NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/8639

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From: New Liberation News Service <[e-mail]>
Subject: Mexico-Environment pt.1
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From dbarkin Tue Nov 10 11:34:25 1992
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From: David Barkin <dbarkin>
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Subject: mexico environ-part1
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From: David Barkin <dbarkin>
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ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION IN MEXICO AND THE EARTH SUMMIT:
WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY?

David Barkin
Professor of Economics, Departamento de Producci"n Econ"mica
Universidad Aut"noma Mextropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco
and
Researcher, Centro de Ecodesarrollo

      Our environmental crisis frontally assaults the air traveler in Mexico
City. Flying through a quarter mile of muck is a seemingly interminable
experience. Travelling to the airport, the taxi driver comments that things
were improving: we can see blue sky and ground visibility is one half
kilometer, permitting us to see the 27-story Latin American Tower.

      I thought about this, and the fact that the driver ~like so many
compatriots~ thought that the situation was getting better in Mexico. I
thought about it as I was flying through one-quarter mile of muck in March
1992, and reading the headline: "HOY NO CIRCULA DOUBLE HASTA NUEVO AVISO". The
newspaper was announcing that for the indefinite future, all car owners in
Mexico City were to be deprived of their automobile for a second working day
each week, and that some were also to be prohibited from using it on weekends.
This tragedy lasted for one month; the press of daily events quickly
transformed it into history and life resumed its normally contaminating style.

      This desperate political move was a symbol of hopelessness and political
impoverishment. I hope that this article will convince you, the reader, of the
depths of the crisis, and that this crisis is not Mexico's alone. It is a
problem for all of us.


                         Mexico's Environmental Crisis

      In 1991, the Mexico City metropolitan area had a population of about 18
million people; the national economy grew at about 4%. The country has been
widely heralded as having overcome the crises of 1976 and 1982. It is the new
wunderkind of Latin America, and the Salinas-Bush administration is proud of
its new-found success. This success has its dark side: structural imbalances,
social dislocations, and falling standards of living are only sustainable
because of the increasingly authoritarian exercise of power by the Presidency.
Mexico's environmental crisis is a reflection of this more general crisis and
now the country's environmental disorders are transcending social classes.

The underside of policy

      The modernization process decimated the urban labor markets and led to a
deterioration in working conditions. The real value of the minimum wage has
declined more than 65% since 1976; it is now about US$4 a day in Mexico City
and along the border, while in the interior it is 20% less. Because of this
drop in purchasing power, employers no longer can use the minimum wage as a
guideline for salaries: industrial employers and many others are forced to pay
between 1.5 and two times the base level just to assure their workers the
ability to barely survive. But most Mexican workers are not so fortunate: only
about 40% of the labor force earns more than two minimum wages.
      Families must also send their women and children out to work. Their jobs
often oblige them to work in marginal or even illegal conditions, with low
wages and at great risk to their health and safety because of the lack of any
investment in protective or appropriate equipment for workers. Throughout the
country, and even in some of the most 'modern' plants, toxic fumes, poor
planning, hazardous materials, and poisonous chemicals permanently injure
workers and cause industrial accidents.

      As a result of the 'modernization' of Mexico's industry and the rapid
opening of its economy to imports During the past 8 years, 1.9 million jobs
were lost. Many people's jobs were sacrificed as imports of manufactured
products, displaced those produced in inefficient small and medium sized
industries. I would not argue that they should not have been displaced, they
were often much more expensive and of lower quality than the imports. But the
problem is that the workers do not have anything else to do. However
inefficient, and without productive alternatives, they are unemployed or
forced into marginal occupations; creating social problems, not of their own
free will; occasioning very profound social disorganization. Is it inefficient
for society to find ways for people to work and to do things that are useful
as opposed to be on the streets as beggars or as the homeless? Although I do
have my own responses to these questions, I don't know how we answer them
collectively. Who is going to pay to support people, or to not support them?

      People have been forced to seek new forms of employment. Migration to
the urban areas has increased while the search for work in the USA has
mushroomed. The amnesty afforded more than 2 million people the opportunity to
obtain legal working papers, and many others have joined the growing flood of
undocumented workers which continue to migrate for short periods every year in
search of jobs which allow them to save some earnings to support their
families in Mexico. Vast networks of itinerant merchants sprung up in
virtually every urban area, provoking a growing conflict with organized
commerce, which the government has not been able to mediate successfully.

      In rural Mexico, public policies deliberately, and with malice of
forethought, drove untold millions off the farms. For decades, as part of its
considered reevaluation of what modernization is about, the Mexican government
decided that it was more cost effective to import food than to allow
"inefficient" peasants to continue to till their lands. Without credit and
technical assistance they were unable to increase productivity, and without
adequate prices many families were forced to reduce their plantings and
abandon their farms. Even those that remained in rural communities were
compelled to search for off-farm work for some of their members to supplement
their incomes, as the real values of basic crops continued to fall.

      But the problem is not solely related to production costs. The problem
also has to do with people, with their relations to each other and to the
society as a whole. Mexico has just embarked upon a revolutionary ~or
counterrevolutionary~ program to privatize the vast system of communities
organized under the land reform system. Mexico's farmers, for the first time
since 1917, can now enter into legal contracts with commercial interests, so
that these groups can finance the cultivation of the land; in return the
farmers will be allowed, under suitable conditions, to work on their own land.
(This is very similar to contract agriculture or the old putting out systems
of yore.) It has already led to a massive reorganization of land ownership in
Mexico's most productive regions.

      There are now in Mexico about 40,000 hectares of land being cultivated
by American farmers with fruits and vegetables for export. This creates about
75,000 migrant labor jobs; many of these jobs came at the expense of jobs for
migrant workers in the USA, since the production often displaced farms being
closed in California in response to economic and ecological pressures. This
process is leading to a number of environmental problems: they use a great
deal of water, much of which is being extracted from fossil water aquifers on
the Baja peninsula, aquifers which cannot be recharged. Further, with the
transfer of grain production from traditional areas, serious social
disorganization is occasioning massive emigration. Women enter the local wage
labor forces, children are joining them in the work places, and in many places
school levels are actually declining.

      [In 1991, the government reported that the country once again became
self-sufficient in maize and beans. This feat was achieved by enlisting highly
capitalized export-oriented farmers to sow these basic food crops: the maize
for the urban areas was produced principally in a few irrigation districts
where high quality land and vast quantities of highly subsidized water, which
is normally used for valuable fruit and vegetable production, were channeled
to production of hybrid yellow corn ~generally used as pig feed~ as political
proof that the country could remain self-sufficient in food. But Mexico's
traditional food producers were idled for lack of official support. These
peasant communities cannot 'efficiently' produce corn, as the economists
understand the concept, because they do not have access to the credit and
purchased inputs which they would need to increase their productivity; but
since many of these communities have so few options open to them, because of
their isolation and because they are indigenous, the social costs to society
of their continuing to produce corn are in fact very low. In fact, these costs
are so low that an honest accounting of their present costs and potential
productivity would recognize that they are very efficient producers in present
day Mexico. Even more surprising, because of the likelihood of major increases
in food prices in the international market ~as a result of the elimination of
agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe, the greater need for food exports
to other parts of the Third World, and the expected transfer of vast
quantities of grains to the production of renewable sources of fuel~ they may
even become low cost producers in the not so distant future!]

Mexico City's environmental crisis

      In 1991, the Mexico City authorities implemented what was widely
proclaimed as a very courageous program to confront the rising levels of
airborne contamination. They first requested, and then ordered every
automobile owner in the valley to abandon his or her vehicle for one working
day a week. The result was that in 1991, the automobile industry had a record
year of domestic sales, 620,000 units, although contamination levels continued
to rise. The president was universally applauded for closing an obsolete 50
year old petroleum refinery. The Mayor asked the city's residents to adopt a
tree ~they were to plant them and then care for them; only about 60% of them
died in the first six months, which is better than the normal record for
reforestation around the world. (The success rate might be due to the water
quality in Mexico City: it is very rich in nutrients!)

      The problems of a Third World city are legendary. For example, Mexico's
efforts to deal with urban transport are quite complicated. The recent
temporary extension of the "one day without a car program" to two days created
another surge in demand for the Mexican automobile industry. Many of those who
own automobiles can afford to buy additional vehicles to avoid the
inconveniences occasioned by restrictions on the use of their existing
vehicles. Of course, there are also still a lot old jalopies around.

      But the effectiveness of any control measures is constrained by the
available alternatives. Public transport is woefully inadequate. Restricting
the circulation of cars does not guarantee the poor public transportation. The
Mexico City metro is a modern and relatively well managed transportation
system; although it has a few design flaws, it is growing. Unfortunately, the
system is overcrowded, and is used at more than 125% of its design capacity.
The bus system has been modernized, after the debacle occasioned by letting
contracts for new buses out to international bidding: the English winner sold
Mexico diesel motors which were not fit for use in London because of
unacceptable emissions standards; to correct this problem, Mexico had to
undergo a very costly and lengthy process of retrofitting these units with
more appropriate motors. The tram and electric bus system was burdened with
motors which lasted less than one-half of their rated lives; these are now
being reconstructed. But these public systems are still inadequate; although
private jitney routes wend through the city to supplement the public services,
many still have to do without.

      The City's sewage treatment system can process only about ten percent of
the volume generated in the Valley. Unfortunately, much more of the effluent
than this goes through the system, with the result than none gets adequately
processed. An additional 20% gets recycled for irrigation or reinjection into
the Valley's aquifers to equilibrate the delicate hydraulic balance, and to
attempt to avoid further sinking of the City. The rest is pied out to nearby
arid regions, where the water is used to irrigate fruit and vegetable
production which is then shipped to the City; although this practice is
illegal, since it constitutes a public health menace and such water should
only be used for grain production; these regulations are difficult to enforce
in the present policy environment.

      There are virtually no solid waste processing centers. A toxic waste
treatment plant in the Texcoco Lake area spews out white foam over the
surrounding areas; the lake is the target of an important rehabilitation
program to rehydrate the area which was desiccated hundreds of years ago by
the Spanish colonizers as part of their settlement program in the Valley. Most
solid garbage is trucked to vast open air landfills where tightly organized
scavenger teams pour through the loads; these teams are from humble families
who actually live in terrible conditions inside the dumps as part of a complex
corporate organization controlled by local czars.

      The problem is a serious one, and I do not have any magic solutions. I
know that the problem is not simply one of the muck in Mexico City's air. We
have a very creative engineer in Mexico, an opposition political leader, who
proposed that Mexico City construct 100 giant ventilators to stir up the air
and end the thermal inversions which trap the contaminants at low levels
around the valley; others proposed drilling tunnels through the mountains to
suck the muck into the neighboring valleys. The discussion is surreal.
      Mexico City requires one-fifth of all the energy generated in the
country to move water in and out of Mexico City. And yet water in Mexico City
is even cheaper than in the subsidized water systems of the USA. I pay more
for water in the provinces, where I get water from rain-fed springs, than the
University pays for all its needs in the Mexico City Valley for 15,000
students.

      But Mexico City 's problems are not just those of the natural
environment. It is very contaminated, although contrary to common belief, it
is not the most contaminated city in the world; unfortunately, there are
others that are worse! Most of its people are very poor: the 1989-90 economic
censuses revealed that more than 75% earn less than a living wage. In
contrast, almost 10% of its population is very rich, even by the standards of
the wealthiest communities in the world; few urban communities in the US, even
in California, have the kinds of elite shopping malls which are springing up
in various parts of the Mexico City Valley. These malls offer very exclusive
merchandise, a great deal of which is imported, and cater to people who,
before 'apertura', might have done their shopping in Houston, San Antonio or
Los Angeles.

      People are being told that living conditions in Mexico City will improve
over the next few years. Industrial production is going to be decentralized.
In our view this will not really solve the metropolitan area's problems: the
official program envisions a move of activity and people along the improved
railroad axis between Mexico City and Queretaro, which is still within the
central valley; they will occupy some more farmland, but these new lands still
require supplies from the same water tables that supply the megalopolis.
Decentralization is the key word in Mexico, but Mexico's government apparatus
is not moving out and plans call for Mexico to become a global or at least a
Latin American financial center.