After a trip to Mexico, I understood that being a neighbor of the United States can never be rich.
At a Mexican restaurant, eating local home-cooked burritos, the waiters were very welcoming, and after serving the food, they told me in very non-standard English that their burrito was made with local corn flour and tasted very good.
I am curious, the impression of Mexico is a big agricultural country, the main plant is corn, why corn is still imported? I talked to the waiter a little more.
The waiter told me that their rural areas now basically grow American corn, and local corn is almost extinct.
Because American corn is more drought-tolerant, less pest-free, and the yield is still high, imported corn in the market is sold cheaper than local corn, and grain merchants now import American corn and do not collect local corn.
I asked him what about the local farmer? The waiter replied that either american corn should be grown, but fertilizers and pesticides should be imported into the United States, although the yield is high, but the cost is also high, and it is not very profitable. Either avocados and cacti are grown for direct export or wine export.
But avocados are very water-intensive, and once the avocados are planted, the surrounding farmland is almost water-free. So there is a lot of abandoned land in rural Mexico now. Food cannot be self-sufficient, or it is only imported from the United States.
Listening to the waiter's description, I probably figured out the doorway: the entry and exit of this agricultural product is ostensibly cash crops instead of traditional food crops, but in fact, the benefits obtained from the export of cash crops are far lower than the cost of imported grain crops.
And California, Texas, and New Mexico can all grow avocados, so why don't they? Maybe it's because it consumes too much irrigation water, it's not as cost-effective to let Mexico waste land.
Of course, the waiter introduced that there is another way out is to run to the United States, where the work of contributing is basically occupied by Mexican immigrants. Think of the dozens of Mexican stowaways in the news in recent days who have suffocated in the container truck, and it seems that the waiter's words are true.
The United States wants both your home market and you to produce cheap produce, as well as your low-cost labor. Of course, the United States will also invest in Mexico, but mainly to build resort hotels, develop theme parks, in order to create their own back garden, this completely dependent on the United States economic structure, there is only prayer that the U.S. economy will not collapse, otherwise the disaster will definitely be Mexico first.
It is not easy to be a neighbor of the United States.
