Ekiwah Adler http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/story.php?itemID=11694
http://www.vsarts.org/prebuilt/showcase/openbook/onlinejournal/selectedworks/2005/featured/featured_essay.cfm
http://www.poetrygso.org/ekiwah.htm
http://207.46.150.51/id/6734970/
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Mexico and Corn
New York Times
July 12, 1993
Mexicans Fear for Corn, Imperiled by Free Trade
By ANTHONY DEPALMA,
Before they plant even one kernel of corn, the Perez Rueda brothers always follow the timeless Mexican custom of using the first 12 days of the year to predict the weather of the coming 12 months. It rained here last Jan. 5 so they planted in May, the fifth month, and their corn is almost three feet high.
Joel and Benjamin Perez Rueda firmly believe that abiding by the old tradition has brought them success, the proof being that in 13 years they have moved up from two mule teams to three tractors, including one they bought just last year because it was such an "ano maicero" -- a good corn year.
But they are worried about next year. They know the custom won't help them handle the big changes that will come if the United States Congress approves the North American Free Trade Agreement and Mexico is flooded with cheap corn from the north.
"Look at what happens when other products are allowed in and the local market gets wiped out," said Benjamin Perez Rueda, 36, jumping off his new Ford tractor on a misty morning in the Chalco Valley, about 25 miles east of Mexico City. "The truth is, the treaty is not going to help us at all." Farmers in Trouble
Even with a 15-year shelter that protects Mexican corn longer than any other products covered by the trade agreement, people here are worried. While many Mexicans would benefit from the new jobs that are expected to be created, corn farmers like the Perez Ruedas would be hard pressed to survive the fierce new competition. Peasant farmers could be hurt even more, and thousands could be left with few choices but to abandon their land and head either to Mexico's already crippled cities or to the United States.
The trade agreement still faces a tough fight in Congress. And a Federal judge in Washington recently increased the uncertainty by ordering the United States Government to assess the environmental impact of the agreement, a process that could take several months. But most people here believe it is inevitable, just as inevitable as the cultural changes that are already under way as Mexico tries to modernize.
As people become more well-to-do, they generally consume less corn, the food of the poor. Bread replaces tortillas, steak replaces tamales, Ford tractors replace mule teams. Mexico City now has Jenny Craig Weight Loss Centers and Denny's restaurants, but whether such changes represent improvements in the quality of life or a long slide toward cultural obscurity is unclear.
"Corn still connects the Mexicans of today with Mexicans from before the conquest, but when you don't get a good tortilla in a restaurant, it's a very good indication of a deterioration of the quality of life," said Homero Aridjis, a Mexico City poet and environmentalist who is constantly tested by the sweet, long-ago memory of his grandmother's handmade tortillas. "It's just like when the French do not find a good baguette in their restaurants. It shows something serious has happened." The Indian Heritage Corn and Mexico Evolve Together
At last the rains have come, and the dark volcanic fields of the Chalco Valley are erupting with an ancient variety of cream-colored corn.
But here and there in the jagged rows tended by Leopoldo Neria Rodriguez and his black and white mules Aguacate and Paloma sprouts an even older type of corn called teosinte, a reminder of the Aztec people who lived in these misty hills half a millennium ago.
In some Indian tribes the word for meals refers only to corn. But corn represents far more than food. Since Indian wanderers first decided to save gnarled kernels of a tiny ear of corn 7,000 years ago and plant them the next season, Mexico and corn -- here it is called maiz -- have evolved together.
Corn cannot grow without man and man cannot survive without corn -- from the earliest times, Mexicans have interpreted this as a lesson for a life of self-sacrifice. Growing corn is a national obsession, even though this is a nation cruelly unsuited for agriculture. More than half of Mexico is arid, and more than half of all land is too steep for cultivation. Yet corn is grown in all 31 states by nearly three million farmers, mostly peasants working small, inefficient fields without irrigation and at the mercy of the rains. With their families, they represent nearly a quarter of all Mexicans.
Because corn comes from the land, land too is an important part of Mexican life, and was a big factor in the violent 1910 revolution. Rambling haciendas were seized from their Spanish owners and the land was redistributed to peasants, who used it to grow corn.
But no green revolution ever followed because corn grows most productively on large flat fields, the kind found in Iowa, not Oaxaca. Average yields in Mexico are one-third those in the United States. Many Mexican farmers either cannot afford or stubbornly resist improvements like tractors, fertilizer or improved hybrids.
Even though cultural changes are reducing the middle class's reliance on corn, Mexico's young population keeps growing by 2 percent a year, increasing the demand for corn and turning self-sufficiency into a matter of national security. A complex system of subsidies has evolved, accompanied by inefficiency and corruption. At a cost of almost $2 billion a year, the Government buys all the corn that Mexicans produce, at nearly $200 a metric ton, almost twice the world price. Then it has to subsidize tortillas, to bring the price back down.
Even so, Mexico often must import corn from the United States to satisfy demand. The corn is dyed green or pink at the border so it cannot be sold back to the Government at a profit.
The price of local corn has gone so high, while other subsidies have shrunk or disappeared, that many farmers who once grew other crops have switched to corn. The production of rice, cotton and sorghum in Mexico has dropped, while corn production, and corn subsidies, have soared. Even without a treaty such a system is unsustainable, and Mexican officials have studied alternatives, including direct payments to farmers who grow corn and other crops, and subsidies based on income.
Whichever is chosen, many who live by corn face an uncertain future. Big farmers can simply switch to some other crop. Peasants who grow only the corn they eat can continue as they always have. But those in the middle, like the Perez Ruedas, stand to be squeezed out by the new competition and the loss of subsidies. According to the World Bank, in the first five years of the treaty, from 145,000 to 300,000 farmers could abandon their land and head for the cities.
When they leave, they will take with them an unwritten encyclopedia of knowledge about hundreds of varieties of corn that have been cultivated for generations until they became ideally suited to their own weather and soil conditions. Scientists are concerned that the genetic stock that is lost may never be recovered.
To Americans used to supermarket yellow corn, the variety of corn grown here -- from stubby cobs like pine cones to those with red, white and speckled black kernels -- is staggering. Mauricio R. Bellon, a scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied this biological diversity, worries that important gene strains could be lost under the coming economic and cultural changes.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Texcoco, near here, has already set up the world's largest corn seed bank with nearly 13,000 samples. But its directors fear they might not be able to keep up with the rate of abandonment if the economy is transformed. The Staff of Life For Mexico's Poor, Corn Is Everything
In one swift, easy motion, Graciano Palma Mancilla splits open the soil with his coa, a three-foot-long digging stick. Except for its wide steel blade, made from a discarded tractor part, the coa is a replica of the planting tool used by his Aztec ancestors.
"We planted 15 days ago," he said, "but it was just too dry. Look." He jabbed his coa into the ground near a spindly seedling. Then he dipped his left hand into a plaid pouch on his waist and took out a small handful of dried corn kernels, which he flipped into the hole.
For roughly $10 a day, Mr. Palma Mancilla will repeat the same motions up and down long rows on the San Juan farm in Temamatla, also in the Chalco Valley. He has his own field of corn to tend, but it is too small and he is too poor not to have to work for someone else. That, he says, is life in Mexico.
For him, there isn't much more to life than corn. He lives with his wife and three children, and the corn they grow provides them with food every day: corn porridge in the morning, tortillas and beans for lunch, a stew with tortillas at night.
"Without corn," he said, "what are we going to eat?"
For the poor, the answer is little else. Per capita consumption of corn in Mexico exceeds 260 pounds a year, which is roughly 3,600 tortillas, or 10 tortillas a day. Almost none of Mexico's harvest goes to feed animals. Here they say an ear of corn fed to a pig is a meal taken from a peasant.
Besides tortillas, corn is turned into soups and tamales -- ground corn steamed in a corn husk. Pushcarts sell corn on the cob, rolled in a crumbly white cheese, and cups of corn kernels doused in atomic chile. At midday, practically every construction crew makes a small fire on which to cook tortillas. A rare fungus that grows on some corn husks is saved and turned into a delicacy called huitlacoche.
But even without free trade, many Mexicans have already changed the way they feel about the crop. In a modern supermarket, pasty tortillas in plastic bags are displayed across the aisle from pasty white bread in plastic bags. In wealthier states near the United States border, people prefer more expensive tortillas made of wheat.
It could be just that the northerners eat more beef, and wheat tortillas taste better with beef than do those made of corn. But to many traditional Mexicans in the center and south of the country, that preference aligns the northerners more with wheat-eating Europeans than with the corn-eating Indians of their past. The Mighty Tortilla Corn Loses Its Hold On Many Mexicans
Walls once yellow are stained a greasy gray. A conveyor belt runs ceaselessly and the gas-fired flames of the oven, exhausted into the garage-sized room, give the Marta Elena Tortilleria in the mountain village of Tenango del Aire all the charm of a bus terminal.
Mario Sanchez, 18, figures that on an average day he makes and sells about 12,000 tortillas at the Marta Elena, one of about 24,000 small tortilla-making shops in Mexico. On a special day like the recent celebration of Tenango del Aire's patron saint, John the Baptist, he could go through 35,000 tortillas, especially if they are blue ones made from black corn.
The corn he uses comes from the Chalco Valley, from the fields of Mr. Neria Rodriguez and the Perez Rueda brothers and the farm where Mr. Palma Mancilla works. The shop on Tenango del Aire's main street thus completes an ancient cycle of planting, harvesting and tortilla-making that Cortes found in 1519 when he landed on the coast of Mexico.
Outside the open counter, hoping to rush home before the rains started again, Emma Chong bought a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tortillas, about 35 of them at a cost of one peso -- 33 cents. Mrs. Chong said she, her husband and their 6-year-old son, Carlos Antonio, would not finish them for a week; they much prefer bread.
Her mother, Concepcion Varela, also bought a kilo, but she and her husband will finish them in two days. She said that in her 66 years she had never gone a day without eating corn, and if for some reason a day should come when she couldn't find a tortilla, she supposed she would eat bread, but she wouldn't like it.
"You see how my children like bread now," she said, clearly concerned with the way her family and Mexico were changing right before her eyes, how their roots seemed no longer to run so deep, and how corn for many no longer was so important. All so different. "But I'll tell you," she said, defiantly, proudly, "for me and for my husband, the tortilla still is everything."
July 12, 1993
Mexicans Fear for Corn, Imperiled by Free Trade
By ANTHONY DEPALMA,
Before they plant even one kernel of corn, the Perez Rueda brothers always follow the timeless Mexican custom of using the first 12 days of the year to predict the weather of the coming 12 months. It rained here last Jan. 5 so they planted in May, the fifth month, and their corn is almost three feet high.
Joel and Benjamin Perez Rueda firmly believe that abiding by the old tradition has brought them success, the proof being that in 13 years they have moved up from two mule teams to three tractors, including one they bought just last year because it was such an "ano maicero" -- a good corn year.
But they are worried about next year. They know the custom won't help them handle the big changes that will come if the United States Congress approves the North American Free Trade Agreement and Mexico is flooded with cheap corn from the north.
"Look at what happens when other products are allowed in and the local market gets wiped out," said Benjamin Perez Rueda, 36, jumping off his new Ford tractor on a misty morning in the Chalco Valley, about 25 miles east of Mexico City. "The truth is, the treaty is not going to help us at all." Farmers in Trouble
Even with a 15-year shelter that protects Mexican corn longer than any other products covered by the trade agreement, people here are worried. While many Mexicans would benefit from the new jobs that are expected to be created, corn farmers like the Perez Ruedas would be hard pressed to survive the fierce new competition. Peasant farmers could be hurt even more, and thousands could be left with few choices but to abandon their land and head either to Mexico's already crippled cities or to the United States.
The trade agreement still faces a tough fight in Congress. And a Federal judge in Washington recently increased the uncertainty by ordering the United States Government to assess the environmental impact of the agreement, a process that could take several months. But most people here believe it is inevitable, just as inevitable as the cultural changes that are already under way as Mexico tries to modernize.
As people become more well-to-do, they generally consume less corn, the food of the poor. Bread replaces tortillas, steak replaces tamales, Ford tractors replace mule teams. Mexico City now has Jenny Craig Weight Loss Centers and Denny's restaurants, but whether such changes represent improvements in the quality of life or a long slide toward cultural obscurity is unclear.
"Corn still connects the Mexicans of today with Mexicans from before the conquest, but when you don't get a good tortilla in a restaurant, it's a very good indication of a deterioration of the quality of life," said Homero Aridjis, a Mexico City poet and environmentalist who is constantly tested by the sweet, long-ago memory of his grandmother's handmade tortillas. "It's just like when the French do not find a good baguette in their restaurants. It shows something serious has happened." The Indian Heritage Corn and Mexico Evolve Together
At last the rains have come, and the dark volcanic fields of the Chalco Valley are erupting with an ancient variety of cream-colored corn.
But here and there in the jagged rows tended by Leopoldo Neria Rodriguez and his black and white mules Aguacate and Paloma sprouts an even older type of corn called teosinte, a reminder of the Aztec people who lived in these misty hills half a millennium ago.
In some Indian tribes the word for meals refers only to corn. But corn represents far more than food. Since Indian wanderers first decided to save gnarled kernels of a tiny ear of corn 7,000 years ago and plant them the next season, Mexico and corn -- here it is called maiz -- have evolved together.
Corn cannot grow without man and man cannot survive without corn -- from the earliest times, Mexicans have interpreted this as a lesson for a life of self-sacrifice. Growing corn is a national obsession, even though this is a nation cruelly unsuited for agriculture. More than half of Mexico is arid, and more than half of all land is too steep for cultivation. Yet corn is grown in all 31 states by nearly three million farmers, mostly peasants working small, inefficient fields without irrigation and at the mercy of the rains. With their families, they represent nearly a quarter of all Mexicans.
Because corn comes from the land, land too is an important part of Mexican life, and was a big factor in the violent 1910 revolution. Rambling haciendas were seized from their Spanish owners and the land was redistributed to peasants, who used it to grow corn.
But no green revolution ever followed because corn grows most productively on large flat fields, the kind found in Iowa, not Oaxaca. Average yields in Mexico are one-third those in the United States. Many Mexican farmers either cannot afford or stubbornly resist improvements like tractors, fertilizer or improved hybrids.
Even though cultural changes are reducing the middle class's reliance on corn, Mexico's young population keeps growing by 2 percent a year, increasing the demand for corn and turning self-sufficiency into a matter of national security. A complex system of subsidies has evolved, accompanied by inefficiency and corruption. At a cost of almost $2 billion a year, the Government buys all the corn that Mexicans produce, at nearly $200 a metric ton, almost twice the world price. Then it has to subsidize tortillas, to bring the price back down.
Even so, Mexico often must import corn from the United States to satisfy demand. The corn is dyed green or pink at the border so it cannot be sold back to the Government at a profit.
The price of local corn has gone so high, while other subsidies have shrunk or disappeared, that many farmers who once grew other crops have switched to corn. The production of rice, cotton and sorghum in Mexico has dropped, while corn production, and corn subsidies, have soared. Even without a treaty such a system is unsustainable, and Mexican officials have studied alternatives, including direct payments to farmers who grow corn and other crops, and subsidies based on income.
Whichever is chosen, many who live by corn face an uncertain future. Big farmers can simply switch to some other crop. Peasants who grow only the corn they eat can continue as they always have. But those in the middle, like the Perez Ruedas, stand to be squeezed out by the new competition and the loss of subsidies. According to the World Bank, in the first five years of the treaty, from 145,000 to 300,000 farmers could abandon their land and head for the cities.
When they leave, they will take with them an unwritten encyclopedia of knowledge about hundreds of varieties of corn that have been cultivated for generations until they became ideally suited to their own weather and soil conditions. Scientists are concerned that the genetic stock that is lost may never be recovered.
To Americans used to supermarket yellow corn, the variety of corn grown here -- from stubby cobs like pine cones to those with red, white and speckled black kernels -- is staggering. Mauricio R. Bellon, a scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied this biological diversity, worries that important gene strains could be lost under the coming economic and cultural changes.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Texcoco, near here, has already set up the world's largest corn seed bank with nearly 13,000 samples. But its directors fear they might not be able to keep up with the rate of abandonment if the economy is transformed. The Staff of Life For Mexico's Poor, Corn Is Everything
In one swift, easy motion, Graciano Palma Mancilla splits open the soil with his coa, a three-foot-long digging stick. Except for its wide steel blade, made from a discarded tractor part, the coa is a replica of the planting tool used by his Aztec ancestors.
"We planted 15 days ago," he said, "but it was just too dry. Look." He jabbed his coa into the ground near a spindly seedling. Then he dipped his left hand into a plaid pouch on his waist and took out a small handful of dried corn kernels, which he flipped into the hole.
For roughly $10 a day, Mr. Palma Mancilla will repeat the same motions up and down long rows on the San Juan farm in Temamatla, also in the Chalco Valley. He has his own field of corn to tend, but it is too small and he is too poor not to have to work for someone else. That, he says, is life in Mexico.
For him, there isn't much more to life than corn. He lives with his wife and three children, and the corn they grow provides them with food every day: corn porridge in the morning, tortillas and beans for lunch, a stew with tortillas at night.
"Without corn," he said, "what are we going to eat?"
For the poor, the answer is little else. Per capita consumption of corn in Mexico exceeds 260 pounds a year, which is roughly 3,600 tortillas, or 10 tortillas a day. Almost none of Mexico's harvest goes to feed animals. Here they say an ear of corn fed to a pig is a meal taken from a peasant.
Besides tortillas, corn is turned into soups and tamales -- ground corn steamed in a corn husk. Pushcarts sell corn on the cob, rolled in a crumbly white cheese, and cups of corn kernels doused in atomic chile. At midday, practically every construction crew makes a small fire on which to cook tortillas. A rare fungus that grows on some corn husks is saved and turned into a delicacy called huitlacoche.
But even without free trade, many Mexicans have already changed the way they feel about the crop. In a modern supermarket, pasty tortillas in plastic bags are displayed across the aisle from pasty white bread in plastic bags. In wealthier states near the United States border, people prefer more expensive tortillas made of wheat.
It could be just that the northerners eat more beef, and wheat tortillas taste better with beef than do those made of corn. But to many traditional Mexicans in the center and south of the country, that preference aligns the northerners more with wheat-eating Europeans than with the corn-eating Indians of their past. The Mighty Tortilla Corn Loses Its Hold On Many Mexicans
Walls once yellow are stained a greasy gray. A conveyor belt runs ceaselessly and the gas-fired flames of the oven, exhausted into the garage-sized room, give the Marta Elena Tortilleria in the mountain village of Tenango del Aire all the charm of a bus terminal.
Mario Sanchez, 18, figures that on an average day he makes and sells about 12,000 tortillas at the Marta Elena, one of about 24,000 small tortilla-making shops in Mexico. On a special day like the recent celebration of Tenango del Aire's patron saint, John the Baptist, he could go through 35,000 tortillas, especially if they are blue ones made from black corn.
The corn he uses comes from the Chalco Valley, from the fields of Mr. Neria Rodriguez and the Perez Rueda brothers and the farm where Mr. Palma Mancilla works. The shop on Tenango del Aire's main street thus completes an ancient cycle of planting, harvesting and tortilla-making that Cortes found in 1519 when he landed on the coast of Mexico.
Outside the open counter, hoping to rush home before the rains started again, Emma Chong bought a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tortillas, about 35 of them at a cost of one peso -- 33 cents. Mrs. Chong said she, her husband and their 6-year-old son, Carlos Antonio, would not finish them for a week; they much prefer bread.
Her mother, Concepcion Varela, also bought a kilo, but she and her husband will finish them in two days. She said that in her 66 years she had never gone a day without eating corn, and if for some reason a day should come when she couldn't find a tortilla, she supposed she would eat bread, but she wouldn't like it.
"You see how my children like bread now," she said, clearly concerned with the way her family and Mexico were changing right before her eyes, how their roots seemed no longer to run so deep, and how corn for many no longer was so important. All so different. "But I'll tell you," she said, defiantly, proudly, "for me and for my husband, the tortilla still is everything."
Free Trade
NAFTA has caused unemployment within the agricultural sector of Mexico to skyrocket. According to the Economic Policy Institute, at the end of 2004 there were 6.8 million unemployed agricultural workers in Mexico. Corn producers were perhaps the hardest hit by the free trade agreement: over one million of the crop’s cultivators have lost their jobs since the end of 1993, with many of them being forced to sell off their land at artificially low prices. Overall, paid wages to Mexicans working on corn farms have fallen 70 percent and, according to Witness for Peace, rural poverty rates in Mexico have risen to 81 percent. Between 1991 and 2004, the percentage of the Mexican population involved in the agricultural sector fell by over 10 percent.
In 2000, over 530,000 Mexicans immigrated to the U.S. In a COHA interview, Jeffery Rassel, Senior Research Associate at the Center, said that the numbers from the report are “actually a bit low,” revealing that the most recent figures estimate that 80 percent of all immigration from Mexico is illegal. Those choosing to make the illegal trek into the U.S. must endure extreme natural and physical conditions. Deaths are disturbingly common along the U.S.-Mexican border. In 2005, over 460 Mexicans died attempting to cross into the U.S. In 1993, the year prior to NAFTA’s enactment, there were only 205 immigrant deaths. A Witness for Peace study revealed that in 1998, weather-related deaths (hyper- and hypothermia) among immigrants were three times higher than they were in the 1980s.
In CancĂșn, Mexico, on the stifling afternoon of September 10, Korean farm leader Lee Kyung Hae scaled the police barricades, which were keeping 10,000 protesting farmers from storming the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks, and thrust a knife into his own heart. His self-sacrifice proved to be a catalyst for the disparate protesters and a solemn reminder of the toll trade liberalization has taken on the world's poorest farmers. When the talks collapsed four days later, it became clear that the ship of free trade had foundered badly on the shoals of its captains' hypocrisy on farm policy.
Mexican farmers provided the protests' largest contingent, and not just because the meeting took place on their own embattled soil. Based on their experiences under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the free-trade model that it embodies, they had a lot to say. Farmers of maize and other grains, who produce for subsistence and for local and regional markets, have been hardest hit by liberalization, with imports from the United States driving prices down to unsustainable levels. But much of the export sector has suffered as well, with gains in industrial tomato farming more than offset by sharp declines in coffee, Mexico's most important export crop in both employment and output.
Mexico's small-scale farmers came together last winter to demand that their government renegotiate NAFTA's agricultural provisions and establish new policies for the countryside. While they have thus far failed to win a commitment from the pro-free trade administration of Vicente Fox to renegotiate NAFTA, last spring they secured new funds for rural development and a promise to assess the agreement's impact on small farmers and to take measures to defend and promote the sector. Whether the movement can hold Fox to those promises remains to be seen, but the farmers' rejection of the neoliberal model is here to stay.
A closer look at the experiences of Mexican farmers of corn and coffee—the country's largest domestic and export crops which directly support some 20 million of the country's 100 million people—illustrates the perils of agricultural trade liberalization. Farmers' responses to the crisis and their policy proposals present a useful starting point for an alternative approach to rural development, one that recognizes the limits of trade, the importance of domestic food sources, and the value of peasant production.
Imports doubled and the price of corn fell nearly 50%.
In 2000, over 530,000 Mexicans immigrated to the U.S. In a COHA interview, Jeffery Rassel, Senior Research Associate at the Center, said that the numbers from the report are “actually a bit low,” revealing that the most recent figures estimate that 80 percent of all immigration from Mexico is illegal. Those choosing to make the illegal trek into the U.S. must endure extreme natural and physical conditions. Deaths are disturbingly common along the U.S.-Mexican border. In 2005, over 460 Mexicans died attempting to cross into the U.S. In 1993, the year prior to NAFTA’s enactment, there were only 205 immigrant deaths. A Witness for Peace study revealed that in 1998, weather-related deaths (hyper- and hypothermia) among immigrants were three times higher than they were in the 1980s.
In CancĂșn, Mexico, on the stifling afternoon of September 10, Korean farm leader Lee Kyung Hae scaled the police barricades, which were keeping 10,000 protesting farmers from storming the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks, and thrust a knife into his own heart. His self-sacrifice proved to be a catalyst for the disparate protesters and a solemn reminder of the toll trade liberalization has taken on the world's poorest farmers. When the talks collapsed four days later, it became clear that the ship of free trade had foundered badly on the shoals of its captains' hypocrisy on farm policy.
Mexican farmers provided the protests' largest contingent, and not just because the meeting took place on their own embattled soil. Based on their experiences under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the free-trade model that it embodies, they had a lot to say. Farmers of maize and other grains, who produce for subsistence and for local and regional markets, have been hardest hit by liberalization, with imports from the United States driving prices down to unsustainable levels. But much of the export sector has suffered as well, with gains in industrial tomato farming more than offset by sharp declines in coffee, Mexico's most important export crop in both employment and output.
Mexico's small-scale farmers came together last winter to demand that their government renegotiate NAFTA's agricultural provisions and establish new policies for the countryside. While they have thus far failed to win a commitment from the pro-free trade administration of Vicente Fox to renegotiate NAFTA, last spring they secured new funds for rural development and a promise to assess the agreement's impact on small farmers and to take measures to defend and promote the sector. Whether the movement can hold Fox to those promises remains to be seen, but the farmers' rejection of the neoliberal model is here to stay.
A closer look at the experiences of Mexican farmers of corn and coffee—the country's largest domestic and export crops which directly support some 20 million of the country's 100 million people—illustrates the perils of agricultural trade liberalization. Farmers' responses to the crisis and their policy proposals present a useful starting point for an alternative approach to rural development, one that recognizes the limits of trade, the importance of domestic food sources, and the value of peasant production.
Imports doubled and the price of corn fell nearly 50%.
Monday, February 1, 2010
February 1, 2010
Computer lab:
1. Watch and listen to this video:
http://roccovogel.com/slavery_video.html
2. Read about this organization and the kids who are heroes and who have been saved.
http://www.bba.org.in/
3. Go go pioneer and read more articles about child labor.
http://discoverer.prod.sirs.com/discoweb/disco/do/search?keyword1=child+labor&stype=basic&sort=relevance&easy=on&mod=on&chal=on
4. Look for other sites about child labor.
5. Select two images you think would make good illustrations for a poster about child labor and after checking to make sure no one else has picked those two, print them (in color if desired). (Do you need help to know how to do this? Placing the images on a Word page first is usually the best way.)
Look for child labor, migrant labor and children, etc.
1. Watch and listen to this video:
http://roccovogel.com/slavery_video.html
2. Read about this organization and the kids who are heroes and who have been saved.
http://www.bba.org.in/
3. Go go pioneer and read more articles about child labor.
http://discoverer.prod.sirs.com/discoweb/disco/do/search?keyword1=child+labor&stype=basic&sort=relevance&easy=on&mod=on&chal=on
4. Look for other sites about child labor.
5. Select two images you think would make good illustrations for a poster about child labor and after checking to make sure no one else has picked those two, print them (in color if desired). (Do you need help to know how to do this? Placing the images on a Word page first is usually the best way.)
Look for child labor, migrant labor and children, etc.
Monday, January 11, 2010
January 11, 2010
January 11, 2010 -- All class members were here.
Students received their notebooks and put their names on them.
In their notebooks they wrote
January 11, 2010
We watched the Anchor Video (about Stolen Childhoods -- our new workshop) and we answered the questions on the video
Reading Counts Quiz --
Partners:
J.D.
Matt and Alex
Stephanie and Neisha
Katelyn and Naomi
Jacob and Brackston
Kennedie and David
Students received their notebooks and put their names on them.
In their notebooks they wrote
January 11, 2010
We watched the Anchor Video (about Stolen Childhoods -- our new workshop) and we answered the questions on the video
Reading Counts Quiz --
Partners:
J.D.
Matt and Alex
Stephanie and Neisha
Katelyn and Naomi
Jacob and Brackston
Kennedie and David
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
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