Standing at the end of Avenida Madero (Madero Avenue) on the
last day of January 2008, a stone throw from the Zocalo or City Center of
Mexico City, I am swept along in a sea of thousands of farmers and laborers,
carrying signs and banners. Streaming from the historic statue of the
Angel of Independence, symbolically setting fire to a decrepit tractor, one
hundred and fifty thousand small farmers, teachers, workers, and neighborhood
activists are marching to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
and end the illegal “dumping’ by Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto of billions of
dollars of taxpayer subsidized U.S. agricultural crops-beans, rice, sugar,
powdered milk, soybeans, and genetically engineered corn–onto the Mexican
market.
NAFTA, pushed through in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. in 1994 over the
opposition of the majority of North Americans, is literally driving Mexico’s
thirty million small farmers and villagers off the land and into the slums of
Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Tijuana, Juarez, and other cities; or
else, following the path of twelve million others before them, across the
increasingly dangerous border into the United States to find work. Rural
villages in Mexico have become literal economic ghost towns of women, children,
and the elderly. In some municipalities, 80-90% of the men and boys are gone,
increasingly joined by the young women.
A dark-skinned peasant woman, wearing her kitchen apron, approaches me. I stand
out in the crowd, an obvious gringo with my Code Pink anti-war T-shirt and my
Organic Consumers Association baseball cap. The farm woman patiently explains
to me how NAFTA has broken up her family. Her two sons and her daughter, like
millions of other jovenes (young people), she explains, desperate for a
living wage, did not want to leave their community or abandon their families,
but they had no choice. And now, with the militarized border, so-called illegal
aliens, like her children, can no longer take the risk of coming back home to
visit. Her sons and daughter, like most other immigrants, send back
“remesas” (money) to help support their families. This twenty-four
billion dollar annual lifeline is the only thing standing between Mexico’s
rural population and utter poverty.
Moving up behind the farmers, flanked by banners protesting the imminent
sell-off of Mexico’s publicly owned electricity and oil industries, union
workers and students fill the massive square in front of the National Palace.
Mexican workers, whose minimum wage is 1/12 that of the U.S., are already
suffering from high prices for electricity and gasoline. But once U.S. and
European corporations take over the petroleum and electricity sectors, prices
will inevitably skyrocket.
Passionate speakers from the podium call for a repeal of NAFTA and the
restoration of food and energy sovereignty, but everyone knows that Big
Business and Agribusiness call the shots in Mexico City, Ottawa, and
Washington. Short of a miracle, rural and urban poverty will increase, as will
the power and obscene wealth of the industrial agriculture, oil, and utilities
multinationals. In July 2006 Mexicans launched an impressive though ultimately
abortive ballot box revolution, turning out in droves for the anti-NAFTA
presidential candidate, Manuel Lopez Obrador, from the left-of-center PRD
(Party of Democratic Revolution). Although Lopez Obrador won the popular vote,
according to reliable exit polls and election experts, in a U.S.-style
electronic vote theft, the elections were stolen, and Felipe Calderon, a
pro-NAFTA corporatist was installed as President. As a Mexican activist friend
reminds me today, we are at the end of the road for polite protest. Nothing
short of a second Mexican (and American) revolution will save us.
Corporate globalization, savagely embodied by NAFTA, is not just a threat to
Mexican farmers and rural villagers. The economic, health, and social damage
created by industrial agriculture, corporate globalization, and the patenting
and gene-splicing of transgenic plants and animals, are inexorably leading to universal
“bioserfdom” for farmers, deteriorating health for consumers, a
destabilized climate (energy intensive industrial agriculture and long-distance
food transportation and processing account, directly or indirectly, for 40% of
all climate-disrupting greenhouse gases), tropical deforestation, and a rapid
depletion of oil supplies. Lest we forget, forty percent of the world’s
population are still small farmers and rural villagers. If we allow corporate
agribusiness and so-called “free traders” to continue to drive these
last two billion peasants from the land, replacing them with chemical and
energy-intensive, climate disrupting industrial farms, cattle ranches, and
agrofuels plantations, we are doomed.
Fortunately practical solutions are at hand, although implementing these
obvious alternatives will require nothing short of a global grassroots rising.
The simple solution to all this is to scrap NAFTA, make organic and sustainable
farming once more the dominant practice in agriculture (as it has been for most
of the last 10,000 years), help the globe’s two billion farmers stay on the
land, make healthy organic foods and lifestyles the norm, and restructure
global agriculture and commerce so that sustainable local and regional
production for local and regional markets and Fair Trade become the norm, not
just the alternative. And of course as we begin this great turning away from
corporate control, we will also begin to be able to address and solve the
global energy crisis (at the root of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) as well
as the global climate crisis, through conservation, economic re-localization,
and drastic greenhouse gas reduction in the agriculture, transportation, and
utilities sectors. Unfortunately none of the “major contenders” for
the White House are offering any real alternatives, other than rhetoric, to
address the current Crisis. Our job is daunting, but standing here at the end
of the road, it appears we have no choice.