Bishop Ricardo Urquidi Watty of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, speaks during
a Mass celebrated along the Rio Grande in his diocese Jan. 13. In
observance of the Day of the Migrant, a group of Catholic pilgrims
and bishops walked from Laredo, Texas, across a bridge to meet their
counterparts from Mexico before the Mass. The events followed a meeting
of U.S. and Mexican bishops whose dioceses fall along the border.
CNS/Ricardo Segovia |
By David Agren
Catholic News Service
MEXICO CITY (CNS) — The Mexico City Archdiocese
urged the Mexican federal government to better protect some of the country’s
poorest and most vulnerable residents as concern grows that a flood of
duty-free agricultural imports from highly subsidized U.S. producers could
force many small-scale farmers to abandon rural areas and head to the
United States.
Hugo Valdemar, archdiocesan spokesman, expressed concern about the North
American Free Trade Agreement’s impact on Mexican farmers after
the Jan. 1 removal of duties on four basic products: white corn, beans,
sugar cane and powdered milk. The tariff removals were mandated by the
14-year-old agreement.
He added that the changes could lead to an “increase in poverty”
and “more immigration to the United States.”
Nationwide protests occurred in early January, and the country’s
largest campesino group predicted that 1.4 million farmers would be negatively
affected by the competition.
The majority of “campesinos,” or peasant farmers, work on
farms of less than five acres in size, lack modern equipment and technology,
and collect only modest government subsidies — if any at all.
“This change is going to throw many people off of their land,”
said Fernando Gonzalez, an indigenous farmer from Oaxaca state, who protested
outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. “There’s no (other)
work, there’s not much of anything, so people leave for the other
side” of the border.
The Mexican Congress passed a nonbinding resolution Jan. 4 urging President
Felipe Calderon to renegotiate parts of NAFTA.
Aldo Munoz Armenta, political science professor at the Jesuit-run Ibero-American
University in Mexico City, said the president could push for reopening
NAFTA talks. He explained, however, that large food processors wield far
more political influence than the groups representing campesinos.
“(NAFTA) impacts a sector of the economy that is unable to defend
itself,” Munoz said.
Valdemar disagreed with calls for reopening NAFTA talks, but said the
federal government should encourage development in the countryside, where
some 30 million Mexicans work, often in subsistence farming or for wages
of less than the national minimum wage of $5 per day.
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