By David Agren
Catholic News Service

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- The Mexico City Archdiocese urged the Mexican federal government to better protect some of the country's poorest and most vulnerable residents as concern grows that a flood of duty-free agricultural imports from highly subsidized U.S. producers could force many small-scale farmers to abandon rural areas and head to the United States.
Hugo Valdemar, archdiocesan spokesman, expressed concern about the North American Free Trade Agreement's impact on Mexican farmers after the Jan. 1 removal of duties on four basic products: white corn, beans, sugar cane and powdered milk. The tariff removals were mandated by the 14-year-old agreement.

"The church is deeply concerned about the ushering in of this phase of the free trade agreement," Valdemar told reporters Jan. 6. He added that the changes could lead to an "increase in poverty" and "more immigration to the United States."

The lifting of the final remaining tariffs on U.S. agricultural goods has provoked disquiet in Mexico, where the majority of "campesinos," or peasant farmers, work on farms of less than five acres in size, lack modern equipment and technology, and collect only modest government subsidies -- if any at all. Nationwide protests occurred in early January, and the country's largest campesino group predicted that 1.4 million farmers would be negatively affected by the competition.

"This change is going to throw many people off of their land," said Fernando Gonzalez, an indigenous farmer from Oaxaca state, who protested outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. "There's no (other) work, there's not much of anything, so people leave for the other side" of the border.

The Mexican Congress passed a nonbinding resolution Jan. 4 urging President Felipe Calderon to renegotiate parts of NAFTA.

Aldo Munoz Armenta, political science professor at the Jesuit-run Ibero-American University in Mexico City, said the president could push for reopening NAFTA talks. He explained, however, that large food processors wield far more political influence than the groups representing campesinos.

"(NAFTA) impacts a sector of the economy that is unable to defend itself," Munoz said.

Valdemar disagreed with calls for reopening NAFTA talks, but said the federal government should encourage development in the countryside, where some 30 million Mexicans work, often in subsistence farming or for wages of less than the national minimum wage of $5 per day.

"There should be emergency programs developed for helping the countryside and campesinos," he said.

"Since the (early 1980s) ... there haven't been any serious measures taken for defeating the deteriorating conditions in (rural areas)."

Over the past 20 years, Mexico dismantled a series of programs that guaranteed crop prices and extended credit to the country's small farmers. But many of the old programs often only benefited those supporting the long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party and were corrupt, Munoz said.

01/07/2008 3:59 PM ET