| MEXICO CITY (AP) -- President Vicente Fox
called for the nation's embattled farmers to consider
themselves businessmen, saying they should adopt new
technology and crops to confront one of the worst agricultural
crises in recent decades.
Fox spoke Tuesday before a friendly crowd of small farm
owners, while a group of leftist communal farmers gathered for
a Wednesday demonstration to protest low coffee, sugar and
grain prices.
Marking a departure from decades of paternalistic farm
policy in Mexico, Fox said that farm owners who pulled
themselves up by their own bootstraps would get more attention
than those who staged protests.
Touting "an entrepreneurial attitude on the
farm," Fox promised to eliminate "the corruption,
paternalism, political favoritism and bureaucracy" that
has characterized the government's subsidy and farm trade
policies.
"Today we are announcing a radical change of
attitude," said Julian Orozco, president of the Rural
Producers Chamber, at a meeting with Fox at the president's
residence. "Instead of asking for handouts, we're talking
about what we can contribute as modern farmers in a new
century."
"That kind of statement," Fox responded, "is
going to get a better response from us than any street
demonstration."
Thousands of left-leaning farmers -- many members of
inefficient communal farms set up by the former ruling party
decades ago to gain the farmers' political loyalty -- have
scheduled a protest march in Mexico City for Wednesday.
In recent weeks, wheat farmers blocked roads in northern
Mexico to protest low prices for their crops and U.S. grain
imports, and sugarcane farmers blockaded government offices to
protest late payments from sugar mills.
Mexico is fighting to adapt to international competition in
crops like coffee -- where overproduction has caused prices to
plummet -- and the effects of trade agreements that opened the
country's previously closed market to agricultural imports.
The protesters are likely to ask for more official support
for aging farmers on increasingly unprofitable communal farms.
They also are demanding more subsidies, but Fox said Mexico's
hands are tied.
"You're talking about a billion dollars a day in
agricultural subsidies in developed nations," Fox said.
"That's not an area in which Mexico is going to be able
to compete." |