The ancient Mayans believed they were created by gods who mixed their blood with ground corn. They called themselves “Children of the Corn,” a phrase Mexicans still sometimes use to describe themselves.
Corn, it seems, is not just a staple food for 107 million Mexicans, it is part of their culture. You might say it is part of the fabric of their being. Poor Mexicans (40% were below the poverty line in 2003) get 40 % of their protein from tortillas. Recently the price of tortillas went out of control:
The typical Mexican family of four consumes about one kilo — 2.2 pounds — of tortillas each day. In some areas of Mexico, the price per kilo has risen from 63 cents a year ago to between $1.36 and $1.81 earlier this month.
With a minimum wage of $4.60 a day, Mexican families with one wage earner have been faced in recent months with the choice of having to spend as much as a third of their income on tortillas — or eating less or switching to cheaper alternatives.
So now they are switching to cheaper and far less nutritious alternatives, such as instant noodles.
The root cause of this situation is the bonanza American farmers are making from switching from growing subsidised corn for animal food to subsidised corn for ethanol production. The reasons why the peasant farmers of Mexico, who grow the higher quality white corn designed for human consumption, don’t benefit while the American farmers, who grow yellow corn for animal feed, do are complex and contradictory. Let’s say that in the vertical integration of oligopolistic transnational corporate industrial food production (a single company, Grupo Gruma, controls as much as 80 percent of the Mexican tortilla flour market) the peasants get squeezed out. In fact yellow corn seems to be mixed into the milled flour for tortillas, while, as far as I can make out, the white corn is ending up in Mexican cows and chooks, thus pushing up the price of eggs, dairy products and meat as well.
And Mexican peasants are increasingly heading north, running the gauntlet of the increasingly ferocious border security, some no doubt to end up as cheap farm labourers.
I’m not altogether sure whether ethanol from corn results in less CO2 emissions. I suspect it does not. But now another tale is unfolding which may implicate American corn.
It seems the bees of Germany are dying – a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany has been reported, up to 80% in isolated cases. In the US losses are even higher – 70% on the east coast and 60% on the west coast since November.
Walter Haefeker of the German Beekeepers Association says that there are probably a number of causes:
one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.
It seems that ‘Bt corn’ has been modified to produce its own insecticide. 40% of US corn has this charming feature which is now being introduced to Europe. Free trade rules and Monsanto will not be denied.
Whether or not a linkage can be established with GM corn, unanticipated effects of such genes released into the biosphere have always worried me. And as Albert Einstein said, we can’t do without bees:
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
Mexican campesinos have been doing it tough since NAFTA. A lot of this story will be related to cheap corn imports from the US over the last 10 years driving previously subsistence farmers into other crops. Fine market logic – until you realise they used to actually eat most of that corn themselves, and then sell the surplus locally to get income for tools and seed. Its now uncompetitive.
Now they’re subject to price fluctuations on an ex-homegrown staple.
The nail has been hit on the head as far as campesinos are concerned, NAFTA and the importation subsidized US corn was a disaster. American corn coming into Mexico at less than the cost of production forced Mexican farmers off the farm and across the border in order to survive. Now a second unintended consequences maybe a benefit to Mexicans the will be back in a position of being able to make a living growing corn. This leaves the possibility than emigration to the US will slow and life in Mexico will improve for the people living in rural areas
NAFTA has certainly been a major problem. Corn subsidies have increased in the US and I gather eliminated in Mexico. You would think that Mexican farmers would now benefit but the article by John Burstein and Manuel Pérez Rocha
says that the benefit will be minimal as “small farmers have been left out of the corn market, and often have left their communities for the life of an undocumented worker in the United States.”
The reason they give is that the corn flour monopolies have been substituting American yellow corn in the mix. Also, as with most modern industrialised food production, most of the profit goes to large companies that operate beyond the farm gate. Not just in food processing. If the farm-gate prices go up farm inputs usually go up as well, so I’m not sure how well the American corn farmers are doing.
The Washington Post article says that Mexico went from exporting 137,000 tons of corn in 2005 to importing 800,000 tons in 2006, I’m not sure why.
But the main point of the story is the increase in food prices for the non-farming poor where tortillas are being priced out of the diet resulting in hunger as well as a drastic reduction in nutrition because of the inferior substitutes.
vertical integration of oligopolistic transnational corporate industrial food production
Well, yeah, but do you have to put it like that? The syllable: word ratio is way out of whack!
Where to start with the confused logic of this typical anti-globalisation piece?
Pretty obviously, the main problem here is the home-grown milling monopoly, not the evils of globalisation. Are you seriously claiming that this monopoly did not exploit both farmer and consumer prior to NAFTA? One of the irritating traits of critics of multinationals is their underestimation of the rapacity and, absent external competition, political influence of local capitalists.
And just what is the actual complaint here? That subsidised US corn has made campesinos uncompetitive or that it’s too dear for the urban poor to buy? They’re utterly contradictory arguments. Unless you’re claiming that the milling monopoly is not merely exploiting farmers and consumers but are now doing it on a far larger scale than they did before. In which case, absent anti-trade regulation, the monopoly will not last very long and NAFTA, by easing the entry of evil US corporations to the milling market, will in fact hasten the demise of the monopoly. Milling and selling corn hardly seems a natural monopoly – the scale economies aren’t large.
As for the bees, intensive monoculture is hardly something new to either Europe or the US. Before blaming GE crops I’d want to see the hard science – there has been too much fearmongering and outright lying by greenies about this approach to breeding new varieties for me to take it on trust.
The rising price of corn for Mexicans is an indication that biofuels are not a quick fix for GW. Well not unless you really think global starvation for the third world is part of the solution. It’s an ugly truth about GW that needs facing.
To be sure, NAFTA needs to be critically re-examined, certainly re-negotiated, and possibly even scuttled. And also, to be sure, corn agriculture in North America has some very weird macro features to it. But these things are really only symptoms, not the underlying illness. It may be helpful to step back a bit further, get a wider perspective, and ask a few difficult questions.
For instance…
“The reasons why the peasant farmers of Mexico, who grow the higher quality white corn…”
Did I just hear right? There are “peasants” still, somewhere in North America? Why, FFS? Are there any “peasants” still, in either Canada or the US? Why should there be any in Mexico? Mexicans don’t live in the damn Sahara desert, they live in one of the three most prosperous regions on all of planet Earth.
A few things to bear in mind: Mexico is three times the size of France; it has a large and energetic population, abundant natural resources, oil, arable land, ports, multiple coastlines, venerable and sophisticated cultural traditions, historical access to the vast cultural resources of Europe, and it lives right next door to the most dynamic economy in world history. There is no good reason on earth why Mexicans should live in poverty. They have been ruled for nearly the entire 20th-cent. by a single party — the corrupt, backward, Party of Institutional Revolution (I’m not making that up!). “Institutional” and “revolution”: now there’s two words that go together naturally, if ever I heard ‘em. For pete’s sake.
The underlying issue is that Mexicans need to wake the hell up. They need to take responsibility for their absurd unaccountable governments and elites, their ridiculously corrupt social system, their moronic economy, and their completely irresponsible reproductive habits. They need to critically address their culture, politics, and economy, and restructure their country on every level. And they need to stop using emigration to the US as a steam valve and a cheap excuse to perpetually postpone having to take a hard look in the mirror. In a word, they need to be patriots. Si se puede!
There’s no reason why Mexico shouldn’t be one of the most prosperous, desirable destinations on Earth. If it’s a backwards hell-hole instead, they have only themselves to blame. The sooner they face up to that, and face its ramifications, the better off they’ll be.
Currently there is a young generation of Mexican emigres living in the US who are, on the whole, a dynamic, hard-working people, quickly learning a zillion things about politics, efficiency, and hustle. Many of these should be enticed to return to Mexico, and share their new-learned skills and habits, for the greater good of that country.
dd, I’m not saying a lot that I can be sure of. So I was hoping people like you would add to the information we have so far. I can see the inconsistancies and illogicalities of the situation. At base, the desire of the US for independence from Middle East petroleum through subsidising the production of ethanol is upsetting the complexities of the food production economy. Most likely it would here too if we subsidised ethanol from wheat.
Canadian farmers say that since NAFTA their situation has worsened markedly with the entry of US millers and other multinationals into both the farm input and the post-farm production scene. So farmers have themselves to get bigger or to get out.
In Mexico according to the CIA Factbook agriculture employs 18% of the labour force to produce 3.9% of GDP. Free trade was supposed to be structured to allow an adjustment process, but peasants in developing economies always seem to get the rough end of the pineapple. Where I’d rant is about the unfairness of developed farm subsidies and continued barriers to access, which I’m sure you’d agree with.
Not exactly, because I don’t have specific knowledge in this case. But it does seem true that the investment provisions of free trade have exacerbated the situation, especially where developing economies do not have anti-monopoly laws that mean anything. There is also the issue of corruption.
If there are 40 million poor in Mexico and 20 million farmers who are being messed about by the US desire to create an ethanol industry, it’s worth trying to get to the bottom of it without accusations of antiglobalisation rants.
On the bees, I agree we need science. But it is the case, I understand, that there is inadequate testing for adverse impacts before GM strains are released onto the market in the US. I believe inadequate weight is given to the precautionary principle. That’s all. Plus bees dying wholesale is not a trivial phenomenon.
j_p_z, I understand that yes, there are peasants in Mexico. You’d probably be able to find some in the US and Canada as well in the sense that farmers have not been able to sustain a living on farm without taking off-farm jobs.
But I’m not an economist, just an interested lay person. Also as you know interested in rigged elections. Yes, I was aware that Mexico have had the one party for that long. There are claims that the last election was stolen. This warrants further examination, which I haven’t had time for, and it’s hard to do at this distance.
I too have an impression of a dynamic people in an economy that has plenty of potential. But poverty and inequality, with a Gini index that is almost Brazilian, still seem intractable.
There’s a lot of debate about the energy balance of ethanol made from corn. The DOE reckons it’s about 1.3 out for 1 energy in on average, but the best farms and systems get about 2:1.
There are people who claim that the net energy balance is negative, notably this paper by Pimental.
Even if the net energy balance is positive, even 2:1, it’s not a great ratio.
The problem, DD, is a highly stratified society; with a very large number of small subsistence farmers in rural areas. So, whats therotecially good for urban poor can easily devastate rural campesinos. Two seperate societies.
JPZ is right about the ossified political society – down south, where I travelled in the mid 90s, its practically run by private landlord armies, the guardias blancas. Nasty bastards too – basically thugs for the landlord class that is in many ways unchanged after 500 years. This is the context for the rise of the Zapatista movement.
Subsistence farmers really dont fit into the market model of producers or consumers. They’re part timers at both, and they actually cant afford the “cheap” US corn which has driven their tiny post-diet corn returns to nil.
american corporate culture does not provide a decent living to all americans, every city has a ‘wrong side of town’. since wwll, america has been sliding down the measures of national wellbeing- have a look at ‘average height and weight’, and life expectancy.
corporate culture in nations that do not have a rule of law is even less benign. directing campesinos to improve their lot as though they were harvard b-school grads riding the chicago commodity market is amusing, from a safe distance.
i suspect the only cure for humanity’s various problems is mass death. at 10% of the current population, many problems would disappear. unfortunately, this die-back will only be effective if it proceeds from the bottom up. from a moral standpoint, one could wish it were the other way around.
No Tim T I didn’t have to put it like that! I wrote something, looked at it for a moment, thought I was on a roll, put in another word and let it rip!
agriculture employs 18% of the labour force to produce 3.9% of GDP
That’s another way of saying that agricultural workers are only about 18% as productive as other Mexican workers. Put another way, on average agricultural workers can boost their income by a factor of 5 by moving to other industries.
They need a revolution in agriculture, either by shifting people off farms or by massive capital investment to boost production, or both. NAFTA enables – indeed probably will in the long run force – both.
The real issue is where the people will go. Again, it is NAFTA that encourages the creation of maquilledoras to absorb the rural population. But it doesn’t sem to be doing that fast enough at the moment, which is why the displaced population is tending to become wetbacks. The answer to which is more, not less, investment by evil US corporations in such sweatshops.
No offence DD, but the model you’re employing is missing some on-the-ground realities.
Maquilledoras are springing up in the north, yes. The vast majority of campesinos live in the south – some 2000 kilometers away. Many in Chiapas are indigenous Mayan speakers, whose grasp of Spanish isn’t that much better than mine. Not exactly ideal factors to abstractly transfer between sectors.
Their GDP quotient is utterly misleading, and a fairly useless stat – as they are mainly subsistence farmers. That is, they eat most of their produce themselves. They dont figure in market logic – except when their tiny post-diet margins get wiped out by cheap corn they cant always afford to eat. This even goes to seed replanting and tools – it undermines the diet cycle itself.
And wasnt the point of Brian’s post the increased dependence on imports that have dramatically price-spiked? They need ‘more’ of this alleged market efficiency?
Note also that you cant flood the US in the same way under NAFTA rules. It becoming clear Mexico would do better in pursuing food self-sufficiency first.
As for the agricultural revolution – I can see your point in the abstract there. But these are tenant farmers living in semi-feudal arrangements under the big blanco landlords. NAFTA is hitting them, but not the root problem. Its not clear to me how NAFTA is going to address the monopoly on land ownership by a southern blanco elite thats been doing things the same way for 500 years. These guys are the sticks in the mud. The campesinos are just trying to eat.
This article is terribly confused. The facts argued present two contradictory, but both false explanations of what is happening. Both of these possibilities could only ever be half true.
One moment, cheap corn forces people off the land, the next minute cheap corn forces meat prices to rise.
Alternatively, expensive corn forces people off the land and forces meat prices to rise.
The second alternaitve relies on a highly unlikely situation where vertically integrated MNE is less efficient than arms length trade. If this were true, it would not continue for long.
The production function always cuts through the murkiness. Y = f(L,K,A,t…)
The Mexicans are better off. US and Mexican total output have increased.
“The Washington Post article says that Mexico went from exporting 137,000 tons of corn in 2005 to importing 800,000 tons in 2006, I’m not sure why.”
Perhaps they don’t have comparative advantage in corn. US corn production went through huge productivity changes in the 20th century, pre GM. In a way, it is a very capital and technology intesnive commodity.
You’re missing the point anayway. US corn is subsidised and will be more so after the US Congress passes ethanol industry related laws – this is the real mistake here. Corn is a inferior base to produce ethanol from. Trade is good, subsidies are bad.
Re: GM corn being the root of all evil and killer of bees.
That whole idea had been pretty thoroughly debunked, last I heard. The original research was truly appalling (synopsis: monarch butterfly caterpillars die if they eat only GM corn pollen. They also die if you try and keep them alive on non-GM pollen from any plant. In fact they die on any food other than milkweed leaves…)
Chris
Mark H said:
I thought I’d made that point, but yesterday I had trouble finding my head. After posting I switched on the radio and heard a certain cricket match in progress. It mightily disturbed my sleep.
I thought there was confusion also and was hoping that commenters would cast some light. So far the most light has been cast by Lefty E for which thankyou.
As I understand it peasant farming is quite a good production system, or can be in many parts of the world. Vandana Shiva says that in India 100 farmers each farming an acre will produce more food and of vastly greater variety than one farmer with modern equipment. But 100 farmers are never going to make enough to each buy a car, have a holiday at the beach and send their kids to university. Also large monocultures allow better secondary processing/distribution/marketing systems so that their produce can take its place among 25,000 plus items at my supermarket on the other side of the world.
Smallholder farming is under pressure all over the world. The New Delhi food analyst Devinder Sharma looks at what’s happening from where he sits and sees 600 million Indian farmers going through the mincer. In the end the real gains will be the corporates, according to him. Sharma is always bitter, but there seems plenty to be bitter about.
My elder brother who sold the family farm, shifted north and now has 5 or 6 properties. He’s doing OK at the moment. But he sees the future also as belonging to the corporates who, he says, already own most of the prime country in his industry (beef). I understand that Australian family farmers by expanding as he has have generally done better than the Canadians, but I don’t have solid research to back that.
In the US Willie Nelson has been doing concerts for 20 years to try to keep family farmers on the land. Some of them will find a niche, at least for a time, some won’t.
The EU decided to treat their farmers humanely 40 years ago and look at where that got them.
Personally I left school at 15, worked on the farm for 2 years, decided it was a mugs game and went back to school.
dd I hear three problems with the maquilledoras. First there is the shit wages and exploitative working conditions. Second there have been dreadful stories about local pollution. Third there is the giant sucking sound in recent times of factories being moved or replaced by those in China.
But all my information is anecdotal, garnered from lefty sites on the internet.
I think we’ve had this discussion before, Brian, but I’m not exactly sure why we should be mourning the end of the family farm and the rise of the corporate one. If indeed this is the case – and Quiggin argues that the family farm isn’t going away.
Being on the land has its good points, sure, but it’s a hell of a way to make a living. The swings of climate and commodity prices make it one of the most volatile industries out there; and yet it’s run by small entrepreneurs with limited risk hedging ability and whose lifestyles vary greatly according to these vagaries.
In the developing world and subsistence farming, replace “lifestyles” with “ability to eat properly”.
With regards to Devinder Sharma’s article, the question arises why farmers (in the Western world) are prepared to continue to farm if they are really making no money.
Brian: “Personally I left school at 15, worked on the farm for 2 years, decided it was a mugs game and went back to school.”
There’s an old Irish joke about farming. Farmer wins the lottery, the papers ask him what he’s going to do with all that money. “Well,” he says, “I’m going to keep right on farming until it’s all gone.”
Corporate agribusiness farming gives you certain decisive macro advantages, but at certain rather heavy (and often invisible) costs. (Animal cruelty, unhealthy yet cost-effective produce, top-down corporate over-management; and plus, do we really want to have to eat just any old sort of shit that Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland decide to shovel out?). On the other hand, I’d be willing to bet that Indian subsistence farming is nobody’s idea of a good time. Ultimately the best thing would be to find a harmonized system where one kept one’s sturdy yeomen on the land, but it didn’t result in inefficiency and dire poverty. I suspect that in a truly civilized system, subscription-based food cooperatives reaching out to individual organic and biodynamic farming systems will go some of the way towards covering the spread. It’s already starting to happen. Pete Townshend:
“It’s alarming
How charming
It is to be a-farming.”
A friend of mine who deals in exquisite wines tells me that the ones which come from bio-dynamic vineyards have astounding qualities that most of the world has not yet discovered. A future, perhaps.
On the other hand, _this_ is the past, and we’ve lived it before:
Around the year 1000, the Byzantine Empire decided that, for various economic and political reasons, it would favor massive large-holding farms (their version of agribusiness) over and against the small-holders in Anatolia. The natural upshot was that, although farming was improved in efficiency, Asia Minor became critically underpopulated, which had adverse effects on the Byzantine Army. ‘No problem,’ they thought, ‘We’ll just replace the shortfall with these new Turkish mercenaries.’ Then, in their first critical battle with a foreign incursive force, which turned out to be –guess who?– Seljuk Turks, the Turkish mercenaries defected to the side of their ethnic confreres.
The battle, which the Byzantines massively lost, was the Battle of Manzikurt in 1071 A.D., and it lost much of Anatolia for Constantinople, and spelled the ultimate ruin of the Byzantine Empire. It was also a major proximate cause of the Crusades. Goes to show what a careless approach to farming policy and linked demographics can do for you.
That’s one end of the spectrum. On the other hand, and at the other end, from the original post, I notice *this* howler:
“The typical Mexican family of four consumes about one kilo — 2.2 pounds — of tortillas each day.”
Let me see if I got this straight. A “typical” Mexican family of *four*?! Show me a typical Mexican family of four, and I’ll show you a typical 3-legged centipede. The biggest structural problem of the “campesinos” (what a fucking medieval word, and what a fucking medieval attitude it expresses) is that on average they produce about six more new campesinos than the four new campesinos that they already couldn’t afford. If they want to go on breeding like rabbits, then Vegas odds are pretty certain that they will just have to, well, live like rabbits. That’s an old equation, and if they don’t want to responsibly adjust for it, then I don’t see why anybody else should have to make up the shortfall for them. I don’t like to see anybody living in poverty, but these knuckleheads are every bit as thoughtless as some nitwit yuppie driving an SUV, and they should be called on it.
Ahh, farms. How does the tune from “Green Acres” go again?
Robert, it rings a bell, but I didn’t read Quiggin’s article last time, at least not properly. On that weekend I was in fact on a nostalgic trip to the small farming community where I grew up and was very busy for a while thereafter.
In terms of emotion, the experience of growing up on a farm where we produced most of what we ate is imprinted on my soul. But I know that farm is not there anymore. I’ve been back and the farm I knew has gone. The landscape has entirely changed.
And in response to your last question about why people stay on the land, one day a couple of years ago I was listening to the radio as they discussed the latest rural crisis. Suddenly I recognised the voice. It was my brother telling some reporter that he’d rather live in a cave than move to the city.
That’s the emotion. All I’m saying is that the family farm is under pressure and that some other people see corporates claiming the future. Quiggin’s article supports the first part. He says that holdings are getting bigger and/or people are earning part of their income off-farm. That’s because they have been under pressure. My mail is that Australian farmers have coped with these pressures better than most around the world, some by becoming corporate.
That’s where the definitional problems start, but few of the farmers in the district where I grew up are operating on a single contiguous block of land unless they have developed an off-farm income stream. My best friend of those days went from 600 acres to 6,000 acres and told me he should have at least doubled again. Our class-mate, on the other hand, the kid next door to me, now has 5 houses, not sure how many farms, but he puts 300 animals a month in his own feed-lot for finishing. He lives in a town and spends a good deal of time being the shire mayor. He’s already corporate, but if he bought another operation the same size he’d probably have to establish a corporate office and employ a CEO. He’s the sort of bloke who would. So I’m not I’m not sure that Quiggin is right in saying that the corporate influence is declining. It may be just beginning. As Quiggin says, they are not defined as large businesses but traditional family farms they are not.
But that is happening in an evolutionary way that is normal and acceptable in a capitalist world. It is the external shocks that fracture the social fabric and end up with people dispossessed, displaced and some dead that I mourn.
In the case of Mexican corn it is a deliberate market intervention of a foreign government that is causing the current shock, on top of the earlier market intervention of US food subsidies.
If I read the articles correctly I think they are saying that it is the non-farming poor who are being shafted this time, and that the Mexican corn-producing peasants, who have already been shafted, won’t gain much if at all from the higher corn prices.
Is that simple enough English?
j_p_z, I enjoyed the tale of the first part of your comment. And, yes, there is a revival of eating real food grown locally.
As to breeding like rabbits. I’m here to tell you that your calling them on it is going to change things not one little bit. I’ve noticed that human reproduction is not a perticularly rational matter. If anyone asked me whether it was rational to have kids, I’d tell them, no. Funnily enough no-one asks me or seems the slightest bit interested in what I think!
Brian — Fair enough. So tell me: what do your other 16 hijos do for a living?
Pass!
j_p_z, this is irrelevant even if you want to defend the idea that it is correct.
US NAFTA corn displaces Mexican corn
US corn is diverted to ethanol
Mexican corn price rises leaving some Mexicans eating noodles
Surely we can all understand this simple story without getting our knickers twisted over the relative breeding rates of different populations.
In Australia we don’t have any special animus towards Mexicans so you rant seems misplaced. Now, if you wanted instead to talk about Lebanese ..
shorter wbb: For the life of me, I can’t understand how recklessly increasing populations could create increasing demand for foodstuffs, or how this could possibly put upward pressure on a less flexible supply curve which may not react as quickly, or for the same reasons, in a massively corrupt and incompetent economy, as the said reckless and incompetent population increase. I mean, really! Doesn’t a mother of 16 require exactly the same amount of tortillas as a mother of three? Why would the price change? Or could it be that I am completely fucking retarded?
wbb, I think you’ve nailed the basic story.
j_p_z, no you’re not retarded, but to me it seems you think that Mexicans breed out of sheer wilful stupidity. I checked the CIA Factbook for Mexico against the World, and some perhaps comparable countries. Their fertility rate of 2.42 per woman ranks 108/222 and is almost spot on the world average. They are close to the world average on quite a few measures, but have a low death rate, noticeably lower than for the US. So they are no good at dying. Migrating isn’t ranked but they seem quite good at that.
If the poor are breeding rapidly, as they seem to in most places, then perhaps Jeffrey Sachs has a clue in concentrating on the education of women, starting with providing meals at school and encouraging the girls to go to school. That is as part of a comprehensive aid program.
Of course we don’t want to turn the thread over to how to bust poverty but as a last word I’d say that I’m not keen on comprehensive free trade agreements unless the countries have similar levels of development, similar social structures and similar values. But that is another big topic.
Brian — “I’m not keen on comprehensive free trade agreements unless the countries have similar levels of development, similar social structures and similar values.”
Well that is a very astute point, and I wish you would broadcast it more loudly. A good observation, and one which I don’t see made very often.
“I checked the CIA Factbook for Mexico…”
Yeah, that’s one way of gathering data. You know what I did instead? I spent a number of years working with Mexican emigres, interviewing them, and collecting point-specific information about their lives. Hoo-whee! Come and ride a bus some time, in pretty much any city in California, Arizona, Texas (and now Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, etc. etc.) What you see will be pretty interesting. What you hear –and what you don’t hear– might be even more interesting. (And as I recall, the CIA also told us there were WMDs hidden under all the sofas in Iraq, as well.)
What Mexicans want to do in Mexico is of no concern or interest to me. But if what they get up to begins to massively impact what happens in my own country, in every conceivable dimension, then yes, I feel bound to take notice.
j_p_z, I think your way of gathering data gives useful insights. For example the official statistics in India late last century took over 100 million off the poverty stats, not by a change in the lives of real people, but because of the way the official statistics defined poverty. It has always seemed strange to me that there are fewer poor people in the country than there are hungry people. That’s why Devinder Sharma reckons he can tell better what’s going on with the rural poor by visiting the railway stations in major cities and see who’s getting off, how many and what they are carrying.
As to the CIA Factbook, I think it’s just a straightforward compendium of facts as revealed in official stats. The little introductory stories to the various sections are a different matter, but I skip them.
A “typical� Mexican family of *four*?! Show me a typical Mexican family of four, and I’ll show you a typical 3-legged centipede. The biggest structural problem of the “campesinos� is that on average they produce about six more new campesinos than the four new campesinos that they already couldn’t afford. If they want to go on breeding like rabbits, then Vegas odds are pretty certain that they will just have to, well, live like rabbits.
jpz, I find your remarks cliched and obnoxious. It’s well established that high fertility rates coincide with the worst oppression of women through state and religion. Education of women is the major factor in decreasing fertility through take-up of contraception. The fertility rate in Mexico (and you did state “Mexico”, not USA)is now heading down to 2 and will probably drop below that in the next few years.
“jpz, I find your remarks cliched and obnoxious.”
Thanks! In my experience, ‘cliched and obnoxious’ frequently equals, “true.”