Member-only story
NAFTA’s Assault on Mexico’s Indigenous Farmers
Excerpt from Eating Tomorrow (New Press 2019), Chapter 8, with deep gratitude to the late Alejandro Nadal
I saw how far-reaching NAFTA’s effects were in Soteapan, a small municipality on the slopes of the Santa Marta volcano in Mexico’s southeastern state of Veracruz. Colleagues from El Colegio de Mexico (ColMex) took me there to better understand the connections among trade, poverty, and the environment. Under the direction of Alejandro Nadal, they had been studying the Popoluca indigenous farmers in Soteapan — from small-scale commercial producers in the lowlands to subsistence producers in the highlands — to assess the impacts of NAFTA and liberalization on cropping patterns and environmental management. They wanted to compare current practices to those before NAFTA, and to the cropping practices documented in great detail in a 1960 anthropological survey.
These are poor indigenous farmers, the kind you can find across southern Mexico. The vast majority lived in crowded homes with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. Education levels were low. In 2000, more than 90% of households were in extreme poverty. The 66% fall in maize prices had cut into producers’ incomes, and related changes had compounded the problem. Prices for other important crops in the area had also fallen. Coffee prices declined 66% while prices for common beans, another Mexican staple, fell 41%. This left producers with few alternatives if they wanted to shift crops to avoid the maize crisis caused by U.S. agricultural dumping under NAFTA.
The other dramatic impact on local producers came from the restructuring of local and regional markets with the expansion of Maseca, the multinational Mexican firm that controls a large share of the domestic market for maize flour. Through its national network of suppliers and its access to inexpensive imports, Maseca can provide year-round supplies of flour, masa (dough for tortillas), and tortillas, something local millers could not match. As one tortilla-seller in town told me, he wanted to keep milling maize for local farmers, but that would have left him with tortillas only in the months after the local harvest. Because Maseca used its market power to insist on year-round contracts with its distributors, he had to stock the company’s tortillas even when local maize was available to…
