The Grain Train Robbery of 1996

On May 30, in a gritty outer ring settlement of Monterrey, Mexico, over 400 men, women and children assaulted a grain train and carried its cargo off to their homes. Shouting "We're hungry!," women hauled off the contraband in buckets and two-year-old children carried it gingerly across the tracks in plastic bags. At the end of the day, 40 tons of corn had disappeared into the community of San Nicolas de la Garza.

For hungry people in Mexico, the new economic order isn't working.

In 1993, Mexican farmers produced nearly as much white corn as the 80 million people in Mexico needed for their staple food, tortillas. This year, two years after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and one year after the Mexican peso devaluation, analysts estimate that Mexico will need to import nearly six million tons of corn to meet national demand -- and there is little corn to be had on the world market. Mexico has only eight days worth of corn in reserve. The nation could slide into famine if the rains fail and if the policies put in place to conform to NAFTA continue.

Shortages in Mexico and on the world market can be traced, in part, to forces beyond human control, such as bad weather, and to human conflicts, such as war. Like Texas and Oklahoma, northern Mexico is baking under a relentless sun. War in Chiapas has created the conditions for widespread hunger in that region. But the families who attacked the train near Monterrey were doing more than feeding their families in times of adversity -- they were thumbing their noses at the Mexican government and its decision to bet the future of the Mexican food supply on the global marketplace. With the Grain Train Robbery, Mexico has become the poster child of food insecurity in a global economy.

At the behest of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and later, U.S. negotiators of the NAFTA, the Mexican government systematically dismantled its farmers' capacity to produce corn and other basic grains over the past 15 years. With rosy projections of low world grain prices from the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute in their pockets, Mexico's trade negotiators and agriculture policy makers greatly reduced credit, technical assistance and marketing aid to grain farmers, focusing the nation's resources instead on export crops such as fruits and vegetables. "Sell high, buy cheap" was their motto -- until the combination of the Mexican peso devaluation and shortages in world grain supplies sent grain prices skyrocketing.

It shouldn't have taken a train robbery for policy makers to realize that these policies are leaving the cupboard bare. Farmers' organizations pleaded for credit programs and help with marketing, but the government believed World Bank assessments that high grain prices are a temporary glitch in the transition to the global economy. Thousands of acres remain unplanted and production has fallen 20 percent. The national corn marketing agency, CONASUPO, has only been able to acquire 750,000 tons of grain of the 2.3 million planned, compared with five million tons acquired from the previous harvest. Hundreds of thousands of farmers have been forced off the land into cities in Mexico or have crossed into the United States. What's happening in Mexico isn't an anomaly -- it's simply the first tremor of a global trend that will rock the foundations of all of our societies if governments don't act decisively, and soon. In Argentina, a highly productive agricultural exporter, the poor are literally eating cats. Bolivia, which depends on outside sources for 70% of its food, teeters on the edge of famine.

The access to food is a fundamental human right. It may also be the key, in the next decade, to social stability and democracy. This fall, thousands of government bureaucrats, food activists, agribusiness executives, and farmers will converge in Rome for the World Food Summit sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization. Its purpose? To develop a plan of action to guarantee food security across the globe into the 21st century. The people from San Nicolas de la Garza won't be there. But the image of families hauling grain away from a train should be present as governments decide whether to leave food security in the hands of the marketplace, or take a more active role in guaranteeing citizens access to their daily bread.

Return to the Index of Summer 1996