A Growing Problem - NAFTA

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A GROWING PROBLEM
Farmers fear U.S. exports
'How is the Third World supposed to trade with the First World?'
By ELIZA BARCLAY
Houston Chronicle Foreign Service
A CAXOCHITLAN, MEXICO - Hipolito Cuauhtémoc has worked as an apple farmer in the small central state of Hidalgo for 22 years, but he says this year's harvest in orchards that stretch over a few acres will be his last.

"The prices have dropped too low, and people want to eat the shiny red apples from Washington state ?- they say they're aesthetically better," Cuauhtémoc, 51, said, grimacing as he says the word "aesthetically."

Greater access to the U.S. market under the North American Free Trade Agreement, has helped exports of crops like mangoes, which are ideal for Mexico's sub-tropical Pacific coast. But in many regions, Mexican farmers continue to fold, faced with the pressure of low-cost imports 11 years after the agreement began opening up the borders.

The export assembly, or maquila, sector has bloomed in Hidalgo, with more than 7,000 enterprises now dedicated to textile and apparel manufacturing for export, but Cuauhtémoc said he will not be looking for work in those places.

"I'm a farmer, and I'll stick around here as a caretaker even though nobody is growing apples anymore," he said.

Even before NAFTA took effect, the Mexican farming population was shrinking, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

While the agreement helped to bring an estimated $10 billion in foreign investment and 800,000 new maquila jobs to Mexico by 2001, the agricultural sector dropped by 2.8 million people, or more than 11 percent, between 1990 and 2003, according to the UN agency.

An agreement to open the markets between the United States and Central America, known as CAFTA, is offering similar promises of job creation and economic prosperity in the maquila sector to the impoverished region, but the agreement also portends an even bigger loss in the farming sector because these Central American countries are more dependent on agriculture.

Central American farming is already under pressure, with widespread migration already under way. There has been a nearly 2 million person drop in the agriculture sector, or 5.4 percent, since 1990. But there were still more than 35 million people involved in Central America's agricultural sector in 2003, attesting to its importantance to the region.

With next to no government support, they stand to be swept out of the market with the arrival of cheaper American farm imports.


Textile jobs to increase
According to a recent study by the University of Michigan, the accord would create 300,000 new jobs in textiles and apparel in Central America, but it also stands to cause major displacement of farmers. This shift from farms to factories will likely compound Central America's mass migration to cities ?- where even maquila jobs may be taken first by the urban unemployed ?- or to the United States.

The U.S. and Central American governments have championed CAFTA as a means to create jobs in manufacturing sectors increasingly competing with Asian powerhouses like China and India.

For countries like Honduras, with an already established maquila sector, 140,000 jobs could be lost to Asia without Cafta's lowered trade barriers, Honduran President Ricardo Maduro has said.

Yet the treaty remains contentious and unsigned in the U.S. Congress, despite President Bush's support. The measure was sent to Congress Thursday with a 90-day deadline for passage.

One barrier is opposition by some powerful members of the sugar and domestic textile industries.

Labor unions and environmental groups argue the agreement fails to ensure worker rights or protect the environment in those countries.

Three Central American countries ?- Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic ?- are waiting to see if it passes in Washington before ratifying it. Leaders of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, however, with greater stakes in the maquila sector, shepherded it to ratification and are now pleading with Washington for its approval.


The Mexican precedent
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, has said CAFTA will level the playing field for Americans. But many farmers, and particularly Mexican farmers, feel it's not a fair fight.

"How is the Third World supposed to trade with the First World?" said Adalberto Bravo Olguín of COPRODESA, a Mexican corn farmers federation based in Puebla state.

Across Mexico, ghost towns litter the landscape, with homes and dusty main streets abandoned by farming communities unable to compete when prices dropped with the lifting of tariffs on imports of U.S. food commodities in 1994.

One-fifth of Mexicans still work in the agricultural sector, but it has lost 1.3 million jobs since the mid 1990s, many of them in corn cultivation.


Making corn pay off
In the northern state of Sinaloa, where corn production is more efficient and close to the border, corn farmers have felt little heat from NAFTA.

But in the small town of Nopalucan in the central state of Puebla, some corn farmers have joined ANEC, a national network of corn cooperatives that has reached out to struggling farmers.

They are now producing their own line of tortillas called Our Corn made with 100 percent Mexican corn.