Mexico’s government has not met its commitment to enforce its agreed-upon price for farmers, who are forced to sell to an oligopsony of corporations, intermediaries and wholesale operators.
The world’s largest peasant & Indigenous movement expressed its solidarity with Mexican farmers, who have been striking to demand the government remove basic grains from free trade agreements.
Environmental deregulation, rural abandonment, speculative pricing, and the prioritization of property rights over human rights were central tenets of neoliberal economic policy, whose impact on Mexican farmers is now a subject of reflection in our country.
Mexico, a country that could have been an agricultural powerhouse, resigns itself to surviving on band-aids, managing its decline with welfare programs that change names but not their underlying logic while sacrificing food sovereignty to USMCA diktat.
Despite resistance from Coca Cola and other private interests committed to destroying children’s health for profit, Mexico’s junk food ban has been implemented in 86% of the country’s schools.
With the USMCA revision, Mexico will be even less self-sufficient in food as the US pushes for more imports and Mexico lacks a substantive policy to support and develop national agricultural production.
Leche par el Bienestar guarantees Mexicans are able to exercise their constitutional right to healthy food, providing milk at between 16% to 70% the cost of private milk, while guaranteeing a fair price to dairy farmers.