Mexican corn comes a cropper

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VALLE DE CHALCO, MEXICO -- Ruben Gomez just rode 18 hours on a cramped bus for a first look at something designed to keep him at home. Inside a cinder-block building in this poor Mexico City suburb, he sees a dozen huge steel tubs filled with corn.

Mr. Gomez, a corn farmer from rural Chiapas state in southeast Mexico, is looking at the newest in a chain of collectively owned tortilla plants and stores called "Nuestro Maiz" -- Our Maize -- that hopes to save an ailing industry by using only Mexican corn and giving profits back to the farmers.

"So many people have had to leave Mexico and look for work in the U.S. Maybe this can keep me on my land."

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement liberalized commerce between the United States and Mexico a decade ago, an interesting trade pattern has emerged: growing quantities of cheap American corn cross the border southward, while increasing numbers of Mexicans corn farmers abandon their fields and cross the border northward, looking for work.

Today, nearly a third of corn consumed in Mexico comes from the United States.

Since 1994, according to new data from Oxfam International, Mexican corn prices have fallen by more than 70 percent. Meanwhile, the government in Mexico City estimates that 400,000 of this country's farmers leave their land every year, many of them young men seeking work in the United States.

It's not just corn, of course. Since NAFTA went into effect, Mexican agriculture has been consistently undersold by highly efficient, heavily subsidized U.S. imports. It's been disastrous for the country's bean, chicken, pig and coffee farmers.

But nothing has been hit harder than corn, or resonates so deeply in the Mexican soul. For 10,000 years, the inhabitants of Mexico have based their diets and their lives around this grain. Pre-Colombian Indians worshipped a god of corn; today, most Mexicans eat corn at every meal. Now Mexican corn and the 15 million Mexicans who depend on it economically are in crisis.

"Continuing to produce in the current market simply isn't possible," said Armando Joffre, director general of Nuestro Maiz. "If we don't do something, Mexico will just stop growing corn altogether."