Neoliberal Globalization, NAFTA, and Migration: Mexico's Loss of Food and Labor Sovereignty

Abstract

This article explores the way in which Mexico's countryside was affected by the country's economic integration to its northern neighbors since the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico's political technocracy placed its bet for economic growth on the comparative advantage of cheap labor, a losing bet: Mexico's asymmetrical integration into the North American economy, combined with neoliberalism, had a detrimental impact on its food self-sufficiency, its labor sovereignty, and substantially increased its out-migration rates. The article explores the relationship between food self-sufficiency and labor sovereignty in this process. The main thesis is that food self-sufficiency is a condition for a country to enjoy “labor sovereignty”—the ability of each nation to provide with living wages for a vast majority of the population. Of the three NAFTA nations, Mexico is the least self-sufficient, and hence the one that expels the largest rate of migrants.

Keywords:

• peasant economy
• development
• agriculture
• food sovereignty
• migration

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A version of this article was presented at the workshop on Migrant Rights in an Era of Globalization: The Mexico-US Case, April 13, 2011, cosponsored by the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, the Center of Latin American Studies, the Katz Center for Mexican Studies, and the Human Rights Program of the University of Chicago. Javier Ramos Salas and two anonymous reviewers provided useful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. Estimates by the Consejo Nacional de Población (CONAPO) are even higher for this period at 2.8 million. See www.conapo.gob.mx. For further scholarship on the issue of agrarian displacement, see Araghi (2000).