Agriculture in Mexico

During the early colonial period, the Spanish introduced more plants and the concept of animal husbandry, principally cattle, horses, donkeys, mules, goats and sheep, and barnyard animals such as chickens and pigs. Farming from the colonial period until the Mexican Revolution was focused on large private properties. After the Revolution, these were broken up and the land redistributed. Since the latter 20th century NAFTA and economic policies have again favoured large scale commercial agricultural holdings.

Mexico’s main crops include grains such as corn and wheat, tropical fruits and various vegetables. Agricultural exports are important, especially coffee, tropical fruits and winter fruits and vegetables. Sixty percent of Mexico’s agricultural exports go to the United States.

History of agriculture in Mexico

Mesoamerican period

The territory of Mexico roughly corresponds with that of Mesoamerica, which was one of the cradles of plant domestication. Archeological research in the Gulf coast of Tabasco shows the earliest evidence of corn cultivation in Mexico. The first fields were along the Grijalva River delta with fossilized pollen evidence showing forest clearing around 5100 BCE. The domestication of corn is followed by sunflower seeds and cotton.

Agriculture was the basis of the major Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Olmecs, Mayas and Aztecs, with the principal crops being corn, beans, squash, chili peppers and tomatoes. The tradition of planting corn, beans and squash together allows the beans to replace the nitrogen that corn depletes from the soil. The three crops together are sometimes referred to as the Three Sisters.

Soil erosion from corn production has been a problem since the Mesoamerican period. This and other kinds of environmental degradation have been cited as the cause of the collapse of the Teotihuacan civilization. To create new areas for cultivation, Mesoamericans harvested rainfall, developed lakeshore irrigation systems and created new fields in the form of terraces and "chinampas" artificial floating islands in shallow waters.

Colonial period

Although silver mining brought many Spaniards to Mexico and silver was the largest single export from New Spain, agriculture was extremely important. There were far more people working in agriculture, not only producing subsistence crops for individual households and small-scale producers for local markets, but also commercial agriculture on large estates (haciendas) to supply Spanish cities. In the early conquest period, Spaniards relied on crops produced by indigenous in central Mexico and rendered as tribute, mainly maize, following existing arrangements. Some Spaniards were awarded grants by the crown of indigenous tribute and labor in the conquest-era institution of encomienda, which was phased out replaced by indigenous labor allocations by the crown (repartimiento), finally wage labor or other non-coerced labor arrangements.

In central Mexico, the rise of the Spanish population in and the drop in indigenous population in the sixteenth century saw Spaniards acquiring land, creating haciendas and smaller farms called ranchos. Much productive land was held by indigenous villages, with the protection of the crown, but long-term trend over the colonial era and the nineteenth century was the transfer of those lands into non-indigenous hands. Haciendas have been well studied in Mexico, starting with François Chevalier's highly influential work, followed by assessments of whether his generalizations held for regions of Mexico.' Studies found that haciendas were, in fact, not inefficiently organized and badly managed, nor did the concentration in land ownership result in waste and misallocation of resources. Hacienda owners (hacendados) sought to maximize income and minimize production costs, economically rational behavior. In economic terms, benefited in ways that small holders and indigenous communities could not, since they had economies of scale, access to outside credit, information about new technologies and distant markets, a level of protection from predatory officials, and greater security of tenure." Although haciendas had advantages of scale in producing crops such as wheat and in ranching of cattle and sheep smaller producers of fruits, fresh vegetables, and small animals (pigs, chickens and their eggs) supplied local markets. In Mexico City, chinampa agriculture was highly productive and labor intensive, supplying the capital, with land continuing to be held by indigenous farmers into the twentieth century.

The Spanish introduced a number of new crops such as wheat, barley, sugar, fruits (such as pear, apple, fig, apricot, and bananas) and vegetables, but their main contributions were domesticated animals, unknown in Mesoamerica. The Spanish brought cattle, horses, goats, and sheep as part of what is now called the Columbian Exchange. These animals often caused damage to indigenous crops in central Mexico, but outside the zone of intense indigenous settlement and cultivation, cattle and sheep were grazed on land not previously devoted to agriculture. Sheep grazed on previously cultivated land had disastrous environmental consequences, documented in a classic of Mexican environmental history. Many breeds of the animals the Spaniards imported are still raised today called "criollos."

With the discovery and exploitation of large-scale silver deposits in Zacatecas and Guanajuato, cultivated areas outside of traditional agriculture expanded, particularly in the Bajío, which became the bread basket of Mexico producing the imported grain, wheat. Unlike central Mexico, which had a long indigenous tradition of sedentary agriculture, much of the Bajío was a marshy wetland not continuously occupied or cultivated. For the Spaniards, the Bajío was a disappointment, since there were no deposits of precious metals and no indigenous populations with existing hierarchies, but the region did show promise for initially the grazing of cattle and later agriculture. With population growth in silver mining cities in the eighteenth century, agriculture expanded and cattle grazing was displaced to more marginal lands and declined in importance. Agriculture in the region was productive, but was not technologically innovative. The bottom lands were rich in nutrients Spaniards had no sense that access to productive land was restricted, which might have sparked innovation in cultivation. However, the shaping of the regions hydrology with dams and canals in the eighteenth century made possible wheat cultivation on a large scale. Spaniards developed irrigated agriculture, with the construction of canals and dams, marshy land was drained and redirected.

A number of native plant and animal species from Mexico proved to have commercial value in Europe, leading to their mass cultivation and export including cochineal and indigo (for dyes), cacao, vanilla, henequen (for rope), cotton, and tobacco. A high quality, fast red dye from small cochineal insects that were cultivated and collected from the nopal cactuses on which they thrived was an extremely important export to Europe, the second most valuable after silver. Cochineal production was labor intense and largely remained in indigenous hands. Mesoamerican staple foods, especially maize, continued to be important. In the eighteenth century, when the Spanish crown was seeking new sources of income, it created a monopoly on tobacco production and processing, restricting cultivation to areas around Orizaba.

Recent assessments of the Roman Catholic Church's role in the Mexican economy have examined the hypothesis that the church was a major drag on the Mexican economy. The church was the recipient of the tithe, a tax on agricultural production, but with indigenous communities exempt from the tithe and considerable number of haciendas owned by the church itself, it has been argued that more land remained in indigenous and church hands than otherwise would be expected. Since the church functioned as the main source of credit to elites, its lending to them at below market rates cost the church revenue and increased the wealth of those acquiring the credit. The church owned considerable land in its own right. An advantage of church-owned haciendas over privately held ones was that unlike individual hacendados, whose deaths triggered a division of property among the heirs, the church as a corporation continued to consolidate its wealth over time.

19th century

Land tenure and agricultural production continued along the patterns of the colonial era even after the Mexican War of Independence (1810–21). Much of the fighting had taken place in the Bajío, Mexico's bread basket, and the silver mines were damaged as well, so there were factors that led to stagnation in agriculture there. Political turmoil in the post-independence era was an obstacle to economic growth, but agriculture itself did not put a drag on it. One economic historian considers Mexico's "pre-capitalist agricultural organisation" one of Mexico's several obstacles to industrial development. Low rates of economic growth generally were also due to the lack of a national market and high transportation costs. Most Mexicans were subsistence farmers using rain as the main source of water for their crops. In the post-independence era, much agricultural land was in the hands of corporate owners, that is the Roman Catholic Church and indigenous communities, and those lands could not be alienated under colonial law and its continuation in the early republic (1822-1855). They could not be rented or used as collateral for potentially more profitable enterprises. Mexican liberals targeted corporate ownership of land during the Liberal Reform era, and the landed wealth of the church was expropriated, but much land was still held by indigenous communities. Political turmoil continued until the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the coup by liberal army general Porfirio Díaz. Once he had consolidated power, large haciendas were encouraged to develop commercial farming for export, made possible by the building of railroads to take products to market at low freight rates. Railroads were built using foreign capital and by extending land concessions to the entrepreneurs. Much indigenous land was usurped and land prices where railway lines were built soared. Displaced agricultural workers found temporary employment building railway lines. Indigenous village lands that had largely escaped the Liberal Reform were now expropriated at rapid rates. Large haciendas became profitable again, reversing a trend toward gradual disintegration into smaller units. Expropriated church lands remained in the hands of large-scale producers. Landless indigenous villagers became rural or urban wage laborers.

When wheat production in the U.S. and Canada expanded in the nineteenth century and mechanized reapers developed, the binding of cut wheat for later threshing opened a market for the commercial development of the henequen industry in Yucatán. Henequen production on a large scale had never been commercially viable before, but the production of henequen for cordage rapidly became a major export product to the U.S. and Canada. Cotton production was the fastest growing agricultural sector, with textile factories being established in the states of Puebla and Mexico. Factories produced both cotton yarn and finished textiles. With the development of a network of railway lines, commercial agriculture became more generally possible. Tobacco was an important crop, no longer protected as a colonial monopoly of the crown, and cigarette factories using machine-rolled cigarettes produced 5 million kilos in 1898.

20th century - Land reform and Green Revolution

The result was the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1920. The result afterwards was the breakup of most large private landholdings to be redistributed, especially under a system of common tenancy regulated by the government called ejidos. The lands could be worked individually or collectively by members of the ejido but the land could not be leased or sold. The process of dividing lands and developing ejido organizations continued into the 1930s under President Lázaro Cárdenas. By the end of the 1930s, haciendas almost entirely disappeared from central and southern Mexico with numerous small holdings of ten to twenty acres as well as ejidos becoming dominant. Land reform in Mexico was an achievement of the Mexican Revolution, with the distribution of land to peasants concentrated in Mexico's center and south. The breakup of the haciendas solved a political problem in Mexico, since it was one of the demands of the peasants who fought and was enshrined.

By the 1930s and 40s, agricultural production was dropping and the government sought technical solutions. Soils in central Mexico were considered exhausted by use and inadequate so that the government promoted agricultural development outside the traditional areas of cultivation, particularly in northern Mexico. In the 1940s during the presidency of Manuel Avila Camacho, the Mexican government partnered with the U.S. government, and the Rockefeller Foundation to launch the so-called Green Revolution (1950–70). Research facilities developed new strains of wheat, maize, beans, and other crops, to engineer a variety of desirable traits, such as disease resistance, high protein content. Sorghum, a new crop was introduced to Mexico during the era of the Green Revolution, which was used for animal fodder. Mexico expanded cattle production in this era, fed on sorghum. Seeds and inputs of fertilizer and pesticides for irrigated agriculture were suited to Mexico's northwest, but required more capital than small-scale cultivators could afford. Mexico's agricultural output between 1950 and 1970 was "truly spectacular," but it was not long lasting, subsequently called "the birth place and burial ground of the Green Revolution" Synthetic pesticides were applied to fields to control both insect infestations attacking plants, but also controlled insects that were disease vectors for humans. Synthetic fertilizers required adequate water so that its nitrogen would not be toxic to crops. The application of both pesticides and fertilizers were applied regularly. Pemex, Mexican national oil company, and Fertimex, the national company for the production of pesticides, particularly DDT, were integral in promoting large-scale, agribusiness dependent on these synthetic inputs. In order to be competitive, Green Revolution crops had to be cultivated and harvested by machinery, which meant that it was economically viable only with large-scale farms.

The ejido system remained intact until the 1990s. However, during World War II, industry became the more important sector of the economy. Mexico’s rural population began to fall in the mid century, from 49.3% in 1960 to 25.4% in 2000. Federal policies outside ejidos still favored large agricultural producers over rural peasant production, including the offering of credit and protectionist policies. One of these was the construction of major irrigation systems, especially in the north. The first major irrigation project was the Laguna Project near Torreón, followed by the Las Delicias Project near Chihuahua, both with the aim of producing cotton along with wheat. These projects increased the amount of land available for agriculture from 3.7 million acres in 1950 to 8.64 million acres in 1965. In addition, the Mexican government encouraged only crops such as corn and beans, restricting imports of these two staples until 1990.

By the 1970s, agricultural production was unable to keep up with population growth leading to imports of basic staples. The Mexican government initiated programs in the 1970s and 80s to encourage family planning and the utilization of birth control, in order to reduce surging population growth. The peasant population had increased 59% in the period 1940–1960, with the number of work days in the fields going from 190 days in 1950 to 100 days in 1960. Overpopulation was a factor in internal migration as well as migration for work to the U.S.

The rise of neoliberalism and the negotiation of NAFTA in the early 1990s pushed agriculture towards even more commercialized enterprises. The Mexican constitution was modified in 1992 to allow for leasing and selling of ejido land if the majority of members voted in favor. The goal of this was to allow ejidos to combine to form larger and more efficient farms, with money invested from private sources, but has resulted in most ejido land becoming privately held.

These changes have had uneven effects on Mexican agriculture. Until the late 1990s, Mexico was a net exporter of agricultural products, but today it is a net importer, mostly from the United States. With the need to compete with imported grains and less direct support from the government, the agricultural sector entered a crisis. Mexican agricultural income has polarized with large commercial farms dominating the sector and at the other end small subsistence farming which still is the main source of income for many, especially in the south of the country. The former are able to take advantage of reduced trade barriers and exports, especially to the United States have increased. Former subsidies provided by the government was replaced by a program called Procampo, which gave direct cash payments to farmers growing corn, beans, wheat and other grains, allowing farmers to decide what to plant.

Despite greater output, agriculture continues to decrease in percentage of Mexico’s GDP since 1990. The proportion of GDP of agriculture, forestry and fishing fell from 8% of the nation’s GDP in 1990 to 5.4% of Mexico’s GDP in 2006, with a growth rate of only 1.6% during that time, far behind other sectors of the economy. In 2010, the structure of the GDP and labor force showed agriculture, forestry, and fishing combined was valued at 3.8% of total value, employing 5,903,300 or 12.5% of the labor force.