Farm leaders from across Mexico who traveled to Mexico City for the Sept. 25 forum on “Restoring National Agriculture” at the Economics Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), are now out on the hustings nationwide, campaigning for the national strategy drafted at the forum to save both Mexican farmers and the national food supply, particularly when it comes to the basic grains: corn, wheat, sorghum, rice, beans and others. The idea is to move hard now, to get their proposal on the table before public consultations on revising or extending the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade pact (USMCA), beginning in October in Mexico.
At the forum, cosponsored by the farmers leading the National Front To Save the Mexican Countryside (FNRCM) and UNAM Economics Department, the farm leaders and the economists discussed at length the causes of and needed remedies for the existential crisis faced by farmers after decades of free trade policies. At its conclusion, they issued a letter addressed to President Claudia Sheinbaum, her Secretaries of Economics and Agriculture and Rural Development, and the Agriculture Committees of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, outlining the urgent needed change in the nation’s agriculture and food policy.
Farm leaders from nine Mexican states who attended are now holding press conferences back home. El Heraldo headlined its Sept. 29 report in the Chihuahua state edition, “Producers Ask Claudia Sheinbaum To Rethink Agri-Food Policy. They warn that austerity and budget cuts aggravate the rural crisis.” That article was then picked up by other media.
El Heraldo identified the key points outlined in the letter to the President, including “a universal policy of parity prices to cover national production costs, accompanied by credits with preferential rates, a system of collection, distribution of seeds and fertilizers, as well as the expansion of the agricultural frontier.”
Eraclio “Yako” Rodríguez Gómez from the FNRCM told reporters that they propose that a “National Agricultural Roundtable” be established, with the participation of producers, consumers, and the Mexican government, in order to “de-monopolize the market and reduce the control of large importers.” As the letter states, out of such a roundtable “a development strategy to strengthen the domestic market and promote the industrialization of the country” could be developed.
This strategy to restore food self-sufficiency by “restoring the concept of national agriculture in force between 1934 and 1982,” requires that basic grains be removed from the USMCA treaty, which has only “deepened food dependence and corporate control over basic grain prices, which exposes Mexico to possible ‘grain blackmail,’” the letter argues. The prices for Mexico’s basic grains must no longer be set by the speculators of the Chicago Stock Exchange.
The letter is clear: No one is proposing that Mexico break commercial relations with the United States, but Mexico does need to diversify its markets, looking to new platforms such as the BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, “where there is greater understanding of the needs of the nations of the Global South.”
