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

Alejandro Nadal, a pioneer in the field of trade, environment, and agricultural biodiversity.

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…