Agricultural Policies

Paper

Dumping without borders: how US agricultural policies are destroying the livelihood of Mexican corns farmer

Oxfam Briefing Paper, August (2003)

In September 2003, the world’s trade ministers will descend on the Mexican tourist resort of Cancun. The aim is to advance the current negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Northern governments promised to make the latest talks a ‘development round’. But if they are to translate their promises into practice, they will need to address an issue that is causing mass poverty across the developing world: agricultural dumping. Nowhere is the problem more powerfully apparent than among Mexico’s corn farmers. Mexico has been growing corn for 10,000 years. But today the corn sector is in a state of acute crisis. Household incomes are in decline, and nutrition is deteriorating. Across Mexico, millions of people are migrating in a desperate bid to escape rural poverty, many of them intent on reaching the US. In the southern state of Chaps, where the corn crisis has interacted with a collapse in coffee prices, it is estimated that 70 per cent of the rural population now live in extreme poverty. The slump affecting Mexico’s corn farmers has multiple causes. Some of these are domestic. Successive Mexican governments have failed the rural poor, preferring to concentrate public spending on commercial enterprises. It is also the result of the strategies of big agribusiness companies which buy, trade, and process corn on both sides of the border. But the US government is also directly culpable, and it is US agricultural policy that will be under discussion in September. As we show in this paper, there is a direct link between government agricultural policies in the US and rural misery in Mexico.

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