Excerpts from the paper
Finding the Global in the Local: the WTO, Corn, and Migration
© Andrea Schuman, 2004
Saturday, September 13, 2003: Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Day three dawns on the Fifth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization. Cancun is locked down tight, with police in riot gear lining the road that snakes up the peninsula housing the hotel district and the Convention Center, where the meetings are taking place. The news that filters from the Convention Center is not encouraging, in official terms. The crucial piece of business for this round, the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), is stalemated. A formidable coalition of developing nations, over time referred to variously as the Group of 20, 21 or 22- and winding up as a Group of 24- has refused to open debate on the terms put forth by the United States and the European Union. The US and the EU are interested in discussing the removal of tariff barriers to the entry of agricultural products, thereby further opening developing country markets to their surpluses, while the Group of 20+, including such major agricultural exporting economies as Brazil, India, China and Argentina, is more concerned about the effects of massive subsidies provided by the US and the EU to their agricultural sectors, subsidies which are destroying developing countries’ own agricultural base, they argue.
Demonstrators have made their way to Cancun as well, from other parts of Mexico, the United States, Korea, Japan, Italy and elsewhere. Dubbed “globalifobicos” by the Mexican press- a coinage attributed to former Mexican President Salinas- there is no single agreed agenda among them either. The two groups that seem to dominate are officially constituted campesino (small farmer) organizations and student groups. The anarchists, who were so prominent in Seattle in 1999, are also present. Demonstrators have been made quite comfortable by the municipal government, which provides not only places for them to set up their tents, but porta-potties, five gallon jugs of purified water, and sound systems.
This story is the result of my efforts to track the effects of “grand” policy initiatives- NAFTA, a trilateral agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada; the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture- on the everyday lives of ordinary people living and working in an agricultural state of Mexico. Migration becomes a central aspect of the narrative, as international trade policy changes the agricultural landscape for small farmers worldwide. Does free trade increase human redundancy? What are the operative mechanisms in this process? Following the general points that were to be debated in Cancun back to specific instances, in this case corn farming in Yucatan, is one way to uncover the linkages.
Mexico Post-Nafta
Almost one quarter of Mexicans continue to work in the agricultural sector, which generates just eight percent of the GNP. Many farm for family subsistence, with any surplus in good years being sold for much needed cash, and many work small plots dependent on rainfall, lacking access to credit. But, with alternative employment virtually nonexistent for most agriculturalists, any threat to this way of life represents a threat to life itself. Of the three million corn farmers working in 1991, more than one million had deserted the occupation by the year 2000. Where did they go? Two figures are suggestive- an increase in the dependency rate (the number of non-workers a worker supports) and the covariance of the price of corn with the number of illegal entrants to the US. When the first goes down, the second goes up.
The Mexican economy’s three largest earners remain oil, tourism and remittances from workers in the US. This has been true both pre and post NAFTA, although their relative positions have changed in a telling way. Just two weeks prior to the WTO Cancun meeting, the government announced that this last income source, money sent home to family members by migrant workers, has moved to second place on this list, following oil. According to the Consejo Nacional de Poblacion, the Mexican national census organization, only 3% of Mexican municipalities report no migratory activity to the US. Between the period 1992 and 2000, which encompasses the first six years of NAFTA, the number of households receiving remittances almost doubled. Although figures on total remittances for 2003 have not yet been released, several sources concur in estimating more than 10 billion dollars. That a country as large and with as much potential as Mexico depends so greatly on the export of human beings to maintain and reproduce its population at home is a staggering fact.
Yucatecan Farmers and the World Market
A resident of Peto- a town in the southern corn-growing region of Yucatan - described to a reporter the options available to him prior to embarking on his fourth border crossing, (my translation):
Now it’s easier, because friends and family members who are in the US recommend to us the ‘polleros’ [border crossing guides] who will help us to get to the other side. A ‘pollero’ charges between 1,500 and 2,500 dollars, depending on the type of service that the person prefers: in the cheapest, most of the time you have to walk about two hours in open land or desert, and also they only leave you in Los Angeles and your friends have to come get you to take you where you’re going to live. In the more expensive service you don’t walk, rather they take you in a vehicle, all the way to where you’re going to live. But it’s an important difference in cost, which makes the majority of people opt for the economy service...
US immigration policy denominates some entrants as “merely” economic migrants, in some manner less worthy of respect and assistance than those fleeing war or seeking freedom from oppressive regimes, who are commonly called “refugees” or “asylum seekers.” This masks an important fact: for many rural dwellers in less developed countries, the current rules of the game in international trade represent a real and immediate threat to their livelihoods- not just to their “standard of living”- but to the activity that keeps them and their families alive. Where traditional agricultural output is overwhelmed by imports sold at less than their cost of production, the practice known as “dumping,” many small farmers and their families lose the means to maintain even what is essentially no more than a subsistence way of life. In Yucatan, as elsewhere in Mexico, this process is underway for many corn farmers. Corn, the nation’s staple grain, has become too expensive to produce, as the price of US imported corn is below both countries’ cost of production.
Retool, Relocate
While economists are well aware of the potentially destabilizing effects of trade opening, the negatives are usually considered to be of short or medium term importance. People are resilient- they will move to other parts of the country where workers are in demand or seek training to allow them to enter a field that is expanding. Unfortunately, for many Latin American farmers, the options are few. Lacking basic education and experience in regulated work settings, they are not realistic candidates for industrial or service sector jobs. The sad fact is, while the workforce as a whole may successfully rebalance itself over time, most of the individual workers in agriculture currently being made redundant will not. The urge for survival being what it is, many of them will relocate. And the most attractive ready alternative is migration to the US, where low paid jobs as gardeners, dishwashers and cleaners of hotel rooms will allow them both to survive and to contribute in meaningful ways to the maintenance of their families. The non-monetary costs to sending families and communities, and to Mexican civil society as a whole, remain to be calculated.
.To receive a copy of the full paper, please request "WTO, CORN and MIGRATION" from aschuman@ctriples.org
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