AMLO stands for corporatization of the Mexican village | Article

Alberto Vizcarra Ozuna

PFor more than two months, corn and wheat growers in Baja California, Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, and Michoacán, among others, have been holding demonstrations of varying tone and intensity in order for the federal government to take action against the huge unforeseen circumstances that are putting jeopardize the production capacity of the country’s bulk materials production regions, currently affected by the sharp drop in world prices for these products due to the fact that such goods are quoted on the speculative markets of the Chicago Stock Exchange.

Price drops of more than 30 percent intersect with cost increases of more than 50 percent, threatening manufacturers with a continuation of delinquent portfolios if the federal government persists in not allocating the budgetary resources needed to offset the fall in product prices. these items. The wheat harvest is about to end and the corn harvest is about to start amidst total uncertainty as international prices, in their historical fall, offer only 4,200 pesos per ton of wheat and 4,900 pesos per ton of corn when required. in order to recover costs and obtain a reasonable rate of return, 8,000 pesos for the first ton and 7,000 pesos for the second.

During the 2018 campaign, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in all the agricultural regions of the country where he held rallies, offered a guaranteed price policy for all producers. Already elected president, he entered into the T-MEC negotiations and, as president, ratified them, thereby committing – like previous governments after the signing of NAFTA – to ensure the national production of basic crops. As soon as this happened, the President reconsidered his words and did not apply the promised policy of guaranteed prices.

He hid his complicity in the pricing policy he received from T-MEC under the guise of using subsistence farming subsidies, knowing that he had no way to join in the pursuit of goals that would actually reduce food dependency. This is not the first time the President has drawn attention to reality with symbolic actions. He feels content and free from guilt because he is helping poor peasants with aid packages and in doing so loses all understanding of the economic consequences that the departure of national producers at the expense of international markets and their large corporations will have on the country. irrigated areas with installed capacity to respond at any time to food policies oriented towards the national market and self-sufficiency.

While the federal government, in coordination with state governments, is pursuing a containment strategy of offering far fewer bids and no formal promises, corporations such as CARGILL are taking advantage of manufacturers’ insecurity and pressure to offer purchases at prices even lower than those set internationally. market.

Sinaloa producers are making angry statements and demanding urgent government intervention to act as an intermediary with buyers to pay fairer prices. They say that in Sinaloa, CARGILL wants to pay 4,800 pesos per ton of corn to complete the grower tour. This is the same pattern that is repeated in all corn and wheat producing states.

The case of Sinaloa is not only characterized by the fact that it produces six million tons of grain per year, but also by the fact that this volume, which is 25 percent of the national grain production, corresponds to a socially productive composition, which on average includes producers from twenty to fifty hectares, which produce almost three million tons of grain. Similar combinations have been registered in other gross states, where forms of production organization, credit agencies of producers, not absorbed by gross cartels, are still preserved.

The absence of government in this critical episode, from which the Mexican village suffers, gives a free hand to large transnational private corporations, which seek with irresistible greed to oust national producers and transform, through market dictatorship, Mexico’s mass-produced regions into the fiefdom and leverage of its speculative markets.

A sad and pitiful demise of a government that, while claiming to be anti-neoliberal, relinquishes the food future of the nation to a treaty that for the past thirty-five years has symbolized the crowning achievement of neo-liberalism and the collapse of the national economy.