DECEMBER 1995 · VOLUME 16 · NUMBER 12

---

B O O K    N O T E S

---

A big lie of Mexico's economic miracle mirage was that Mexican agricultural producers could compete with U.S. agribusiness as state farm supports were dismantled.

Zapata's Revenge argues that this big lie will have enormous economic and political costs for years. Since the end of the Mexican Revolution, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has survived by zig-zagging. It has served a small urban and rural elite while regularly backtracking to pay rhetorical and -- less often -- substantive homage to the land-reform legacy of Emiliano Zapata's uprising.

Mexico's 1982 debt crisis broke the PRI's populist wing, as it turned over the throttle to those neo-liberal twins, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Their policies reached a zenith under former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. With NAFTA as a North Star, Gortari tacked radically into neo-liberalism at the direct expense of Mexican agricultural producers. Aware of the resiliency of both the peasantry and the PRI, Tom Barry does not predict where this will end. He does a fine job, though, of explaining how opening Mexico's borders to U.S. agribusiness uprooted peasants and all but the richest Mexican farmers.

"From 1980 to 1991 Mexico received 13 structural and sectoral adjustment loans from the World Bank, more than any other country," Barry notes. The Bank conditioned a 1991 agricultural loan on Mexico: slashing tariffs, canceling price controls on basic foods, privatizing state-owned monopolies and eliminating price guarantees for corn -- the mainstay of the rural poor. Mexico's blunt 1992 agricultural plan said two million peasant families, about 75 percent of the nation's corn farmers, "will have to search for alternatives in other crops, reorganize their land holdings, associate with private capitalists or become wage laborers." Salinas promoted high-value agro-exports as a solution, but production costs run $2,600 per hectare for broccoli and $8,800 per hectare for strawberries, far beyond a peasant's means.

As Mexico's government slashed its role in agriculture, its leading trading partner, the most productive agricultural producer in the world, did no such thing. While Salinas rolled back state support, the United States kept pouring billions of dollars into crop price supports, agricultural research, food aid and crop export assistance, which helped U.S. farmers and agribusinesses drive their Mexican counterparts out of business. U.S. agricultural exports increased 150 percent since the mid-1980s. One-third of Mexico's food processing capacity is U.S. controlled.

"Together with NAFTA and GATT, this neoliberal restructuring blindly handed over Mexico's farm and food sector to the leveling forces of the international market," Barry says. "Straitjacketed by their uncompromising market philosophy and using NAFTA as a cover for domestic restructuring, Mexican technocrats dodged the responsibility of designing a farm policy that would respond to Mexico's own development and food needs."

Chaos or Community:
Seeking Solutions, Not Scapegoats for Bad Economics
Holly Sklar
Boston: South End Press, 1995.
221 pages, $16
Reviewed by Charles Carbone

In Chaos or Community, Holly Sklar attacks the trendy belief that poverty is a lifestyle choice or a consequence of low intelligence. Instead, Sklar argues that the "breakdown" in family life has come from "paycheck inequality, corporate downsizing, technological investment, wage deflation, and temporary employment."

Sklar shows how U.S workers, compared to their European counterparts, labor longer hours in non-union, more precarious and exploitative jobs. The U.S is the only major industrialized nation where low-wage workers have increased productivity significantly while experiencing large declines in real earnings. The greatest impact has been on women, racial minorities and rural workers, although more workers of all kinds will join a "growing minimum-wage culture."

Using articles from business publications, Sklar describes in corporate America's own words how U.S. companies made staggering profits in 1994 by slashing labor costs, wages and benefits. Sklar places other signs of social decay -- such as mushrooming prison construction and a more rationed higher education system -- in this context.

Chaos or Community shows how women, immigrants, and minorities are "scapegoated as the producers and reproducers of poverty." Sklar uses historical background and an analysis of contemporary political changes to show how white, privileged institutions and businesses promote racist and discriminatory beliefs. She offers a detailed account of redlining in the financial services industry and draws parallels to segregated housing and education trends.

At times, Sklar's ambitious scope leads to excessive generalization. Her critique of global corporatization suffers from broad generalities and unsupported conclusions. Although this section is not as well researched as the rest of the book, critical issues concerning multinationals are addressed: the enormous wealth and power of U.S. corporations abroad and the government's paramount concern with promoting the private interests of U.S. companies.

Sklar challenges readers to choose "community over chaos." By "community" she means "corporate accountability, community reinvestment and redevelopment, conversion of the military-industrial economy and an all-age social security system." Sklar devotes much less attention to social prescriptions than social pathologies, which suggests that the cure is as complex as the chaos in which we now live.