The Mexican agriculture sector has been decimated by decades of free trade policies, including the USMCA, which have allowed the multinational grain cartels to dump cheap products on the Mexican market, destroying the country’s food self-sufficiency, reducing food production and consumption in the country, and driving millions of Mexicans to head to the U.S. as “economic refugees.”
That was the view stated by Alberto Vizcarra, a leader of the National Front To Save the Mexican Countryside, in a Jan. 20 interview with EIR. He stated that these free trade policies had wiped out some 4 million Mexican food producers; that “there is currently no market for over 4 million tons of corn, 500,000 tons of beans, and thousands of tons of sorghum.” Vizcarra reported on the Front’s demand that all basic grains be removed from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where they are currently traded at the whims of speculators for the benefit of the cartels, and that Mexico, instead, return to a policy of developing national food self-sufficiency to meet the population’s needs.
He reported that the Front, in addition to staging national protests, is working with fellow farmers in the United States, Chile, and other countries, because they all share the same enemy: the Wall Street-run grain cartels that put speculation before people’s needs. He reported that the Front had recently met with Mexican Agriculture Secretary Julio Berdegué, and read him selections from a letter of support that the Front received last year from 18 American farm leaders—to the Secretary’s visible displeasure.
Vizcarra called for Mexico and the U.S. to unite in the building of great infrastructure projects, such as the PLHINO and NAWAPA water projects, as long-proposed by U.S. economist Lyndon LaRouche. “As our friend Lyndon LaRouche always, always emphasized, he viewed these projects as exemplary…. He called for making the U.S.-Mexico relationship an example of what North-South relations should be, where the economies are measured in terms of mutual benefit, and not that someone has to lose so that the other can win.”
The full Vizcarra interview can be found here: Stop Speculating with Mexico’s Grain Production! Interview with Alberto Vizcarra. It can be found at the Playlist tab on the EIR YouTube channel.
