Growing Corn Stopped Being Profitable

One in every two kilograms of corn consumed this year in Mexico was purchased abroad. It is the expression of the crisis in which the Mexican countryside finds itself three decades after the North American Free Trade Agreement, now USMCA, imposed a total liberalization of agricultural and agri-food trade, specialists explain to La Jornada.

While the purchase of corn abroad, a basic grain in the national diet, is increasing, the planted area is decreasing. In 1994 it was nine million 196 thousand hectares, which in 2023 – the latest available data – was reduced to six million 941 thousand hectares, a drop of 24 percent, according to data from the Agri-Food and Fisheries Information System (SIAP).

Mexico is self-sufficient in white corn, the type intended for human consumption. Imports are mainly yellow corn, used as fodder or for products in the food and beverage industry. Total consumption by families and industry amounts to 46.6 million tons, and this year production will be 23 million, according to estimates by the sector.

Small farmers see that the activity is no longer profitable and that is why they decide not to plant, explains María Eugenia Rojano Valdez, head of the Secretariat of the Countryside of the State of Mexico.

Álvaro López Ríos, general secretary of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, points out that the drop in production in both rainy and irrigated areas is related to the lack of a promotion policy, starting in the years after NAFTA came into force. It is evident that the countryside has been severely impacted by different phenomena, but the most serious is the absence of support and protection programs, he says.

And also by the emergence of activities that were more profitable for some agri-food companies, at the cost of the reduction in the supply of a basic grain. This is what has happened with the production of fruits such as avocado or the so-called berries and vegetables grown in greenhouses.

In Jalisco, the second largest producer of corn in the country after Sinaloa, farmers have stopped growing the grain to dedicate their land to berries, a crop that generates greater profits in the immediate future but has an effect on the erosion and depletion of the land and consumes large quantities of water. In this state, three out of every ten hectares of planted land is dedicated to these fruits. Something similar occurs with other high-value crops, such as avocado or agave.

“There is support, but not enough,” says Manuel León, from Morena Agropecuaria Sinaloa.

Original article by Rolando Medrano, Braulio Carbajal with correspondents Israel Dávila, Ernesto Martínez y Juan Carlos G. Partida at La Jornada, December 26, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.

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