AGRICULTURE

The leaders of the Mexican Revolution were seldom economic or political theorists and left no clear statement of the ultimate ends they sought to gain via land reform. In fact, the objectives were constantly changing, sometimes without a recognition that such a change was occurring.

Robert Edminster, 196136

For Obregon and Calles, land reform was a political instrument for maintaining the loyalty of peasant groups, manipulating and subordinating them. The Sonorans’ aim was to encourage the kind of entrepreneurial, market-orientated, and mechanized farming that Obregon had engaged in personally. They placed more emphasis on irrigation works and the promotion of commercial agriculture than on changing land tenure.37

One of Calles’s main concerns was agricultural production. Between 1907 and 1929, corn production had declined 40 percent and bean production by 31 percent as producers either ceased farming or switched to more lucrative crops. Meanwhile, the population had increased by 9 per cent. Given the desperate need to increase food production, by the end of his term, Calles, like Carranza, favored reliance on the hacienda. In March 1930, he informed President Ortiz Rubio and his cabinet that he felt that the distribution of more land would damage the national economy and that land reform should end. At that point, many felt that no more land would be transferred to ejidos.38

Between 1907 and 1929, land ownership became more concentrated, with a mere 1.5 percent of landowners owning 83 percent of private farmland. Agriculture also became polarized geographically, with production in the north increasing by 430 per cent. Northern agriculture was in the hands of aggressive entrepreneurs who employed modern technology to produce high-value crops for distant markets. The problem in the north was distributing everything that was produced.

In central Mexico, agriculture—which was at the subsistence level and relied on traditional, labor-intensive methods—declined by 38 per cent between 1907 and 1929. There was little investment in producing corn—the main staple. The government imported food to make up for the decline in food production there.39

Despite the promises of land reform made in the heat of battle, the main trend in the 1920s was not a radical land reform but a mixed economy based on small and medium-sized plots in addition to the hacienda. In part, this backtracking occurred due to revolutionary military leaders allying with hacendados and their appropriating some haciendas themselves. Landed interests sought to prevent land distribution and to have the federal government provide them with roads, subsidized credit, and irrigation works. Except in the area dominated by the former Zapatista leaders, during the 1920s the federal army did more to block land reform than further it. By 1928, only 4 percent of all agricultural land had been distributed as part of the land reform.40

Several factors affected agricultural production between 1920 and 1934. Some large owners deferred agricultural investment because they feared their land would be taken for land reform. This was in part offset by massive road building and irrigation works in northern Mexico. In both the ejido and private sectors, worker productivity was low. In 1930, almost 70 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture, but generated only 22 percent of national income.41

Due to the vagaries of weather, politics, and the international economy, there were sharp variations in the volume of agricultural production. Henequen production plummeted due to the introduction of combines (which needed no twine), competition from other nations, and the increased use of synthetic fibers after the Second World War.42

Cardenas differed from his Sonoran predecessors in that he viewed the ejido as the key to social justice and as a viable form of rural production. He realized that to be successful ejidos would require improvements such as electricity, roads, potable water, and schools, just as large commercial farms required them. The January 1, 1934 entry into his diary stated it was the responsibility of the present generation to distribute land to villages that lacked it and provide them with the necessary credit to cultivate it: “The Revolution requires ejidos and the subdivision of great estates. This will expand production, increase the purchasing power of the rural masses, and benefit the economy as a whole.”43

Table 19.1 Land reform, 1917-1940

Source: INEGI (1994: 381)

Cardenas addressed this responsibility by distributing almost 10 percent of Mexico’s total land area to 723,000 families. As a result, in 1940 ejidatarios cultivated 17.3 million acres, while private farmers only cultivated 16.8 million. In 1930, only 13.1 percent of irrigated land was included in the ejido sector, while by 1940, 57.4 percent was. In addition to land, during Cardenas’s term ejidos received credit, machinery, marketing assistance, and agricultural extension services.44

Since the beginning of the land reform, the ejido has been subjected to criticism for being “inefficient.” However, it was well suited to the times in that it utilized what was in abundance— land and labor—and required relatively little scarce capital. In addition, it increased security for larger producers whose fears of peasant takeovers were quieted. Cardenas’s efforts not withstanding, ejidos suffered from having less water, fertilizer, fixed capital, and financing than privately owned farms.45

Beneficiaries of land reform saw an immediate improvement in their standard of living and broke out of their fatalism. Ejidos benefited the economy as a whole by producing lasting rural peace and by adding nearly three-quarters of a million families to the market. After the land reform, the old landowning class abandoned its passive rentier role and became actively involved in new financial and industrial undertakings. Many of its members shifted from direct ownership of land to processing and marketing the production of ejidos. Agribusiness established profitable ties to ejidos. Anderson Clayton purchased cotton produced on ejidos in the Laguna. The highly productive ejidos of the Yaqui Valley became appendages of the U. S. agricultural economy.46