Fears over free trade

TLAXCALA, Mexico -- The verdant farm hamlets in Mexico's central highlands have become a front line in the battle over globalization ahead of a World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun.

These farms hundreds of miles from Cancun lie in the ancestral heartland of corn, a crop now flooding in from the United States at lower prices under 1994's North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Trade ministers from the WTO's 146 members will meet in Cancun beginning Sept. 10 to discuss a trade treaty cutting tariffs and subsidies and further opening markets to foreign trade. The meeting is an important stage in attempts to create a binding treaty by the end of next year.

A World Bank report released Wednesday said the trade talks are stalled over disagreements that are important to developing countries, such as agriculture and tariff reduction on manufactured products like textiles.

No longer competitive

While their ancestors practically invented corn, farmers here are not competitive anymore. Plots in this town are small -- usually one to five acres.

Some blame American, Japanese and European farm subsidies, and call for a WTO agreement eliminating subsidies in rich countries and giving preferential treatment to farmers in the developing world.

"There is no way we can compete," said farmer Bacilio Flores, 53. "Farmers in the United States have 1,200 acres, and they get thousands of dollars a year in government payments. We can never match that, even in our dreams."

Corn is an important cultural symbol here. A few miles east are the 1,200-year-old ruins of Cacaxtla, with murals depicting human beings sprouting full-grown from an ear of corn. A few miles west are the pyramids of Teotihuacan, where corn may first have been domesticated 4,000 years ago.

Even in Mexico City, buses bear a government-sponsored ad: "Without corn, there is no country."

But molding, cone-shaped stone grain silos are all that's left here of the government distribution agency that once bought corn at preferential prices.

"There are some farmers who benefit from free trade, like those who grow mangoes and avocados," said Rafael Castaneda Perez, 70. "But we need government help and better conditions to do that."

Even with preferential treatment, Mexico's small, antiquated farms probably still would be swamped by the vast, mechanized corn fields of Iowa.

"We want agriculture taken out of the summit talks," farm activist Rafael Rodriguez said. "Agriculture isn't just another kind of merchandise. It's a way of life, a culture, a relationship with the land and the environment. If we lose it, we can't replace it."

Activists bristle at the idea of these rural hamlets operating under free trade -- and with fewer farms. Many agricultural workers driven from the countryside end up in the United States as undocumented migrants, while others are forced to work at maquiladora assembly plants that specialize in U.S. exports.

But maquiladora plants are leaving Mexico for countries with even lower wages, like China. Some fear displaced farmers simply will have no place in the modern economy.

"No country in the world could provide jobs for this many people in the farm sector," Humberto Jasso of Mexico's economy department said last year during a protest by thousands of farmers.

The British rock band Coldplay, which supports the Make Trade Fair activist campaign, is scheduled to visit here Saturday to discuss its belief that opening agricultural markets to free trade drives small farmers out of business. The band will perform Sunday and Monday in Mexico City.

But a third path between a free-trade future and a return to a difficult past also is being cleared.

On the outskirts of Mexico City is a tortilla cooperative, where farmers owning the plant sell their grain directly for Mexico's staple food, cutting out the middlemen and raising profits.

A mechanized production line with stainless-steel vats rolls out as many as 360,000 tortillas per day according to the traditional, pre-Hispanic dough recipe -- using chalky lime from whole kernels, rather than from milled corn flour. The cooking takes up to 20 hours.

"This is the traditional method, but using modern technology," said Jose Domingo Martinez, 47, the cooperative's assistant manager.

"It gives the farmers a better price, and it preserves the tradition."