Eighty of the world’s nations have completed their federal elections this year or are about to go to the polls.
The European Union completed parliamentary elections June 9; India’s two-month long election ended June 4 and South Africa’s election concluded May 29. France’s general elections were scheduled for June 30.
The United Kingdom voted July 4 and Venezuela’s election is July 28.
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For North American agriculture, perhaps the most interesting 2024 election to date was Mexico. On June 2, the country elected a political novice, Claudia Sheinbaum, as president.
Sheinbaum couldn’t be more different compared to any one of Mexico’s long line of often wealthy, sometimes corrupt past presidents, explained Dan Restrepo, an expert on Latin American politics and business, on a recent Pod Save the World podcast.
According to Restrepo, Mexico, a country known for its “machismo,” or manliness, Catholicism, and political cronyism, now has a female Jewish outsider as president. And, he added, she’s “a technocrat and climate expert.”
Equally impressive, Sheinbaum, the recent mayor of Mexico City, didn’t just win; she crushed her opponent by amassing “the largest number of votes… in Mexico’s political history.”
How do you say “mandate” in Spanish?
It may take a “mandato” for Sheinbaum, the first woman to be elected leader of any NAFTA nation, to surpass the success of her predecessor and mentor, former president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known better as AMLO, when she is sworn in on Oct. 1.
In his (by law) single, six-year term, AMLO delivered huge wins and also suffered large losses. The popular president raised Mexico’s minimum wage 116 per cent to both attract international business (which it did) and stem the flood of Latin and South American migrants passing through Mexico to the U.S. (which it didn’t).
American agriculture, whether it admits it or not, is one of the largest beneficiaries of this river of illegal immigrants. It is estimated that at least 45 per cent of all migrant laborers working on U.S. farms do so illegally.
Mexico and the U.S. face two other ag problems as Sheinbaum awaits the election of her American counterpart: a bitter trade fight over Mexican import restrictions on genetically modified corn and glyphosate, and a fight over a 1944 treaty that manages water usage of the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers.
The trade fight centers on only about 600,000 tons of white corn from the U.S., or just a tiny share of the 16.5 million tons of U.S. corn Mexico imported last year. It should be easy to settle: Carve out a GM-free/glyphosate-free exemption for the piddling amount of American food-grade white corn exported south and go in peace.
But not the Biden administration. It won’t concede one kernel. Neither will Sheinbaum, who recently promised to fight the U.S.’s GM-strident trade rules.
The water dispute centers on Mexico’s failure to deliver on the terms of a 1944 treaty governing shared water of the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers. Mexico claims it can’t deliver what it promised 80 years ago because climate change has brought drought, not deliverable water.
Want to bet which side of that argument Mexico’s President-Elect Claudia Sheinbaum, a Nobel Prize-sharing climate scientist, is on?
