ISDS Case Map
agriculture | farmers | food
plus livestock, forestry, etc
Corporate globalization, savagely embodied by NAFTA, is not just a threat to Mexican farmers and rural villagers. The economic, health, and social damage created by industrial agriculture, corporate globalization, and the patenting and gene-splicing of transgenic plants and animals, are inexorably leading to universal "bioserfdom " for farmers, deteriorating health for consumers, a destabilized climate (energy intensive industrial agriculture and long-distance food transportation and processing account, directly or indirectly, for 40% of all climate-disrupting greenhouse gases), tropical deforestation, and a rapid depletion of oil supplies.
Thousands of Mexican farmers, some herding cows, flooded into the capital on Thursday and set a tractor on fire to demand government protection against cheap US farm imports under NAFTA.
From 11th to 13th January 2008, 21 delegates and members of Via Campesina, from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Peru, South Korea, Norway, France, Haiti, Mali, Italy, the United States, Mozambique, Turkey, the Basque Country and Nepal, met in Dijon for a strategic seminar on the theme “Food Sovereignty and Free-Trade Agreements” convened and organised by the Via Campesina's Food Sovereignty work committee.
Convened two years before the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the 200th anniversary of the 1810 War for Independence, Mexico's latest farmer protest is now gathering force with strong historical and political overtones. Farmers intend to follow the same route that Pancho Villa took on his 1914 march into Mexico City, and on which an anti-NAFTA protest was conducted by protestors on horseback in 1999
The Mexican farmer march against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will enter Sunday the city of Chihuahua on its way to this capital.
Free-trade deals had been the linchpin of a perceived strategy to break long-standing policy deadlocks in Japan, and to pry open agriculture to market mechanisms and competition. But uncertainty has set in.
"The competition is not about Mexican agriculture against American agriculture, but about a Mexican worker against large companies like Cargill, Conagra or ADM."
Farmers from the Mexican states of Durango, Chiapas, and Chihuahua carried out street protests and roadblocks Wednesday in rejection of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Mexican farmers and trade unions are protesting and carrying out legal actions against the North American Free Trade Agreement, for considering it a mortal blow against the national agricultural sector. The Catholic Church warned in official declarations that the elimination of taxes on subsidized imports of corn, bean, powder milk, and sugar may well force a large number of Mexican farmers to leave their lands.
Some 200 Mexican farmers blocked on Tuesday the Cordoba-Americas bridge linking the country with the United States to protest the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
