The 10 leaders of the National Front To Save the Mexican Countryside, an independent group of farm leaders from seven states of Mexico, issued a clarion call addressed to President Claudia Sheinbaum on Dec. 11 for an emergency change in policy, in response to her proposed national budget for 2025. The proposed budget meets the demands of the bond holders of Mexican government debt: That more than $50 billion of funding for state services such as education, health and support for productive activities such as agriculture be eliminated. This is the largest budget cut since the 1994 payments crisis, when Mexico’s government debt and banking system nearly went under.
“This cut is expected to leave more than one million hectares of the country’s irrigated areas affected by the drought in the northern and central states that support the national production of basic grains, without emergency support. As a consequence, there will be a vertical fall in the production of wheat, corn, beans and sorghum, deepening the downward slide of recent years and thereby deepening [Mexico’s] growing food dependence,” they warn. “The time has come for Mexico to actually break with the schemes and dogmas of neoliberalism.” It is the enormous payments on the debt which should be cut instead, they propose.
The statement points to the global reality driving this crisis: the “financial and commercial instability of systemic proportions, whose epicenter lies in the dysfunctionality of the dollar system, whose disintegration is driving the growing tension in Southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. Events which contain the threat of a world war.
“In such situations, the greatest vulnerability faced by countries is their food dependence on markets that tend toward a speculative maelstrom, threatening dependent nations with starvation.”
The farmers propose specific measures—pivoted on a return to a system of “national agriculture,” dumping the so-called “commercial agriculture” schemes imposed by free trade agreements like today’s U.S.-Canada-Mexico Accord—and urge President Sheinbaum to “explore joining the BRICS,” as a lever to redefine Mexico’s trade and economic relations with North America. The BRICS nations are “marching steadily in their pursuit of a new international financial architecture, which includes not only trade agreements, but also infrastructure projects to increase the productive potential of the associated nations.”
