FOR A PRODUCTIVE COUNTRYSIDE WITH RATIONAL USE AND REGULATED USE OF AGROCHEMICALS IN MEXICO
During the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that began in 2018, of socialist tendencies, the budget for the countryside was cut by 40% and the 17 programs to promote agricultural production in Mexico were eliminated on the grounds that those who operate and produce in the Mexican countryside were “corrupt”, without proving it.
The tendency of some officials involved in agriculture is socialist, such as the Undersecretary of Agriculture of SADER, Víctor Suárez Carrera, who warned that he would put an end to industrial agriculture because it is “capitalist and exploitative”. The budget taken away from the countryside was destined to social programs for small producers, such as Sembrando Vida, an electoral clientelist program that only seeks votes and no increase in harvests, and which has been catalogued by several companies as fraudulent.
In this sense, they launched a frontal attack against Mexican agricultural production of medium and large producers who feed and export 50 billion pesos annually to 120 countries, launching decrees to prohibit the herbicide glyphosate, the most widely used in Mexico, the sanitary supervision of imports; they prohibited the planting and importation of transgenic yellow corn, withdrew subsidies for agricultural diesel, financing for the countryside and crop insurance.
In mid 2022, the attacks on the countryside intensified, when a presidential decree was issued on December 31, 2020 prohibiting the acquisition and use of glyphosate and prohibiting the acquisition of yellow corn for fodder in 2024, when Mexico has a deficit of 18 million tons of this grain and imports them from the USA, which are transgenic and to replace them only increased by one million beneficiaries with cheap fertilizers, but for self-consumption producers, not for commercial producers, all this in violation of the T-MEC.
In addition, among other measures, they prepared another attack on the countryside by drafting a bill in the Senate of the Republic seeking to prohibit the use of agrochemicals commonly used in commercial agriculture in Mexico, such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc., on the grounds that they contain dangerous molecules.
The report by Amado Vázquez published in December 2022 in Tierra Fértil magazine, in which agricultural leaders, agrochemical and agro-producers, senators and farmers who also lead organizations such as the CNA, talk about these last two sections, This topic, once published, was taken up by many in Mexico to understand the attack on the production of the Mexican countryside if these inputs for agriculture and livestock were banned (they also want to ban the use of chemicals against ticks), in addition, the environment would be seriously affected if the use of agrochemicals were not regulated, as proposed by those potentially affected, which would be better than banning them, in addition to the fact that the economic impact would be terrible for the poorest farmers in Mexico.
As one of those involved says: “Under the guise of a health concern, in truth what they are seeking is to take an ideological and prohibitionist approach, unsupported by science, which could have devastating effects for the countryside, farmers, and consumers of Mexican food”.
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