Agrarian Reform and Economic Development in Mexico

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             But the situation is often worse on the more favorable lands. The better soils are concentrated into large holdings used for mechanized, pesticide, and chemical fertilizer-intensive production for export. Many of our planet's best soils, which had earlier been sustainably managed by pre-colonial traditional agriculturalists, are today being rapidly degraded, and in some cases abandoned completely, in the short-term pursuit of export profits and competition. The productive capacity of these soils is dropping rapidly due to soil compaction, erosion, water logging, and fertility loss, together with growing resistance of pests to pesticides and the loss of biodiversity.
             The products produced from these more fertile lands flow overwhelmingly toward consumers in wealthy countries. Impoverished local majorities cannot afford to buy what is grown, and because they are not a noteworthy market, national elites essentially see local people as a labor source, a cost of production to be minimized by keeping wages down and busting unions. The overall result is a downward spiral of land degradation and deepening poverty in rural areas. Even urban problems have rural origins, as the poor must abandon the countryside in massive numbers, migrating to cities where only an auspicious few make a living wage, while the majority languish in slums and shantytowns.
             The modernization of agriculture was also introduced as the only way to contend in international markets, meeting the challenges and opportunities provided in the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The purpose of modernization is to amplify and accelerate awareness of the dramatic human, social and ethical problems caused by the trend of the concentration and misappropriation of land. The development model of industrialized cultures is capable of creating huge quantities of wealth, but also has serious deficiencies when it comes to the equitable redistribution of its fruits and the encouragement of growth in less developed areas.