunge, 49...
...Already markets for these products are not unlimited...
...Molina Ramírez, “El campo en cifras...
...and Macs or agricultural opposed he european union trade has liberalization, steadfastly rich Big culinary tradition (coq au vin and Bordeaux high they arguments in favor of food security and employ- have allowed millions of farmers to remain inment...
...As a state agricultural other agricultural product...
...The Bank of Mexico confirmed the country’s precarious state when it acknowledged, in April 2007 and March 2008, that purchasing the most important 127 foods and agricultural inputs required import payments of $13 billion—or $5 billion more than in 2005, the last year in which prices for these products were stable...
...But obviously this wouldn’t one out of four Mexicans living in villages with popula- work, since the North Americans do not subsidize their tions of 2,500 or less...
...3. North American Transportation Statistics Database, “Transportation and the Economy,” Table 2-3, “Employment in Transportation and Related Industries,” available at nats.sct.gob.mx...
...6. Blanca Rubio, Explotados y excluidos (Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 2001), 128–29...
...Summing up the tion, hoarding, and speculation on inventories and prices: situation, the World Bank noted that between December Cargill increased its profits by 86% in the first trimester of 2006 and February 2008 average world food 2008...
...Peter Rosset, “La hora de La Vía Campesina,” La Jornada, May 9, 2008...
...La Consulta, un logro del movimiento ciudadano,” La Jornada, June 23, 2008...
...2. WTO study cited in Reuters, “Países en desarrollo pierden 24 mil mdd por subsidios al agro,” published in La Jornada, August 27, 2003...
...Los campesinos del siglo XXI,” Nueva Sociedad no...
...As the economist Ale- the large farms of the north, following the agricultural cycles jandro Nadal wrote in 2007, “Maseca [a subsidiary of of fruits, vegetables, and flowers (as well as demand from the Gruma], the largest corn flour company in Mexico and urban construction industry), returning home only at the the world, expects that after [the price hike], many corn planting season and again for the harvest...
...4. Jeanne Batalova, “Mexican Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Information Source, available at www.migrationinformation.org...
...17...
...Associated Press, “Report: Mexican Army Used Rape, Torture in Drug War,” September 21, 2007, available at www.usatoday.com...
...where about half of Mexican corn is produced...
...food autonomy...
...wheat prices rose by 75% in the same pe- agro-corporations betray them as primarily responsible for riod...
...corn prices at the beginning of that year already prefigured a suspicious change in behavior on the part of world reguEqually devastating is the undermining of domestic lators of staple-grain prices, but in the Mexican case, the farmers, from the small to larger producers, who cannot hoarding of these products by the transnationals was so compete with cheap agro-imports...
...ican officials of the neoliberal era do not think in social While a great number of campesinos remain on their terms...
...Hubert Cartón de Grammont, “El mercado de trabajo en el campo: unas reflexiones a partir de la lectura del libro Portraits de Bahia, de Hèléne Rivière d’Arc,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología no...
...government claims.20 To 49...
...Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Sobre la situación de los derechos humanos en Chiapas, Balance Anual 2007,” available at www.frayba.org (translation by the author...
...1 And it makes sense that the old conti- tegrated into modern forms of production and nent, which is home, in proportional terms, to consumption, while keeping backwardness and five times as many farmers as the United States, structural dualism at bay...
...Its disappearance gave way to the great corn yields one ton, versus more than three and a half transnational retailers—Minsa, Corn Products Internatons in the United States...
...Mexican Studies, 2004), 88–95...
...Meanwhile, Mexico is not competitive in almost any cording to a provision of NAFTA...
...Juárez,” NACLA Report on the Americas 41, no...
...24...
...2) rising food demand from developing countries (as Brazilian president Inácio Lula Da Silva put it: “The world was unprepared for China and India’s 2 billion inhabitants—out of the 6 billion who live on the planet—eating three meals a day”);16 (3) a worldwide change in consumption habits, which has increased the consumption of meat and, therefore, grains to feed livestock...
...The same occurred with other goods ing in misery throughout the world, as a result of manipulathat make up the basic food basket...
...These are replacing the advantage, “not even a 10th of the area we lose tortillas traditionally made by hand from masa for staple crops could be channeled toward har- de nixtamal, the alkalized corn dough used by vesting fruits and vegetables for export to the small producers whose importance to the inUnited States...
...Manipu- From the macroeconomic point of view of globalizalating the supply of these enormous stocks, they man- tion and comparative advantage, improving people’s aged to sell this same grain, in Mexico City, at 3,500 quality of life matters little, and increasing subsidies to pesos, with a profit of more than 2,000 pesos per ton.9 the inefficient countryside would be idiotic, a waste of World prices for corn had been rising since the begin- resources...
...14...
...This underlined the increase in prices for corn, wheat, soy, powdered milk, and planting seeds...
...José Galán and Laura Poy Solano, “Abierta violación al espíritu constitucional: expertos,” La Jornada, April 28, 2007...
...Mexico’s fertilizers, electricity, diesel, staple goods on the Mexican domestic market...
...Víctor Quintana, “Drug Trafficking, Violence and Repression,” CIP Americas Program, May 8, 2008, available at americas.irc-online.org...
...Roberto González Amador and David Brooks, “Tensa al mundo en desarrollo altos precios de alimentos: FMI,” La Jornada, April 11, 2008...
...report: mexico ii Sergio Zermeño is a professor at the Institute of Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico...
...9. Inter-American Development Bank, “Remittances and Development: The Case of Mexico” June 28, 2005, available at www.iadb.org...
...Silvia Ribero, “Agrocombustibles: secretos y trampas del Banco Mundial,” La Jornada, July 5, 2008...
...In the last 10 years, Mexico has increased fertilizer imports by 400...
...Today, Maseca already controls 50% tent to which it has spread in comparison with full-time emof the national tortilla market, and it is considering taking ployment with a formal contract—it now accounts for about over the entire market with these predatory practices...
...3. Alejandro Estivill, conference on SPP, Universidad de las Américas (Cholula), June 12, 2008...
...Mexico imported yel- the 150,000 sugarcane growers—and in genlow and white corn from the United States to control the price and instituted no policies that countryside—either demonstrate their comwould give Mexican producers an incentive— petitiveness or throw in the towel...
...23...
...14...
...Ribero, “Agrocombustibles...
...9. John Ackerman, “Democratización: pasado, presente y futuro,” Perfiles Latinoamericanos: Revista de la Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Sede México 14, no...
...es structur social circuit are trapped and within a logic Today’ i of agr weakening country imported $5.7 billion worth of food in the fi t , y h p a g o e G d n s i t s t a t S f o e t t i t s n l a n o i t a N ’ o i x e M hus, the laborers involved in mex co’s agricultural we ta c ke s into accou I nt th u at, ac cord i ing c to a the num r bers fro r h m s e t companies, as opposed to their antecedents, use a re- depended on imports to fill almost half of its food basket...
...years.13 Informal workers endure terrible conditions and This was the general outlook in 2007, when, owing to are paid extremely low wages, with no opportunities for a combination of factors, neoliberal certainties about the upward mobility...
...sees no incentive in opening its market to cheap, However, these policies, which defend social heavily subsidized U.S...
...Moreover, these migrant day workers benefits of free trade and comparative advantage in the have few labor rights, or rights of any kind, and as they world food market were undermined...
...2 (1991...
...17...
...But even before the current crisis, the Mexican government responded to the inflationary million grain producers, the half-million cofagitation of 2007 by opening borders to grain fee growers, the 800,000 livestock farmers, imports with no tariffs...
...Rights, available at cciodh.pangea.org...
...in the imperial universities where they were edu- lands, rooted in traditional social structures and surviving cated, they were never taught to think this way...
...Rather, the government ceded In addition to the growing impoverishment and this market advantage to the very speculators marginalization to which these rural majorities who had provoked the price rise in the first place, since will be relegated, certain tendencies are already manifesting it was they and no one else who were in charge of com- to the detriment of their collective identity and social equimercializing the massive imports...
...And all this occurred while Mexican producers of per kilo in 1998 to 3.5 in 1999 to 5.5 in 2003.7 staple grains and other agricultural goods saw their ware- These very companies have benefited from two thirds houses filled up with no hope of selling anything during of the Mexican government’s subsidies, and they have the same years...
...19 At first it would not seem obvious which of these factors has had the greatest impact on the price increase, but according to a World Bank report leaked to the U.K...
...4 tional Company of Popular Subsistence (Conasupo), acin the hands of big industry, among which the Gruma Corporation controlled 70...
...It ers had acquired, at 1,350 pesos per ton, a great part of is in this context that eight out of 10 Mexicans live in the previous year’s corn harvest from the state of Sinaloa, poverty, and two out of three in extreme poverty...
...Many simply did not harvest their crops further added to their profits by working together with because of the drop in prices: Between 1995 and 1999, transnational chains like Wal-Mart, Costco, Sam’s Club, 29 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Canales made clear is that the perspective of “open economy” does not value making an effort to increase the domestic production of products imported at low prices, prices made possible by the very high subsidies they receive from their countries of origin...
...González Amador and Brooks, “Tensa al mundo en desarrollo...
...11 What officials like kilo of tortillas—had no correlation whatever with biofuel production and rising input costs, but rather with the multinationals’ hoarding...
...Ibid...
...but not so the prices of fruits, beans, and vegetables, which the multinationals export from Mexico and whose prices have increased much less...
...32 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS this we can add another determining factor: hedge funds, which began aggressively buying present and future grain worsen, as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, predicted in April: “The commercial deficits of countries like Mexico,” he said, “could increase as far as $10 billion, or one perSEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Elections in Mexico 1. Portions of this essay draw on many of the ideas I developed in collaboration with Enrique Conejero in the introduction we wrote together for a book we coedited, Democratización y globalización en América Latina (Spain: Universidad Miguel Hernández, 2005...
...5. See “A Primer on Plan Mexico,” available at http://americas.irc-online.org...
...Juan Antonio Zúñiga, “Creció 55 por ciento la importación de alimentos básicos en los pasados seis años,” La Jornada, January 16, 2007...
...6) the anti-national attitude of agrarian groups in countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, who prefer to export food, provoking an artificial shortage as a mechanism to destabilize their governments;18 (7) reductions in exports decreed by many exporting countries (Argentina, Brazil, Vietnam, India, and Egypt), whose governments are worried about shortages...
...Israel Rodríguez J. , “El alza en alimentos cuesta a México 5 mil mdd: Banxico,” La Jornada, May 4, 2008...
...the number of migrant agricultural workers in the country has ballooned in the last decade and a half, and many of them are women and children...
...ADm by 67% in 2007, and in that same year, monsanto by 44...
...7. Claus Offe, “El dilema de la sincronía: democracia y economía de mercado en Europa Oriental,” Revista del Centro de Estudios Constitucionales no...
...This increase in the cost of Mexico’s primary imports is equivalent to the country’s petroleum surplus obtained in 2007.24 But the adversity is not the same for everyone...
...The sharp spike in go from one seasonal plantation to another, they are unable to put down roots or organize...
...As former president Vicente Fox’s finance secning of 2007 because of its use in producing ethanol and retary, Fernando Canales Clariond, explained in 2003: the increase in the costs of basic inputs (diesel, gasoline, “The campesinos will have to transform themselves into and electricity), but the speculative jump that occurred industrial workers or true businesspeople, particularly at the beginning of that year—from six to eight pesos per the poor corn and bean producers...
...8. Luis Hernández Navarro, “La guerra de los alimentos,”La Jornada, October 22, 2002...
...See also Tania Molina Ramírez, “El campo en cifras,” in Masiosare, a supplement to La Jornada, January 12, 2003...
...that is, they chose not to take advantage of the The number of Mexico’s agricultural day larise in prices, which would have benefited them borers, working for ever more depressed wages in the medium term, gradually reconstructing throughout Mexico’s north and west, has swelled...
...If these subsidies were elimi- fell by 40%.5 nated, the countries of the South would triple their agri- Following the agricultural logic of neoliberalism, cultural exports, reaching $60 billion annually, according it could cynically be said that if it is so much cheaper to the study.2 to produce staple grains in the United States and elseIf the proportion of Europeans linked to agricultural where, the best thing for Mexico to do would simply be production is five times higher than that in the United to import everything, paying with a portion of domestiStates, Mexico has a proportion 15 times greater, with cally produced petroleum...
...Why, then, has the country trader, Conasupo had played a role in regulating stockopened its borders for all products...
...6. David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 13...
...Large foreign compa- great that it was thought that importing higher quantities 31 report: mexico ii of corn would stabilize prices and do away with the “externalities” of hoarding...
...4. “Aprueban diputados que se penalice el delito de terrorismo . . . ,” La Jornada, February 21, 2007...
...duced workforce of about 100,000 temporary workers, Now that all Mexican tariffs on foods have been eliminated, working an area that is also small: almost 5 million acres and the global price of food have has risen, we can only of corn, as opposed to more than 66 million in previous begin to imagine how this dependency will worsen...
...His argument was logical: “The dustry has been drastically reduced...
...changed alarmingly: Corn prices on the Chicago market Within this framework we can clearly understand, though in April 2008 had increased by 50% over the previous it still causes repugnance, why the profits of the gigantic 12 months...
...4) the diversion of some foods toward the production of biofuels, to which the United States probably devoted a third of its 2007 harvest and the European Union a third of its vegetable oils, both domestic and imported...
...But between mid-2007 and the first months of 2008, stocks, after their debacle in real estate, pushing up the the situation—not just in Mexico but worldwide— food prices as a part of their financial gambling...
...25...
...4. José Luis Calva, quoted in La Jornada, November 16, 1991...
...notes Displaced People 1. Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development, “Unauthorized Migration: An Economic Development Response,” Washington, D.C., 1990...
...10...
...According to data from the USDA, Argentina and Brazil—two Latin American countries that have maintained tariffs on imported grains—will each buy about a million tons of U.S...
...and rice prices rose by 75% in just the first two the price escalation and the increase en masse of people livmonths of 2008...
...Verónica Martínez, “Refleja México ineficiencia en agro,” Reforma, April 29, 2008...
...2. USDA, Foreign Agricultural Service, “Mexico: Trade,” available at www.ers...
...3 (May/June 2008): 31–33...
...Between 1990 and 1999, the price of beans is principally responsible...
...6. International Crisis Group, “Latin American Drugs: Losing the Fight,” March 7. See the recent report by the international Civil Commission on Human 8. See Lourdes Godínez Leal, “Combating Impunity and Femicide in Ciudad 9. See Erich Moncada, “Mexico’s Military and the Murder at Zongolica (II),” 14, 2008, available at www.crisisgroup.org...
...28 HeriBerto rodriguez / LAtinPHoto.org NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS by Sergio Zermeño Tas proposed by the United States, with cost of European agricultural subsidies, the Despite Coca-Cola...
...org...
...González Amador and Brooks, “Tensa al mundo en desarrollo...
...Military Programs in Latin America,” September 2004, available at ciponline...
...Alejandro Nadal, “Crisis alimentaria: ganancias para buitres,” La Jornada, May 7, 2008...
...there really could be a sharp fall in the North American This was combined with the dismantling of the Namarket’s prices...
...7. Ibid., 127, 131...
...Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mouriño has been questioned for signing contracts with his family’s oil company while serving in public office...
...6. Associated Press, “Mexican President Decries Anti-Immigrant Tone,” February 14, 2008...
...Desolation: Mexican Campesinos and Agriculture in the 21st Century Indigenous migrant workers prepare food during the tomato harvest on a farm in the northwest mexican state of Sinaloa...
...bunge, centage point of GDP, because of food imports...
...13...
...usda.gov...
...ADM by 67% in 2007, and in that same prices increased 48%.15 Many explanations for the crisis arose: (1) Cargill increased year, Monsanto by 44...
...The very low subsicompetitive in fruits, vegetables, flowers, seafood, beer, dized prices of U.S...
...12...
...Ibid...
...librium: The most important of these is the “casualization” What a way to squander an opportunity to strengthen (precarización) of labor, which becomes informal, temporary, Mexico’s own non-monopolistic companies...
...Guardian, biofuel production is responsible for at least 75% of it, not 3%, as the U.S...
...41...
...grain in 2008, while Mexico will bring in 11.3 million...
...and (8) the dramatic rise in fertilizer and pesticide prices in just one year...
...long distances to the large farms of the north...
...Armoring NAFTA 1. See the official Web site, www.spp.gov/myths_vs_facts.asp...
...2007 of months four o-export s anomie...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 5
