MEXICO CITY - Promising that his administration "will not abandon" Mexico's farmers, President Vicente Fox kicked off a series of talks Monday aimed at making Mexican producers more competitive with their U.S. counterparts.
The goal of the talks between dozens of farm groups and various Cabinet members is to reach a national accord through which the government will help Mexican farmers move into the 21st century. Farming groups have called on the state to help them modernize outdated technology and to secure credit to overcome mounting debts.
"The long-term solution is to make the Mexican farm sector more competitive, more productive," Fox said in a speech inaugurating the meetings.
"For that reason, today we are launching these joint working sessions. Today we pledge our support to Mexican farmers with this strong alliance that will allow us to develop a national assistance and development plan for the farming sector."
The government and farming groups hope to reach an agreement by the beginning of next month.
The attempt to reach a national accord came after farming groups staged massive protests across the country to protest provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement that lifted tariffs Jan. 1 on many U.S. farm products.
The groups argued that they would no longer be able to compete with U.S. farmers and briefly threatened to shut down the U.S.-Mexican border the day the NAFTA provision went into effect. They called off the protests after Fox agreed to negotiate a farm accord.
Fox said Monday that his government "will not abandon the farmers and will support them totally."
"We already have taken important measures and we will take however many are necessary," Fox said.
Fox thus far has resisted demands by some farm groups that he re-negotiate NAFTA, a position Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda repeated Sunday during a forum on the farm crisis held in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.
"The solution to the problems in the farming sector will not come by renegotiating the accord as some have suggested simplistically," Castaneda said.
Last month, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico issued a statement noting that the lifting of the tariffs on agricultural products was not the problem, given that about 90 percent of those tariffs already had been reduced to less than 2 percent.
"The United States recognizes that Mexican agriculture faces structural challenges that already existed before NAFTA," the statement said. "These include the high cost of credit, high costs for producers, the lack of marketing and transportation. ... The United States is actively cooperating with the Mexican government and private sector" on these issues.
But Mexican farmers did not take kindly to a suggestion Monday from Agriculture Secretary Javier Usabiaga that farming groups were largely responsible for their own woes.
"How many times have we not heard producers who blame someone or something for their own mistakes?" he told more than 1,000 members of the National Farming Confederation who immediately booed, hissed and made catcalls.
Several farming organizations led peaceful protest marches throughout the country to demand that the farming crisis stay high on the national agenda. Some said that no accord will be acceptable if it fails to include changes to NAFTA.
Alberto Gomez Flores, a spokesman for 12 farmers' organizations belonging to the umbrella group "Farmers Can't Take it Any More" said group members began a series of fasts Monday.
"The fasts will stop when the president informs us that he has taken the appropriate steps with his U.S. counterparts to begin renegotiating NAFTA," he said.
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