Mexican Farmers Protest US Trade Pact

By MARK STEVENSON
The Associated Press
January 31, 2008

Led by a column of tractors, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through downtown Mexico City on Thursday to protest recent trade openings that removed the last tariff protections for ancestral Mexican crops like corn and beans.

Chanting 'Without corn, the country doesn't exist!' farmers and farm activists from across the nation demanded the Mexican government renegotiate the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, to reinstate protection for basic crops.

Farmers here say the can't compete with bigger U.S. farms which receive more government support. Under the terms of NAFTA, Mexico got a 15-year protection period to improve its farms, but that phase-in period ended Jan. 1, and Mexican farms _ mostly tiny plots of 12 acres or less _ still lag behind.

'The truth is, we can't compete, that is why we're demonstrating ... because we're really getting hit hard,' said Telespor Andrade, 44, a weather-beaten farmer from central Mexico who grows corn and beans on about 7 acres of land.

Protesters pastured their cows outside the Mexican Stock Exchange on the city's main boulevard, and burned a tractor at a nearby monument to the 1910 Mexican Revolution.