Mexico's import barriers to expire

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — For 15 years, Mexican farmers have feared the day when the last import protections end for the country's ancestral crops of corn and beans.

But as Jan. 1 draws near, farmers say, the damage has already been done: Mexico has plunged deeply into a model of globalized agriculture where farmers are ill-prepared to compete, and even people who don't farm for a living are suffering.

Nobody knows that better than Vicente Martinez, who grows corn, beans and coffee in the green mountains of Tepetlan, Veracruz. In July, his daughter, Felictas, died trying to cross the desert to enter the United States.

Mr. Martinez blames a combination of free trade and dwindling government farm-support programs that leave rural families with little choice but to migrate; his daughter found no work in their farming town to support her four children, other than cleaning houses for little pay.

"The only thing left to do is run for the United States ... or sit around looking like idiots, because there's nothing to do here, nothing," said Mr. Martinez, whose daughter was abandoned by a smuggler in Arizona.

Corn, beans, sugar and milk were granted special 15-year import protections when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was negotiated in 1993, time that was supposed to be used to prepare Mexico for competition. But many say that didn't happen.

Although global prices for these commodities are booming, Mexico's farm parcels tend to be tiny and only marginally productive, so higher prices internationally have done little to improve people's lives here.

Farmers like Juan Antonio Lopez, who plants corn on about 7.5 acres in Pino Suarez, Durango, have little corn left over to sell and often must buy grain at higher international prices for their families and animals.

Even larger farms have trouble storing crops and getting them to market, in part because the government has allowed state purchasing agencies, granaries and distribution networks to wither, preferring instead to rely on market forces.

Mexico also has been slow to modernize to take advantage of ethanol demands and genetically modified crops.