Mexico promised on Wednesday to open talks with protesting sugar farmers to ease a crisis over government plans to veto a new law protecting cane prices. After weeks of bickering between the government and cane growers groups, Agriculture Minister Javier Usabiaga said he would present a proposal to begin negotiations by Friday.
"(We will present) a concrete proposal at the latest by Friday, that is what they have been asking for and what they asked for yesterday," Usabiaga said in a radio interview.
Tens of thousands of farmers took to the streets last week and began blockades of agricultural ministry offices on Tuesday in protest at President Vicente Fox's plan to veto the law.
Fox says the legislation, passed in June, hurts productivity by keeping decades-old price guarantees in place instead of ditching them after the current harvest as planned.
Carlos Blackaller, a legislator and head of growers group the Cane Workers Union, said the government's new offer of talks might lead farmers to abandon their plans of occupying government run sugar mills.
"It opens the possibility of an understanding," he said. "Now the ministry starts to recognise that we need a legal framework to guarantee the transferal of payments between the cane growers and the sugar mills."
In Mexico, the vast majority of sugar cane is produced on small plots and sold to mills via growers associations, which receive part of the value of the cane.
The government and mill owners say sugar growers' groups are more worried about losing income and political clout if the law is vetoed than protecting growers' interests.
The government's preferred alternative is a direct contract between individual growers and mills, which would reduce the role of growers' groups in the harvest.
About half of Mexico's sugar mills were expropriated by the state in 2001 as low prices and failure by mill owners to pay cane growers began to sow chaos in a sector that provides work for millions of Mexicans.
Comments
Comments are closed.