Progress toward food sovereignty requires policies that protect, regulate, and promote the responsibility of the State. Maintaining the mistaken notion that these are goodwill aid packages given to farmers and agricultural producers only when budgetary resources are available will deepen the agricultural crisis and increase food dependency.
What can the phrase “Without corn, there is no country” mean when domestic corn production is on its last legs in the face of US dumping and the state’s inability to fight neoliberal free trade?
Mexico’s Secretariat of Health was to have established mandatory labeling regulations a year and a half ago, but is in violation of the General Law. Critics point to industry interests.
The situation of FNRCM members in Tlaxcala is unknown. Meanwhile the state government announced that traffic has been restored on the roads.
The fact that the authorities have spoken with the farmers doesn’t mean their demands have been met. Caught between the fire of the USMCA and the wall of public policies that strangle or abandon them, they are fighting for their survival.
Driven by concerns over US crop dumping, monopoly profiteering, the decline of food sovereignty & insufficient state support, farmers have struck for the third in six months. Now transporters have joined.
Organizers considered the government’s has no interest in resolving the agricultural crisis, and balked at the demand that they not hold any demonstrations during this year’s World Cup.
Despite this multi-billion dollar business, the US Trade Representative continues to assert a series of non-tariff barriers prevent the free access of genetically modified corn to Mexican territory.
Research professor Gerardo Noriega says the cost of armed and trade wars has hit Mexican agricultural producers hard.
The objective of the mobilizations is to pressure large importers & grain buyers, who buy subsidized US imports instead of national production.