The anti-Nafta lobby claims that the big beneficiaries of Nafta have been well-capitalised farmers such as vegetable growers in places such as Sinaloa. This state is now one of the US's main sources of out-of-season tomatoes. What the anti-Nafta lobby argues is that marginal maize farmers have been forced off the land because of the competition from subsidised US maize.
This is true, but it takes several layers of statistics to put the issue into its proper context. As the pro-Nafta lobby points out, Mexican maize production increased from 18.1mt in 1993, the year before Nafta was introduced, to 20.1mt in 2001, before dipping to 19.2mt in 2002. What the pro-Nafta lobby does not like to admit is that domestic producers are supplying a dwindling part of the Mexican maize market. Maize imports, almost entirely from the US, increased from under 1mt in 1993 to 6mt in 2003.
The pro-Nafta line is that rainfall has more to do with the level of maize production than US competition. This may be true (production was up to 12mt in 2003 from non-irrigated land compared with 11mt in 1993) but it is beside the point. What is clear from the production statistics is that the acreage sown with maize has barely changed since Nafta: 8.25m hectares were sown with maize in 2003 compared with 8.27m hectares in 2002.
What the statistics show, unequivocally, is that maize imports have increased since Nafta. This has helped to keep maize prices down: bad for the farmers but good for consumers. The production statistics are less easily interpreted. Our guess is that farmers working marginal land have grown less maize: the fact that the acreage has hardly changed although the crop has increased suggests that better land is being used. It may be that the very poor, virtually subsistence, farmers are still growing the crop; these farmers are not really in the money-economy so production costs have little meaning for them. Commercial farmers, who most definitely are in the money economy, have probably increased their production because they can compete profitably. Smaller-scale farmers in between these two extremes have probably switched to other crops: sorghum production has surged from 2.5mt in 1993 to 6.66mt in 2001. This crop is mostly used as an animal feed.
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