JUL 22, 2001 Farm Unrest Roils Mexico, Challenging New President

By GINGER THOMPSON AMATLÁN, Mexico — The fields are green with new sugar cane, but the peasant farmers feel that their way of life is withering away.

By the tens of thousands, peasants in Mexico are abandoning the small plots they considered their birthright.

In recent weeks, thousands of other peasants have taken their struggles to the streets, even to the nation's capital, pushing parts of the agricultural industry to the brink of civil unrest.

The small farmers, typically with plots of just a few acres, are being battered by a combination of forces, from the explosion of free trade under Nafta to plummeting market prices and cuts in government support. Rice, corn and coffee farmers are all being hurt.

Just as American growers from California to Mississippi to Florida complain that the free trade accord with the United States has forced hundreds of them out of business, Mexico's farmers feel similarly overwhelmed. They complain that they, too, are drowning in a flood of imports, and that the agreement has not given them the access to American markets they were promised.

For President Vicente Fox, who inherited a crisis rooted in decades of paternalism and corruption in the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, reforming the agricultural industry and finding alternative employment for millions of subsistence farmers at a time of widespread resentment may prove his most important domestic challenge.

This month, 5,000 sugar cane farmers converged on the capital and blocked access to government offices, demanding $420 million from the nation's 60 sugar mills. The protests became furious after government officials announced that they would investigate charges of corruption against one of the nation's most powerful milling companies.

Tens of thousands of other farmers have held their own protests, forcing one state governor to declare an emergency. Several other governors admit to being worried that the protests could cause smoldering uprisings to ignite.

"The entire Mexican countryside is a disaster," said Carmelo Balderas, hacking with a hoe at weeds around the young sugar plants in his two-acre field near the San Miguelito mill in Amatlán in the state of Veracruz. "There is almost no place left in the country where a small farmer can make a good living."

"And the problem for Mexico," he added, "is that when farmers stop eating, everyone stops eating."

Mr. Balderas said two of his four sons had migrated to the United States in recent years. Asked why, he pointed in the direction of the San Miguelito sugar mill, slouched on a hillside overlooking the village. The mill's owners still owed Mr. Balderas $3,000 for sugar cane he produced last season. His sons, like many other young men in the village, had tired of relying on declining and unreliable incomes.

A wry smile spread across Mr. Balderas' sun-bronzed face, and he compared the crumbling mill to an Aztec pyramid. Soon, he said, "the mill will be the only evidence that we ever existed."

Some of the most intense protests began early this month in the northeastern state of Sinaloa. Corn farmers blocked access to gas depots to demand that the government impose higher tariffs on corn imported from the United States. In all, there are 3.5 million corn growers across the country, and they are uniformly overwhelmed by a 45 percent drop in corn prices over three years.

Farmers in Sinaloa contend that importing corn from the United States has left them with 2.4 million tons of unsold corn. Imports have increased by 14 percent a year or more since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994. That landmark agreement encompasses Mexico, the United States and Canada.

After two days of protests, the governor of Sinaloa, Juan S. Millán, declared a state of emergency when panicked motorists began hoarding gasoline and the state's most important businesses, particularly hotels in the resort city of Mazatlán, were forced to close or greatly reduce their services.

A few days later, in the state of Campeche, rice farmers took control of two cereal plants to demand that the government renegotiate $4 million in loans. And in mid-July, the governors of nine coffee-producing states agreed to press the national government to create an emergency fund to help compensate coffee farmers devastated by declining prices.

The governors, including those from Veracruz, Oaxaca and Nayarit, pointed out that the crises in their states had generated new waves of migrants to the United States. And using the experience of his own state as a warning, the governor of Chiapas, Pablo Salazar, said the areas most affected were those most prone to armed uprisings.

[On July 20, farmers in the border state of Chihuahua gathered at a customs station and turned back grain shipments from the United States. A leader at the protest, part of a national peasant farmer movement called El Barzón, told Mexican reporters that the demonstrations would last until the government undertook new initiatives to help small farmers.]

Mexico's sugar industry offers a window on problems as complex and entangled as the web of shafts and conveyer belts in the sugar mill here.

In the decades after the 1910 Mexican revolution, the government distributed millions of small plots of land — more than half the nation's territory — to peasants as a way of fostering peace in the poorest regions. Over time, those plots have become even smaller as they have been divided and handed down to children and grandchildren. Today each of the nation's sugar mills is supplied by thousands of cane growers — each with an average of just four acres of sugar cane.

The San Miguelito refinery has contracts with 4,500 growers, said Ramón Martínez Amaya, the refinery's controller. Unions, once a part of the Institutional Revolutionary Party's authoritarian political machine, determine the size of the refinery's bloated work force. At the start of the harvest last December, tens of thousands of mill workers called a national strike to demand a 25 percent wage increase and improved retirement benefits.

And under the law governing the sugar industry, the government sets the prices that mills pay cane farmers and requires that the mills make most of those payments before the end of the harvest in May.

Even after it sold the mills to private investors in the late 1980's, the Institutional Revolutionary Party government continued to set prices and to force mills to adhere to union demands.

San Miguelito, like many of the nation's sugar mills, is in serious disrepair. There is a field of new parts and machinery out back, but Mr. Martínez said there was no money for installation. "In global terms," he said, "this plant is way behind modern times."

Rodolfo Perdomo Bueno, who operates a mill company called Grupo Perno, said that despite their outdated machinery, Mexico's refineries had increased sugar production during the last seven years in anticipation of the opening of United States sugar markets under Nafta.

According to the Mexican government, by last October Nafta should have let mills export all their excess sugar, an estimated 500,000 tons, to the United States. But a so-called "side letter," added to the agreement by the United States but not recognized by Mexico, limits exports to the United States to 116,000 tons to protect the American sugar industry.

Meanwhile, Mr. Perdomo said, the Mexican sugar market is steadily shrinking because of increasing imports of less costly high fructose corn syrup from the United States. The syrup is preferred by Mexico's important soft drink industry.

"We were betrayed," Mr. Perdomo said. "We are being forced to sell our sugar wherever we can, at whatever price, so that we don't drown in it."

In Amatlán, sugar farmers wait for what they are owed. Many said the San Miguelito mill owed them $1,500 to $3,000 for the season. It was all the money many would earn this year.

For Mr. Fox, lifting Mexico's rural communities, which make up about 28 percent of the population, out of poverty is a daunting challenge. The son of ranchers, he has promised to help subsistence farmers find new markets, organize themselves into farming cooperatives, and find financing to modernize operations. In recent weeks, his administration has negotiated agreements with corn farmers in Sinaloa and cane growers in Veracruz that have essentially secured the payments they are owed.

But Mr. Fox, a former corporate executive, is also committed to the more Darwinesque principles of free trade. And members of his administration have said that in Mr. Fox's modern-day revolution, small farmers are facing a harsh reality: not all will survive.

In an interview, Secretary of Agriculture Javier Usabiaga said the government could not afford the paternalistic programs that kept small farms going in the past. Rather than charity, Mr. Usabiaga said, the Fox administration wants to change the way the industry is organized.

"We have to change an entire culture," he said. "A small farmer, no matter how productive, is not going to be able to make enough money to survive. That farmer is going to have to start transforming his crops to milk, meat or anything else.

"In essence, he is going to have to find another job," Mr. Usabiaga said. "He is going to have to become a part-time farmer."

But at least one family in Amatlán has decided to break with generations of tradition. Tired of depending on mill officials to pay for the sugar cane they produced, Mari Cruz Hernández and her husband, Daniel Beristain, decided to grow fruit and flowers on the acre they inherited from her mother. On a recent day, they began planting lychee plants on half an acre. On the other half they plan to plant gladiolas.

The gladiolas, Ms. Cruz hopes, will bloom every four months and support her, her husband and her elderly mother for the three years that it will take the fruit plants to begin to yield.

"I got tired of working all year, and then in the end the mill wouldn't pay," she said. "They made us into working beggars. And so we decided, no more."

Many young men in the village, she said, seemed to be making similar decisions. Ms. Cruz pointed to a passing train on tracks above her fields. It was the morning train heading south, she said, toward Guatemala.

The northbound train, she said, passes each evening. Hundreds of Central Americans bound for the United States hang from the cars. And increasingly, she said, young men from the village have begun hopping on board.

Going north has crossed her mind, Ms. Cruz, 28, acknowledged. She compared the migrants to pioneers, and said that each time the migrant train passed, she whispered a prayer for God's protection. But her goals are still centered on home.

Asked about the risks of abandoning a crop that supported her family over three generations, Ms. Cruz said she considered herself a different kind of pioneer. "Sometimes you have to risk everything if you are going to get ahead," she said. "If the migrants risk everything to leave, then we can take risks to stay."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/22/international/22MEXI.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 23, 2001