Leaders of the National Front for the Rescue of the Mexican Countryside (FNRCM) announced this weekend that on Tuesday, Nov. 18, the Agriculture Committees of the Congress and Senate of the Republic, together with federal officials from the relevant ministries, will hold two roundtables with farm leaders on the package of sweeping national agricultural policy changes proposed by the FNRCM. As EIR has reported, the FNRCM has put together an audacious program to free Mexico’s farmers and agricultural production from the grip of speculative finance, which is driving them into bankruptcy.
One roundtable will focus on water issues; the other on the national policies that the government must adopt in order “to restore the effectiveness of the concept of national agriculture,” various FNRCM leaders have announced. The statement from Sonora by the FNRCM specifies that to do so, “requires that our basic grains and other strategic goods be removed from the commercial framework imposed by the USMCA and the Chicago speculative exchange.”
The urgency of restoring a universal policy of parity prices, regulation of grain imports, and other mechanisms aimed at meeting national production targets to reduce dangerous food dependency are on the agenda of this roundtable, but the bulk of the discussion is expected to center on the need to reestablish a National Rural Credit Bank. Such a bank must have the authority to issue sufficient credit to meet the needs of production, free from the constraints of “fiscal adjustments” and the dictates of the banking interests defended by the Bank of Mexico (Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Federal Reserve).
