Maize, Migration, Mexico, the US, and the Environment

A California friend, Romney Steele, who shares my obsession about the maize and US-Mexico relations,  just sent this message.

Debate centers on corn:

In particular, the debate centers around corn, which is Mexico’s primary food staple. The average Mexican consumes about 280 pounds of corn a year, the second-highest per capita consumption in the world. It is Mexico’s primary crop, covering about 60 percent of the country’s cultivated area and employing more than 3 million campesinos, according to Mexican researcher Alejandro Nadal.

Corn is the largest grain crop grown in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, corn is grown on 80 million acres and about 20 percent of the production is exported to other countries.

Mexico is its second-largest buyer, and the flood of U.S. corn has pushed down local prices. Nadal estimates that the price of Mexican corn dropped 33 percent during a five-year period ending in 2003, while the cost of supplies in the country increased 169 percent.

Farm Bill subsidies to corn producers in the United States, coupled with the opening of trade between countries after the North American Free Trade Agreement created a double whammy for corn growers in Mexico, according to critics.

But Jack King, manager of national affairs and research for the California Farm Bureau, said that the exodus of Mexicans to the United States should not be blamed on the Farm Bill.

“I think Mexico may have some limitations on the crops they can grow, their amount of resources and water,” he said. “My guess is that people from Mexico would try to enter the United States for job opportunities even with (a) change of our farm support programs. I can’t necessarily draw a straight line between cause and effect there.”

The Senate is scheduled to continue its debate on the Farm Bill in the coming weeks, but few believe the legislation will be approved by the end of the year.

OK.  You are going to get me in my best preachy, academic mode.  I’ll try to keep it as user friendly as possible but there’s a huge amount of background that really needs to be understood.

As usual the newspaper summary has a huge mess of issues all muddled up: maize, GM, Mexican migration to the US, Mexican agricultural policy.  Let’s try to straighten some of them out.

First (and I realise all for today).  A bit of Mexican agricultural and population history.

The article refers to 3 million Mexican campesinos (peasants) who grow maize.

Now there is a natural tendency to assume that this is a tradition going w-aa-aa-y back into the past.  In fact, Mexican landholding from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was highly concentrated in the hands of a small landowning class.  I’0m not advocating that.  But it’s a fact to be understood.

This is actually not so extraordinary.  Almost nowhere in the world did a free small farmer class exist, contemporary agrarian dreams notwithstanding.

Then following the Mexican Revolution (Civil War) of the early twentieth century, the land was dispersed to the peasants, mainly in the second half of the 1930s.

Formerly peons (in essence unfree laborers) were given ejidos or communal land. Those are the 3 million peasants growing that maize.

The ejido initiative was, I believe, a well-meaning plan.

But several unexpected things undercut it.-

1.  The Mexican population went from 20 million in 1930 to 110 million in about 2005. That means for every one Mexican in 1930 there were five in 2005.  (By the way, the population increase has ended, Mexican families have no more children than Americans, but the effects of this take a generation or two to work through).

Compare the US that went from 122 million to 300 million in the same period.  A mere doubling.

The population increase is not something peculiar to Mexico but has been and is occurring worldwide. England went through a similar one in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century.  So did most of Europe.  Hence that’s where most of the US population comes from.

But what it means in Mexico is that a plot of 5 acres that might have supported one family in 1930 had to support five families in 2005.  Impossible without migration to cities or the US.

2. The ejido system was set up when Mexico was still plowing with mules and oxen.  You can’t put a tractor on a small bit of land.  But Mexicans have TVs and visits to the US.  They have no intention of spending their days plowing with  mules and oxen to make about $500 a year plus their food.   And can we blame them?

3.  People on ejidos could not sell or raise mortgages on their land.  Just take a second to think about the horrendous inheritance problems that this created especially with a surging population.

Bottom line.  To think that NAFTA is responsible for migration from the country to Mexican cities or to the US is just not to even begin to understand the problem.

OK  tomorrow, on to Mexican agricultural land and maize.

• ← Thanks Mariana
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