SAN ISIDRO TILANTONGO, Mexico - Jesús León Santos is a Mixtec Indian farmer who will soon plant corn on a small plot next to his house in time for the summer rains. He plows with oxen and harvests by hand.

Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains.

But to him, that is beside the point.

The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most barren earth in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.

Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms instead of leaving for jobs in cities and in the United States.

"We migrate because we don't think there are options," Mr. León said. "The important thing is to give options for a better life."

Viewed against the backdrop of rising food prices in a global marketplace, Mr. León's fight to keep farmers from abandoning their land is much more than a refusal to give up a millennial way of life.

As Mexico imports more corn from the United States, the country's reliance on outside supplies is drawing protests among nationalists, farmers' groups and leftist critics of Mexico's free trade economy. Earlier this year, as the last tariffs to corn imports were lifted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, farmers' groups marched against the accord in Mexico, asking for more aid.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/world/americas/
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