The News (Mexico D.F.) | Jason Lange, The News Staff | Januayrry 16, 2002
The mayor on Tuesday announced the city will give 154 million pesos (US$17.1 million) this year in subsidies to farmers in the capital's rural zones.
Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the direct subsidy program will help small farmers to make ends meet, and thus able to resist pressure to sell their land as urban sprawl creeps ever closer.
The mayor said the life of the city dependeds on the capital's 20,000 farms and the rural areas and ecological reserves surrounding them.
"If (these) areas disappeared, water would cease to enter and recharge the city's aquifer," Lopez Obrador said during his daily morning press conference.
City government figures indicate the capital's rural zones capture 70 percent of the rainwater which replenishes the city's dwindling aquifer.
Paradoxically, 59 percent of the surface area of Mexico City - the world's second largest metropolis - is rural.
The urban area is concentrated in the northern half of the city, and spills over north and east into the State of Mexico. Forests, green pastures and farms make up much of the southern end of the capital.
However, these undeveloped regions are shrinking as the urban area expands by 5 percent every year.
Last year, 560 small settlements sprouted up illegally over 4,645 acres of previously undeveloped land, according to Maria Elena Rodriguez, a spokesperson for Mexico City's Environment Secretariat.
Many of these settlements were built over the land of failed farmers, who sold it after being unable to compete in the globalized agriculture markets.
The city's Rural Aid program this year will hand out subsidies to 617 small and medium-sized farms, said city Environment Secretary Claudia Sheinbaum, who spoke after the mayor.
Last year, the city gave out 123 million pesos (US$13.6 million) to 353 groups of farmers. Most of the groups are small family operations.
Marcos Chavez, an agro-economics specialist at the renowned Colegio de Mexico, said the program should help stem the exodus of small farmers and farm workers toward cities and the United States.
A 1991 constitutional amendment allowed for the privatization of "ejidos," small communal farms established by agrarian reforms after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). Many small farmers in hard times opted to sell their plots to larger commercial farming companies, ending up as field hands.
"As farm workers (and not owners), they were ineligible for federal government assistance," Chavez said Tuesday in a telephone interview. "They were basically left on their own."
This, he said, in part explains the recent phenomena of rural migration to the cities and north of the border. The mayor's Rural Aid program, Chavez said, "helps campesinos hold on to their lands."
Chavez said the city government's rural assistance program wouldn't be necessary if the federal government worked more to help small farmers.
"Banrural (the federal bank for farm credits) is practically bankrupt, and commercial banks have little interest in campesinos," he said.The News (Mexico D.F.):
