The Global Food Economy by Weis Tony

Author:Weis, Tony
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781848136885
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2007-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

In addition to trade liberalization, the prospects of a second technological-agrarian revolution would only make these social pressures more daunting.

In light of their contemporary agrarian questions and the pressures they face to liberalize agricultural trade, both China and India would do well to observe the experience of Mexico, which is sometimes described as a test subject for the developing world as regards the outcomes of multilateral trade discipline. Further, like China and India, Mexico experienced rapid population growth along with uneven industrialization and urbanization in the twentieth century, and undertook an agrarian transformation with elements of both the Chinese and Indian models. On one hand, the ejido system that followed the Mexican Revolution protected a measure of small-farmer and indigenous land and food security in perpetuity, and with it the centrality of maize production, which had been at the heart of food security and cultural identity for millennia. On the other hand, Mexico was the birthplace of the Green Revolution, and large industrialized farms achieved major yield and productivity gains. This dualistic landscape of communally controlled small-farm holdings and industrialized, high-yield production together made Mexico largely food self-sufficient into the 1980s, even as its population grew more than sevenfold over the course of the twentieth century.

The onset of structural adjustment in the 1980s, however, brought a dose of trade liberalization to agriculture, cutting import tariffs and quotas, along with policy changes favouring export growth. And as some high-value Mexican exports such as fresh fruit and vegetables gained a foothold in off-season North American markets (part of the dramatic rise in the all-season availability of fresh fruits and vegetables there) commercialized farmers experienced increasing incentives ‘not to produce the necessary but rather the profitable’ (Barkin 1987: 287). In tracing the tomato commodity chain, Barndt (2002) provides a detailed insight into some of the social costs underpinning this growth. The flipside of the rising export orientation of these successful farms was that cheap grain imports began rising (Barry 1995; Barkin 1987), and these became a torrent following the onset of NAFTA, which was signed between the USA, Mexico and Canada in 1994. NAFTA affected Mexican agriculture in two fundamental ways. First, state support programmes for Mexican agriculture (e.g. government-subsidized credit and marketing boards) were cut and the state’s formal (albeit long inert) obligation to land reform was terminated, as a precondition of Mexico’s admission to NAFTA was its 1992 constitutional amendment to allow the privatization of the communal ejidos – which had previously been protected from sale or fragmentation. Second, NAFTA entrenched the market liberalization begun under adjustment, enhancing openness to imports while reducing domestic price supports for farmers. Understanding these changes as a further assault on both indigenous livelihoods and culture, the Zapatistas chose the onset of NAFTA to mark their uprising (see Chapter 5).

In the decade following NAFTA, Mexico’s total agro-imports increased by 50 per cent, led by the more than tripling of maize imports from the USA, its modest agricultural trade surplus became a sizeable deficit, maize prices collapsed

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