Monterey.- The six-year term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was characterized by withdrawing support from rural producers, so now they expect the next Government to restore at least part of what was taken from them and that has prevented them from achieving self-sufficiency. food in basic grains.
“Today, commercial agriculture in this country has absolutely no support of any kind and the activity is very complicated. We have everything against us, due to the severe drought and because the Government does not support us,” said Rogelio García-Moreno, agricultural vice president of the National Agricultural Council (CNA).
“When NAFTA (today T-MEC) was signed, they made us compete against the gringos, but they have agricultural insurance, objective income, support for diesel, cheap credit and more benefits. If there is no urgent intervention by the Mexican State, the countryside will It’s going to end.”
Of the 36 subsidies that until the last six-year term there were in the Ministry of Agriculture labeled to improve the competitiveness of the primary commercial sector, the AMLO Government only left 5 and of them its 3 main welfare programs take up 90 percent of the resources of ” competitiveness”.
Furthermore, in its last year, the Government allocated a budget to the Ministry of Agriculture, for support and administrative expenses, of 74 thousand 109 million pesos, just 0.3 percent more in real terms than that of 2023.
And that’s not all, these resources represent 27 percent less than what was assigned to the Ministry of Agriculture in 2018, the last year of Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, based on the 3.8 percent inflation estimated by the federal Administration. for 2024.
In addition to this, the Q4 Government extinguished Financiera Rural, the only direct financing channel that small and medium-sized producers had.
And it also removed support of up to 30 percent of agricultural insurance premiums, with which farmers risked planting crops knowing that they had support in case they suffered losses to their crops.
“The next Administration should not abandon support for very small producers (basically self-consumption), but it must turn its attention back to the commercial producer.
“It is urgent that support for contract farming returns and, consequently, support for hedging on the Chicago Grain Exchange in the case of corn and other commodities.” said Francisco Chapa, member of the CNA Corporate Practices Committee.
He added that Mexico is producing fewer and fewer primary products, such as grains, which are the basis of the national diet, so it is an urgent need to restore subsidies for agricultural insurance because the premiums are unaffordable.
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