Guadalajara, Jal. If the federal government imposes tariffs on corn imports, it will destabilize the industry and will not fundamentally resolve the situation of agricultural producers, affirmed the president of the Jalisco Agri-Food Council (CAJ), Roberto de Alba Macías.
“It is not a question of putting industrial consumers in the corner and neither is it generating an expectation for the producer,” stressed the former leader of the National Campesino Confederation (CNC) in Jalisco.
De Alba Macías told El Economista that in order to fundamentally solve the problem of the low prices paid to corn producers, it is necessary to implement a new agricultural profitability model that ensures a profit for producers before they start producing.
“What we propose is that a new contract farming can be implemented, that we seek a basic solution and not only go to the situation or at the moment to try to jump from one agricultural cycle to another and try to kick the ball forward” , held.
“The formula that we are proposing is that there may be public and private incentives in this new scheme of commercial agriculture; that we can go play in the international grain market, in this case, the Chicago Stock Exchange, see how to buy and secure the price for the producers of Jalisco, that the industry can leverage the purchase of these coverages and that it can There must be a payment scheme for them at the end of the harvest, and with this, aspire to have the best possible price for the producer in an insured manner”, explained the president of the CAJ.
The agency’s proposal contemplates that the fertilizer provided by the federal government to small agricultural producers be included as an incentive, and that the state government help producers with the seed as was done in previous six-year terms, while the Jalisco Fund of Business Development (Fojal), which is the bank of the state government, acts as a leverage engine so that producers who are part of this contract farming model can access financing for their inputs.
According to Roberto de Alba, in the past six-year term, contract farming coverage was just over 90% of the corn harvest, and today the producers that are in this scheme do not even reach 10 percent. .
“There are no incentives, there is no support for coverage, there is no financing. The industry has also been absent from the negotiating tables and they have wanted to regulate supply and demand, with great price speculation, especially in producing areas”, he pointed out.
Last week, the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, reported that there was an agreement with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to impose tariffs on corn imports and benefit local producers with a better price. Despite the fact that the federal Ministry of Economy ruled out the implementation of this measure, the Sinaloan president insisted that it will be applied because that was the agreement of the president of Mexico.
“We are really seeing that it is not necessarily a bottom-up solution. We propose going for a medium and long-term public-private policy so that the production chain really stabilizes, that the trade balance is more equitable and that the producer, far from fighting for a subsidy from the government, may have the conditions to find, in the market itself, the profitability and profits that can make this activity profitable”, shared the president of the CAJ.
temporary measure
The president of the Association of Agri-Food Councils of Mexico (CAM), Jacobo Cabrera, shared that imposing tariffs on corn imports, as the federal government intends, would be positive as long as it is only a temporary measure.
