25th IUF Congress

19 - 22 March, 2007, Switzerland - Geneve

Dear fellow delegates:

Receive my fraternal greetings on behalf of the sugar workers of Mexico, who have asked me to communicate to you their determination and commitment to remain faithful to the solidarity that the IUF represents in Latin America and the world.

Personally, I would like to share with you my great concern over what has been happening and is still happening in the field of sugar production worldwide, which, far from nearing a just and equitable solution, is becoming increasingly adverse for the structure of Mexico’s industry.

In previous occasions, I have described the difficulties that our field of production is suffering, mainly due to the conditions that the United States has imposed on sugar commerce under the North American Free Trade Agreement, as well as its aggressive export scheme for High Fructose Corn Syrup, which constitutes an unfair and cunning competitor of sugar, as it is much cheaper and is readily available in any amount required, given the levels of production achieved in the Northern country.

Next year, 2008, is the year that Mexican sugar trade will open up completely to the United States, and the conditions of production and competitiveness that we reach that moment in will be critical for us.

I would like to stop here and reflect for a moment: The fact that our industry is faced with such grim prospects and there is nothing we can do about it is alarming. We believe that, in general, nobody who trades with the United States can ever come out winning. We’ve known this for years, and so has the United States. Having as it does full economic, financial, and even military power, it wouldn’t be logical for the US to propose a deal in which it could lose any resources or power.

Be it as it may, in 2008 our country will throw the gates of its sugar industry wide open, and that will turn us more into spectators of the neoliberal circus, than into a national production factor of the sweetener industry. We are going to play a very minor role.

This, fellow assembly members, is not born out of pessimism, but rather of realism, of realizing that we have been, and apparently will continue to be, excluded from the decisions concerning the future of our country, of our countries.

When two or more countries sit down to negotiate, represented by negotiators who are convinced of the alleged benefits of the neoliberal model, the resulting agreements are necessarily going to be favorable to the model and not to the people. The only thing that the current economic system has produced in our countries is millions of poor people without hope and a handful of rich people who have neglected the interests of their nation in exchange for what the extra-national model offers them.

Free trade treaties are not actually designed to trade goods and services, but rather to secure the control of the country promoting such treaties over the rest of the signatory countries. They are a way of justifying in paper the unforgivable injustices that are committed against humanity.

Nobody can really expect to see fair trade between the United States, which produces 270 million tons of corn and with its high technology can use any amount of grain to produce and export High Fructose Corn Syrup to Mexico, and our country, which produces some five and a half million tons of sugar and has an annual production of corn of 20 million tons, which I mention in the remote possibility that we might want to compete with our own grain to produce High Fructose Corn Syrup.

There are many asymmetries like this, and each of them poses a very serious risk to our economy and, why not say it, to our national security.

In sum, fellow workers, the North American Free Trade Agreement signed with the United States and Canada is not going to solve any agricultural, industrial or financial problem. On the contrary, everything will get worse, and the green light that will launch this process is scheduled to turn on in January 2008.

Getting back to the sugar issue, I would like to comment on the current efforts in Mexico to increase the byproducts and derivative products obtained from the gramineous plant towards getting the greatest economic benefit from it.

The Union has declared its support to these projects and to any actions taken in that sense to protect our sector. Right now it is vital that everyone involved in the sugar industry join forces around it to preserve our productive identity. We are forming a national strategic alliance with the industrial sectors to try to hold back the coming invasion. We’ll see what results from that.

Within the industry, class conflict continues: profit against justice. We have been struggling for many years to obtain a decent retirement benefit for our fellow workers. In a way, that has been the cause of all the strikes that we have called in the last few years, which have enjoyed the greatest solidarity from the IUF and its affiliate organizations.

Management has conditioned that benefit to our accepting the modernization of the Sugar Contract-Law, and that is precisely what we are discussing right now.

The political model of the Mexican government is not the same today as it was in the year 2000, and we’ve often had to deal not only with management, but also with the officers of the Department of Labor, who have forgotten their constitutional mandate to protect the workers, and have leaned instead in favor of the interests of employers.

As you can see, fellow congress delegates, our labor struggle has diversified. We will continue to fight to preserve our jobs and to guarantee the workers’ rights established in the Contract-Law.

This is the situation right now and the future that our country faces. As you can clearly see, the need for the active solidarity of our peoples and the labor movement is literally becoming an increasingly compelling urgency.

In this sense, and to close my presentation, I want to make it clear to you that the sugar workers who are members of the Mexican Workers’ Confederation are willing to participate in each and every one of the actions carried out by the IUF to preserve the human dignity of those who only have their work as a resource to satisfy the basic daily needs that every individual, family and society as a whole have.

Enrique Ramos Rodríguez

STIASRM General Secretary