Agricultural Strike: A Fight with the USMCA Looming in the Background

The National Agricultural Strike called for late October 2025 turned into a massive mobilization that choked the country’s main logistical arteries — especially in key grain-producing states like Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Jalisco. Called by the Peasant Agricultural Movement across 20 states, the shutdown was a direct response to the unsustainable collapse in corn prices. Mexico’s staple crop saw its value drop more than 50% in the three years leading up to the strike.
Farmers’ unified, non-negotiable demand was crystal clear: a guaranteed price of 7,200 pesos per ton of corn — the bare minimum they say is needed to cover skyrocketing production costs driven by expensive inputs and recent droughts.
The Mexican government countered with a minimum price of 6,050 pesos per ton. Producers immediately dismissed it as a “joke” and a straight-up “insult to the Mexican countryside,” arguing that the offer didn’t come close to covering real costs or the heavy losses they’ve already absorbed.
This strike is a symptom of a much deeper structural crisis Mexico has been dragging since the post-NAFTA era. The harsh takeaway from this neoliberal setup — sealed through the USMCA — is that Mexico’s food sovereignty remains little more than empty rhetoric, completely subordinated to market rules dictated by the USMCA and the Chicago Board of Trade.
At its core, the diagnosis is that despite its progressive talk, the 4T government has stuck to a sectorally neutral macroeconomic policy inherited from the 1990s structural adjustments. The crisis is fueled by the lack of real protection against foreign subsidies and the abandonment of key public policy tools.
The current administration stands accused of prioritizing flashy mega-infrastructure projects over basic food production. While farmers beg for income security, budget priorities have shifted toward projects like the Maya Train. Budget analysis shows the sector needs roughly 10 to 12 billion pesos to restore target incomes and bring certainty back to the fields — yet the government is pouring far more money into non-urgent showcase projects.
According to some experts, the fix won’t come from short-term regional deals. It demands a profound transformation: taking basic corn out of the USMCA entirely and rebuilding a genuine rural development policy that brings back development banking and guaranteed target incomes.
If Claudia Sheinbaum’s government keeps putting tourist and developmentalist infrastructure ahead of the countryside’s viability, the outlook is clear: agrarian conflicts will intensify, driving sustained spikes in agricultural inflation in the coming months. The longer this crisis drags on, the more urgent the debate becomes over reclaiming economic autonomy and productive sovereignty — issues that will ultimately define the real stability and ideological direction of the 4T project.