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Reclaiming Corn and Culture
by Wendy Call
For 14 years, NAFTA has displaced farmers and spurred migration. The
answer from Mexico’s grassroots: co-ops and fair trade.
“The fatal date has arrived,” announced one of Mexico’s largest
newspapers, El Universal, on New Year’s Day 2008. The last trade
barriers between Canada, Mexico, and the United States fell on January
1, completing the North American Free Trade Agreement’s 14-year phase-in
process. While this milestone passed with little comment in the United
States, more than 100,000 teachers, college students, activists,
farmers, and ranchers marched in Mexico City.
The New Year’s Day protesters demanded their government reopen
negotiations on NAFTA. When that didn’t happen, about twice as many took
to the streets again on January 31, 2008. Another newspaper summed up
the situation: “Head-on struggle against NAFTA explodes.”
For nearly two decades, Mexican farmers have spoken out against NAFTA --
a trade agreement they suspected from the beginning would wreak havoc on
their country’s agricultural sector. They have sounded their voices
loudly in Mexico’s capital, while quietly developing their own answers
to NAFTA in farming communities throughout the country -- working models
of “fair trade” that consider people and the environment, not just
profit margins.
By 2003, 1.3 million Mexican peasants had lost their livelihoods because
of NAFTA. Many of the displaced farmers came north in search of work.
Mexican migration to the U.S. increased an estimated 75 percent in the
five years after the trade agreement took effect.
Even outside Mexico’s agricultural sector, NAFTA has been no boon.
Mexico’s World Bank representative recently admitted, “[We] haven’t seen
any progress [in Mexico’s economy] in the last 15 years.”
North of the border, there has been only slight progress. In 2003, the
U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimated that NAFTA had increased the
U.S. gross domestic product only “a very small amount … probably a few
hundredths of a percent.” Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has become Mexico’s
largest retailer.
With the last tariffs lifted on beans, chicken, powdered milk, and --
most im****tant -- corn, Mexican farmers fear the deepening of an already
extreme crisis. Mexican organizations challenging NAFTA have gathered
under the banner Sin maíz, no hay país -- without corn, there is no
country.
Seeds of a Fair Economy
New Year’s Day 2008 also marked 14 years since the Zapatista uprising
began in Chiapas, Mexico. The communiqué they issued in January 1994
said their struggle was for “work, land, housing, food, health care,
education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace.” The
Zapatista communities set about building their own schools, health
clinics, and fair trade initiatives -- giving the Zapatistas political
autonomy and a more prosperous local and regional economy.
In 2001, a group of 383 Zapatista coffee farmers founded the Yachil
Xojobal Chulchan coffee cooperative. The name means “new light in the
sky” or “new dawn” in the indigenous Tzeltal language.
Today, 1,500 co-op members have successfully navigated the complicated
process of organic certification and created a farmer-controlled
processing and ex****t system, so that more income flows to coffee
growers. Chris Treter, co-founder of the Higher Grounds Trading Company,
a U.S. vendor of Yachil’s coffee, notes that the cooperative’s goals
extend from getting a better price for coffee farmers in the near term
to building an autonomous society in the long term.
West of Chiapas, in Oaxaca state, the Association of Indigenous
Communities in the Northern Zone of the Isthmus (UCIZONI) shares many
goals and strategies with the Zapatistas. The group’s 20,000 members run
agricultural cooperatives, train local health care workers, pressure the
government to build schools, fight for secure land tenure, promote
organic agriculture, challenge human rights abuses, and defend members’
legal rights.
The group operates in a region that is feeling the pressure from
economic globalization. Local vendors in open-air markets must now
compete with a superstore owned by Wal-Mart called Bodega Aurrera, which
opened in 2005.
Last year, UCIZONI’s peasant members grew 12,000 tons of corn. With the
entry of heavily subsidized U.S. corn to the Mexican market, it’s
increasingly difficult for the association to find buyers for their
higher quality, more expensive harvest.
Oaxaca may be home to the widest diversity of corn varieties in the
world. More than 5,000 years ago, corn was domesticated from an inedible
progenitor, teosinte, not far from where UCIZONI members grow their
crops today. The Florentine Codex, one of the oldest surviving Mexican
texts, says, “Corn is our sustenance, our life, our being.” According to
Mayan cosmology, people are descended from corn.
Corn provides nearly 60 percent of the calories in the Mexican diet --
eaten as tortillas, tamales, and in UCIZONI’s region, baked totopos. A
large, round cracker that stays fresh for months, the totopo represents
local culture as much as maize represents Mexican culture. Baking
totopos is a special skill, passed from mother to daughter to
granddaughter.
A few years ago, UCIZONI began connecting its corn farmers to totopo
bakers in villages that don’t produce their own corn. Carlos Beas
Torres, the group’s coordinator, explains, “UCIZONI buys directly from
our producers at a fair price, and that pressures the local market to
offer a higher price.”
In the process, UCIZONI is also creating fledgling local economies. A
product is produced, processed, sold, and consumed locally, employing
farmers and bakers, and keeping all the money in the local area.
So far, the program is tiny -- last year the bakers bought just 350 tons
of UCIZONI corn. Nonetheless, the group can replicate this pilot
program, and give local farmers some control in an out-of-control economy.
People’s Trade Agreements
Latin America’s fair trade initiatives extend far beyond coffee and corn
to new models of international trade policy. The two most im****tant
examples are the People’s Trade Agreement, proposed by Bolivian
President Evo Morales, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s
“Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean,” or ALBA.
Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have all joined ALBA.
Both the People’s Trade Agreement and ALBA operate on the premise that
trade should not be an end in itself, but rather a means to sup****t
human and community development.
These government-led initiatives are essential, says Miguel Pickard,
co-founder of the Center for Economic and Political Research for
Community Action in Chiapas (CIEPAC). But “building power from below is
the only guarantee that there will be sustainable solutions. What if
Chávez or Morales is toppled tomorrow?” he says. “Grassroots processes
are very long term. A two-pronged approach is needed: strong,
independent grassroots movements at the base, and radical leaders in
positions of state power.”
Pickard has been a vocal critic of a new trade initiative under the Bush
Administration that broadens NAFTA with increased emphasis on border
security and cor****ate access to natural resources. The initiative,
called the “Security and Prosperity Partner****p,” or SPP, was launched
two years ago in a series of negotiations with the Mexican and Canadian
governments. Because the SPP is not a treaty, there is no congressional
oversight, nor any process for citizen comment. The only input comes
from a council of 30 advisors, ten selected by each government. The list
reads like a Who’s Who of cor****ate North America, including the CEOs of
Bell Canada, Chevron, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Home
Depot/Canada, Kimberly-Clark/Mexico, Lockheed Martin, Scotiabank, and
Wal-Mart.
Pickard believes the secretive, anti-democratic nature of the SPP is a
response to growing grassroots power. “Fourteen years after NAFTA, civil
society is better organized, informed, networked, and mobilized,” he
says. Not only have fair trade networks sprung up, but public opinion
throughout North America has turned against NAFTA, spilling into the
U.S. presidential campaign.
With U.S. elections on the horizon, might U.S. trade policy take a new
turn? What if our next president listened to the New Year’s Day marchers
in Mexico City? What if Carlos Beas Torres, of UCIZONI, rather than the
CEO of Wal-Mart, was an SPP advisor?
The question surprised Beas Torres. “It’s so hard to imagine myself part
of the SPP Council; better that I just list a few elements of a fair
trade policy.” His priorities include subsidies to rural producers,
protections for native crops, rural investment programs, and most
im****tant, a total rejection of “the Wal-Mart business model, which
destroys small and local businesses.”
Wendy Call wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the
Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Wendy is co-editor of Telling True
Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide. She is currently at work on a book
about the intersection of economic globalization and village life in
southern Mexico.
http://www.WendyCall.com
Interested? Read Manuel Pérez Rocha and Sarah Anderson on the real deals
behind new NAFTA negotiations:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5152
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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