Procampo Scandal

Mexico's rural agricultural subsidy program, Procampo, is at the center of a scandal that exploded earlier this week. I have no special insight, expertise, original thought, or clever phrase with which to address the issue, so I'll cede the space to a pair of editorials in El Universal the last few days. First, from Tuesday:

Procampo was created 15 years ago so that the nation's farmers could compete in the American and Canadian markets and to improve the quality of live for the poorest Mexican producers. It turns out that none of these objectives was reached. In relative terms, Mexican agriculture improved neither in productivity nor in competitiveness and rural poverty has only grown. 

Procampo has been a subsidy program directed to the wealthiest and most influential producers in the country. Around 80 billion of the 171 billion handed out during a decade and a half were given to the most powerful ten percent of land owners in rural Mexico.  

Does the federal government refute these facts? In the words of the secretary of agriculture, Alberto Cárdenas, the government denied yesterday that this program needs changes. He assures us that Procampo works well, and that it is better than ever and that it has a long life left.

Nor is this official willing to acknowledge that in the program's register there appear as beneficiaries public officials linked to the operation of the program, deputies, mayors, and that there are also known drug traffickers and various family members of theirs among those listed. 

Our becoming aware of the failure that has been Procampo coincides with the info revealed in the most recent survey of income and home expenditure that illustrates the rise in poverty in rural Mexico during 2008, and also the alarming concentration of Mexican wealth in an increasingly small number of hands. 

These are not isolated facts. People are responsible for Mexico's economic inequality and in this case it is those who gave kidnapped public funds to privately benefit themselves with the national wealth. 

Other social programs, such as Opportunities, have been successful precisely because it has enjoyed much more effective mechanisms for accountability. Procampo, in contrast, supported the most favored and lacked mechanisms of control. How can you not call this a failure?

Second, from today: 

What happens in this country that we take 15 years in discovering that the most important support for agricultural production, the hallmark strategy for improving productivity in rural Mexico, turns out to be a failure? How is it possible that in this time in which so many funds have been handed out, coming from the taxpayers' contributions, to end up benefitting the wealthiest producers? How is it that public money intended to elevate poor campesinos' quality of live didn't manage to have a positive impact?

The first answer to these three questions has to do with the manner in which petty special interests linked to agriculture managed to kidnap the subsidies and public supports for their own personal benefit. In Mexico we are regularly witnesses to how just a few take control of profits that should belong to everyone. Nevertheless, this explanation isn't enough to understand that negligence that gave Procampo such a long life. 

The other answer to these questions can be found in the very poor system of evaluation over the use and destination of public funds that prevails in the country; also in the inability to quickly measure and correct the performance of policies; and, finally, it has to do with the very weak system of accountability under which we still suffer. Without follow-up, the chance to carry out necessary adjustments or set out concrete responsibilities, these programs well remain at the mercy of their own flaws and of rapacious actors. 

It would be fortunate if this experience with Procampo helped us to again set forth, for the next 15 years, a more acceptable and more promising future for the campesinos who, in their great majority, supply the immoral ranks of Mexican poverty. It's not a small issue in the government grid. With it, we lose the source of survival for many millions of countrymen. 

Actually, I do have one comment: I don't understand why politicians try to slide around scandals like this one by claiming that everything is OK. Most people are far more likely to forgive an earnest official honestly telling us how a bad situation (that didn't start under his watch) will get better than a snake telling us that the blood dribbling from our nose is really ketchup. Alberto Cárdenas: there is no government program on the planet which wouldn't benefit from some changes, and Procampo at the very least seems in desperate need of serious modifications. Denials can't change that, and you have sacrificed your credibility disputing something that seems as plain as day.