It took only one week for agents of the globalists’ corporate-financial agriculture interests in Mexico to come out swinging against the campaign to pull production of basic grains in Mexico out of the grip of the USMCA free trade accord and the Chicago Board of Trade. On Oct. 2, the head of Mexico’s “Agricultural Markets Consulting Group” (GMCA), one Juan Carlos Anaya denounced “calls to take grain out of the USMCA” in the upcoming negotiations on revising that U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade treaty. The financial Establishment’s Mexico City’s daily Reforma and its sister daily in Monterrey El Norte publicized his warning.
The call to protect Mexico’s grain producers from price-gouging on the speculative markets was the centerpiece of the package of measures proposed at the conclusion of the forum in Mexico City on “Restoring National Agriculture” held Sept. 25 in the Economics Department auditorium of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Reforma truthfully reported that the 19 farm leaders from the National Front To Save the Mexican Countryside and economists from UNAM and Mexico’s premiere agriculture school at Chapingo proposed that “basic grains—wheat, corn, sorghum and beans—should be left out of the USMCA trade scheme because the agreement has devastated local production by prioritizing the importation of these products at lower prices. For this reason, they proposed the establishment of domestic parity prices based on domestic production costs, instead of prices being linked to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.”
Anaya exclaimed, “These are terrible ideological things!” speaking at a big agricultural expo in northeast Mexico, Reforma reported. He repeated the tired old mantra that agriculture in Mexico was “one of the big winners” of the NAFTA-USMCA free trade treaties, and made a crude bid to pit Mexican horticulture and livestock exporters against the independent grain producers, claiming the first two are “more competitive” and would lose if the treaty were changed.
The one thing that Anaya said, with which the grain producers and economists agree, was that Mexico became “a different country after the [NAFTA] treaty.”
Alberto Vizcarra Ozuna, one of the leaders of the “Save the Countryside” farm group, who spoke at the Mexico City forum, reports in an Oct. 2 article that Mexican agricultural growth rates averaged 6% a year from 1934-1982, when national economic policies regulated and protected primary production, and treated production of basic grains a strategic priority. Mexico was able to satisfy the growing domestic demand for food even as urban areas expanded, along with national industry.
Not so after free trade policies took over. Dr. Arturo Huerta, the head of postgraduate economic studies at the UNAM who also spoke at the forum, pointed out in a post-forum interview that before the 1994 NAFTA treaty went into effect, only 10% of Mexico’s food products were imported. Today, 56% of Mexico’s basic grain consumption is imported, and the flood of cheap, subsidized (cartel-handled) grains are bankrupting domestic producers. If Mexico cannot pay for these imports, or they are not available, there will be no farmer left to produce the food.
