Re: [A-List] Big pig, little pig

[joanna bujes <joanna.bujes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, could someone enlighten me. How come the US keeps subsidizing its
farmers, but requires that other countries, like Mexico, not do so?

Thanks,

Joanna

At 07:36 AM 12/22/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> December 19,
> 2002
>
> Nafta to Open Foodgates, Engulfing Rural Mexico
> By GINGER THOMPSON
>
> IRAPUATO, Mexico, Dec. 15 - A decade of hemispheric economic upheaval
> finally turned Eugenio Guerrero's life upside down last Saturday. That
> morning, he tried to auction off the pig farm that has supported his
> family and some 50 others for two generations.
>
> "It's true," read a flier that announced the sale. "We are
> closing and auctioning everything."
>
> >From now on Mr. Guerrero, 41, will dedicate himself to selling
> paint.
>
> The changes he has been forced to confront are being felt all over Mexico
> as the country struggles to keep its balance, one foot in poverty, the
> other seeking a toehold in prosperity through the North American Free
> Trade Agreement.
>
> Mr. Guerrero said he had barely been able to keep afloat since the treaty
> began abolishing trade barriers between Mexico, the United States and
> Canada nearly 10 years ago. Credit ran dry after a national economic
> crisis devastated banks in 1995. The Mexican government ended most
> agricultural subsidies, sending his costs through the roof. Pork prices
> plunged as cheaper imports from the United States flooded Mexican
> markets.
>
> Now, Mr. Guerrero's last defense is being dismantled. Under Nafta, on
> Jan. 1 tariffs on almost all agricultural imports from the United States
> will end.
>
> The looming deadline has consumed the attention of a nation where a
> quarter of the population lives in rural areas, and produced warnings
> about the possibility of unrest and increased migration across the
> Mexican countryside and into the United States, as millions of peasants
> are forced to abandon their tiny fields.
>
> In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers and their
> supporters have blocked highways and border crossings. They have
> temporarily shut down gas and electricity installations, and even burst
> into Congress on horseback.
>
> President Vicente Fox's government is short of cash and has offered
> little more than moral support. "In the world today, all sectors
> have to adapt to the new competitive conditions," the president
> said. "Agriculture cannot be the exception."
>
> Meanwhile, some, like Mr. Guerrero, grope for ways to hold on to a
> middle-class way of life, if not their farms. For him, Saturday was the
> start of another life.
>
> That morning, Mr. Guerrero, the father of two adolescent sons, held an
> auction to begin selling off half of his 2,000 pigs. There was no way, he
> said, that the family business could compete against large-scale pork
> producers in the United States, who now hold 40 percent of the Mexican
> market.
>
> In the United States, a pig can be raised and sold in Iowa for a fifth of
> what it would cost to raise and sell one in Irapuato. Since Nafta took
> effect, a third of Mexico's 18,000 swine producers have gone out of
> business, according to the Mexican Hog Farmers Association.
>
> Mr. Guerrero said he had laid off all but five of his workers. Most told
> him they would emigrate to the United States illegally in search of a new
> start.
>
> Mr. Guerrero, however, decided to start over at home. He closed
> Saturday's auction with the sale of a hulking black and white male that
> went for 40 percent less than he was asking. A few hours later, more
> resigned than rejoicing, he presided over the grand opening of his new
> paint store.
>
> "Mexico will not be a country of producers, it is going to become a
> country of salesmen," he lamented. "The problem with that is we
> are putting our independence at risk. We are becoming a country that
> depends on foreigners for food."
>
> Mr. Guerrero said he accepted the survival-of-the-fittest laws of free
> trade. "But Mexico entered the free trade game with serious
> disadvantages," he added. "Naturally, we are the
> losers."
>
> It was widely predicted before Nafta took effect on Jan. 1, 1994, that
> free trade would create a new world of economic winners and losers.
> Mexico has become the world's ninth largest economy and a powerhouse in
> the export of manufactured goods. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were
> created, most of them in assembly plants called maquiladoras.
>
> Food imports from the United States have doubled, from $3.6 billion a
> year to $7.4 billion. But the food trade has also boomed in the opposite
> direction.
>
> Exports to the United States, mostly products made by large Mexican and
> transnational food processing corporations, have increased from $2.7
> billion to nearly $5.3 billion. Among the most notable winners are
> companies like Grupo Bimbo, Mexico's largest food company, which has
> taken advantage of cheap grain imports.
>
> Other winners are Maseca, which has become the world's largest producer
> of cornmeal and tortillas, and Sigma, which imports cheap pork parts and
> poultry pastes from the United States to make sandwich meats.
>
> Fruit and vegetable farmers, who benefit from longer seasons of sunshine
> and cheaper labor than their American competitors, have also increased
> their exports to the United States under Nafta.
>
> But many observers say the losses outweigh the gains. Mexico's most
> difficult challenge has been the fate of some 25 million people who live
> in the countryside.
>
> Although agriculture represents less than 5 percent of the gross domestic
> product, about one in five working Mexicans are directly involved in it.
> The overwhelming majority are poor subsistence farmers, who work plots as
> small as two acres. However, midsized farmers are also being
> devastated.
>
> Poultry farmers, too, are expected to be hit hard when remaining tariffs
> are lifted on Jan. 1. Currently Mexico places a 48 percent tariff on
> poultry.
>
> As much as Nafta ignited an economic evolution, said analysts, it has
> also set off a kind of social landslide as the government struggles, in
> the span of a decade, to move millions of people from farming into other
> ways of life. The impact is likely to be felt on both sides of the
> border.
>
> Some 700,000 people are expected to lose jobs in farming and other food
> industries next year, warned Armando Paredes Arroyo, president of the
> National Agriculture Commission. Many may join the estimated 300,000
> Mexicans a year who make the illegal journey to the United States. Most
> are peasant farmers.
>
> Farm leaders pointed to President Bush's farm bill, which promised $180
> billion in spending over the next 10 years, as an example of unfair trade
> practices by the United States. A typical farmer in Mexico receives $722
> a year in government subsidies, officials say, while the average American
> farmer will receive more than $20,000 under the bill signed by President
> Bush.
>
> President Fox, however, rejected calls to renegotiate or suspend Nafta.
> The government says the farming crisis is linked in large part to the
> legacy of government corruption and mismanagement by the Institutional
> Revolutionary Party, which controlled Mexico for seven decades.
>
> In the budget approved last week, the Mexican government pledged $10.2
> billion in spending on agriculture next year, an increase of about 4
> percent over last year. However, farmers complain, only $4.5 billion will
> go directly to subsidies.
>
>
>
> Copyright The New York Times Company