NAFTA benefits elude Mexico farmers

The Associated Press
Published: 12.29.2007

MEXICO CITY - For 15 years, Mexican farmers have feared the day when the last import protections end for the country's ancestral crops of corn and beans.

But as Jan. 1 draws near, farmers say the damage has already been done: Mexico has plunged deeply into a model of globalized agriculture where farmers are ill-prepared to compete, and even people who don't farm for a living are suffering.

Nobody knows that better than Vicente Martinez, who grows corn, beans and coffee in the green mountains of Tepetlan, Veracruz. In July, his daughter Felictas died trying to cross the desert to enter the United States. Martinez blames a combination of free trade and dwindling government farm-support programs that leave rural families with little choice but to migrate; his daughter found no work in their farming town to support her four children, other than cleaning houses for little pay.

"The only thing left to do is run for the United States . . . or sit around looking like idiots, because there's nothing to do here, nothing," said Martinez, whose daughter was abandoned by a people smuggler in Arizona.

Corn, beans, sugar and milk were granted special 15-year import protections when the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was negotiated in 1993, time that was supposed to be used to prepare Mexico for competition. But many say that didn't happen.