More on Maize, Migration, etc

OK, I’ll continue by addressing the concerns raised by Rajagopal and Steve (thanks both of you).   If this repeats things I’ve said lots of times before, I apologize.

Well, by the 1990s, it was becoming clear that the ejido system was not working as planned.

Now, after reforms, it is possible (if an incredible hassle) for campesinos (peasants) to get title to their land and to sell it.  This is really important in a country where until recently loans, if they were to be had at all, came at interest rates of 50% plus.  It is one of the few ways the rural poor can raise capital for everything from medical expenses to the costs of a coyote (smuggler of humans) to take them across the border into the US to a pick up truck that allows them to take a dozen family members to work as bricklayers on a construction project (the main alternative work for campesinos).

But what had happened from the 1930s on was that farming in Mexico ran along two tracks.  There were all these tiny farmers producing just enough for themselves and a small sale to the market.  And there were the big farmers who had tractors and irrigation wells and all the apparatus of modern farming.

How come there were big farmers if there had been land reform?  Well the reform was spotty.  Some large farmers were ruined when their lands were turned into ejidos–I know many, many Mexican families who lost everything.  But others hung on.  And then somehow or other much of the better land got consolidated and was run as large farms.  All a bit murky wouldn’t you say?

So it is my belief, though I need to get figures for this, that most of the trucks you see lined up at Maseca plants (that is the plants turning corn in to masa harina) are bringing in maize from big farms.

Now, and this is really important, big farms in Mexico grow white corn not yellow corn.  The maize that is imported from the US is yellow corn.  Mexicans think this is unfit for human consumption.  So in fact the campesinos are competing against big Mexican farmers with all their economies of scale, not against US farmers.

So what’s that yellow maize doing in Mexico?  It’s being used to make sweeteners.  And it’s being fed to hogs and chicken.

And that means that the diet of campesinos has been transformed in the last fifteen years.  They eat meat.   It’s the custom here that any full-time household employee gets their main meal.  When I arrived here about fifteen years ago, they would fix beans and tortillas and perhaps an egg or a can of tuna.  Now they expect a chicken leg or a bistek or ground beef.  Mothers have gone from a newly-cheap chicken once a week to some kind of meat daily.

OK, OK, we have Mark Bittman (an American cookbook author typical of current trends) urging Americans to go to a grain and vegetable diet.  But really, this has been a boon in Mexico in my opinion.  Children grow tall and strong.  An American friend who visited one of Mexico’s poorer regions, Oaxaca, where this shift has not occurred, said how much better he liked our more prosperous area.   “In Oaxaca,” he said “there are a lot of very short people.  And there’s only one reason for a lot of very short people.”

So, bottom line.  What about NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and Mexican agriculture?  So far as I can see it goes like this.  For big farmers it’s a huge boon, a huge new export market.   In fact, in our part of the world, farmers are growing for the American fruit and vegetable market.  If they are to use irrigation water, this brings a good return.

For campesinos, well, being a campesino is not a great way to live.  I just can’t go along with the huge numbers of Mexican academics (and city folk elsewhere) who believe that the campesino should be kept on the land no matter what.

Later, subsidies on tortillas and the pandering to the cities, maize biodiversity, and environmental impacts.

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