Privatizing the Private Family Farmer: NAFTA and the Transformation of the Mexican Dairy Sector

Abstract

This article explores a much neglected class of rural producers in Mexico, commercial family farmers, whose position in a globalizing political economy is treated as either unproblematic or ignored altogether in the agrarian literature. I contend that these small-scale capitalist farmers, as well as their peasant and ejidal counterparts, are being privatized under Mexico's new neoliberal agricultural policies, culminating with the passage and implementation of NAFTA. While it might seem logical that capitalist farmers oriented toward commercial production would be pre-adapted for this new free-market model, they are instead subject to new rules for operating in an increasingly hostile, competitive market. In 1993 small commercial dairy farmers in north-central Guanajuato began to seek new organizational forms with which to achieve better market integration and increase profits during a period marked by falling milk prices, increasingly scarce and expensive credit, removal of subsidies, and rising costs ...