Sowing Life, Not Austerity: Lessons from Mexico for America’s Future
By Penny Arcos and MJ Johnson
I don’t know about you, but lately it feels like the U.S. is marching backward—cutting social programs, sidelining rural development and forcing farmers and working families into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, since 2018, Mexico has been marching forward with massive investments in infrastructure and social programs and an agroforestry program to empower farmers and youth. If we really want America First, we can’t keep trimming the safety nets. We must invest in working families and innovation.
Mexico’s Sembrando Vida and Jovenes Construyendo el Futuro (Sowing LIfe and Youth Constructing the Future) initiatives, if implemented sustainably, show us a blueprint for lifting up entire communities with dignity, green jobs, and roots in the soil.
During her first international trip as Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum called on the international community at the2024 G20 Rio de Janeiro summit to imagine a new type of economy, an economy of life instead of death. Instead of spending three times the world economy on endless wars, the G20 countries ought to invest one percent of their military budget, or 24 billion dollars a year (twelve times what Mexico already invests) to support the largest reforestation project in history. Six million tree planters could reforest 15 million hectares. That is the entire area of Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador combined.
“The proposal is to stop sowing war. Let's sow peace and sow life.”
From Cuts to Cultivation: What the U.S. Can Learn From Mexico
While we slash Medicaid and SNAP benefits for millions of American taxpayers, ICE terrorizes working class communities and farms with violent raids, kidnappings and massive deportations to El Salvador’s GITMO. Proxy wars, trade wars and monopolies such as Monsanto and John Deere constantly drive up the prices of farming. Meanwhile farmers rely on seasonal immigrants and Native Mexicans in the Southwest to be the backbone of the industry. The result of this chaos will be a collapse in the farming sector, increased medical debt, poor health outcomes and spikes in emergency care. But beyond that, we're tightening belts for people already pinching pennies, not rebuilding the systems that prevent crises in the first place. This isn’t just bad policy—it’s a broken promise.
Indigenous farmers in Mexico built one of the most sophisticated agricultural systems in the world. They cultivated beans, tomatoes, cacao and over fifty native varieties of maize -- sustaining a grand civilization for generations without poisonous pesticides or corporate control. But “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA and USMCA have devastated the Mexican farming sector. Mexicans farmhands break their backs from sunup to sundown while Tyson, Cargill, John Deere and Monsanto pocket billions.
While Americans are being laid off en masse and families struggle to put food on the table, 515 American-based transnational corporations profit the most from Mexican labor. As American farmers go bankrupt and Bill Gates buys up all their land, the United States withdraws from bilateral agreements and imposes tariffs and quotas on $50 billion of Mexican goods, including fresh tomatoes, tequila, beer, avocados, berries and peppers. At the same time, USMCA forces Mexico to purchase Monsanto’s GMO corn for tortillas and cattle feed for American agribusiness, locking Mexico into dependency. Seventy five percent of Mexican exports come to the United States, leaving its economy vulnerable to American trade demands.
Corporate land grabs and monoculture farming threaten biodiversity and Indigenous rights. Precarious wages, persistent droughts, hurricanes and violent Cartels, funded by the International drug trade and armed with U.S.-manufactured high capacity weapons, force millions of working families every year to abandon their homeland to seek employment elsewhere. Politicians and corporate elites offer symbolic refuge to migrant workers in Sanctuary Cities, only to pit them against American workers – fueling a Culture War that distracts from corporate theft.
This is more than just a trade dispute. It is a war on farmers and consumers that undermines the right of farmers to compete and thrive. It undermines regional food security, and forces consumers on both sides of the border to bear the burden of rising prices and disrupted supply chains. The only ones who benefit are corporate monopolies such as BlackRock that buy up abandoned farmland and extract wealth from across the globe.
From Free Market Failures to Planned Prosperity: What Plan México Offers
In a bold initiative to change the course of Mexico's history, in 2018, President Lopez Obrador (AMLO) initiated an ambitious plan rooted in land, dignity and self-determination. Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life) is a colossal agroforestry program. Jovenes Construyendo el Futuro (Young People Building the Future) is a youth apprenticeship program to address rural poverty. Both programs work together to restore degraded land and to boost national food sovereignty in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Cuba.
Sembrando Vida pays small farmers MX $4,500 pesos (US $250) per month to work in local peasant learning communities (CACs) in 23 states, serving 455,000 beneficiaries. Local biofactories run by Sembrando Vida participants provide compost and mineral broths to promote organic farming. Community nurseries provide starter plants. CAC members partner with technical advisors and local youth interns from the Jovenes Construyendo el Futuro program to implement two types of agroforestry systems- Milpa Intercropped with Fruit Trees (MIAF) and Fruit Trees intercropped with Timber (SAF)- to produce cash crops, native agriculture and timber, and to develop innovative products with added value to take to market.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has also rolled out Plan México, a Six-Year Economic Plan that prioritizes food sovereignty with nutrition security to restore dignity to the nation. From 2025 to 2030, the government will invest MX 83.76 billion pesos (US $4.1 billion) to purchase staple crops such as corn, beans, rice, cacao, and honey from small and midsized farmers at fair prices. These crops are then sold in Wellness Stores throughout the country. Add to that huge investments in local fertilizer production to provide free fertilizer to small farmers and training for sustainable fertilizer application. Building up rural infrastructure and restoring the transportation network helps get those goods to market.
Currently, Mexican consumers purchase 75% of their beans from the United States. But with the Frijol del Bienestar (Beans for Well Being) initiative, farmers are guaranteed a price of MX 27 pesos per kilo as well as free fertilizer in order to boost bean production by 300,000 tons and to reduce dependency on imports.
Given that cacao originated in Mexico, it is only fitting that Sembrando Vida cacao be incorporated into Wellness Chocolate.The Mexican government has invested MX 34 million pesos (US $1.8 million) to purchase 160 tons of cacao for chocolate bars, powdered chocolate and table chocolate from Sembrando Vida farmers. Instead of artificial flavors, artificial colorings or refined sugars that corporate brands contain, Wellness Chocolate bars contain at least 50% cacao, and use natural cane sugar, powdered milk, salt and vanilla.
Sembrando Vida coffee, produced by 303 CAC learning communities in Oaxaca, Veracruz, Puebla and Guerrero, now offers consumers a locally grown, healthier and more affordable alternative to Nescafé.
Trial, Error and Growth; What the World Can Learn From Sembrando Vida
There are many lessons that the global community can learn from this pilot program. Implementing a five-year agroforestry program over a million acres requires huge investment in resources and labor to ensure that the economic, social and ecological goals are actually met.
Clarity of Purpose
Is Sembrando Vida an anti-poverty program, a reforestation scheme or an environmental assistance project? Or all of the above?
Implementation Challenges
Farmers, journalists, forest rangers and NGOs have questioned the implementation and long-term sustainability of Sembrando Vida. Without guaranteed funding from the succeeding administration, what incentive was there to maintain trees?
Farmers had become accustomed to receiving government payments to offset the poverty created by NAFTA. Transitioning to a regimented schedule of classes and work, learning new farming techniques from outsiders, working together on shared plots and learning to innovate and to market new products was labor intensive and time consuming. Each CAC handled these challenges differently.
Satellite imagery from the Gates-Funded World Resources Institute (WRI) suggests that Sembrando Vida may have inadvertently caused the deforestation of 73,000 hectares of land in its first year of operation. The military cleared land in Quintana Roo for nurseries. Desperate farmers may have been incentivized to clear forested land in order to plant timber-yielding and fruit trees.
BILL GATES MEXICO PARADOX
CRITICIZES SOWING LIFE
OWNS MORE FARMLAND THAN ANY U.S. INDIVIDUAL- ENOUGH TO FILL A THIRD OF RHODE ISLAND
INVESTS BILLIONS IN MONSANTO, HEINEKEN ANHEISER-BUSH and COCA COLA FEMSA: CORPORATIONS THAT DESTROY MEXICAN LIVES AND LAND
Other causes of deforestation could have been cattle farming or clearing of acahuales, secondary vegetation on land previously used for agriculture or livestock. Should we all eat Bill Gates’ lab-grown meat instead of beef?
Administration Shortcomings
Farmers reported that in the early stages of the program, technicians prioritized quotas over local knowledge, resulting in failed crops. Resources for the nurseries could not meet demand. Lack of initial oversight enabled theft, falsified records and extortion. But the government addressed these problems and replaced corrupt program managers with more reliable ones.
Despite the economic and social gains made by Sembrando Vida, funding for the environment and natural resources sector has been drastically cut in order to reduce the public deficit.
The Way Forward
As with any new project, economic development must be environmentally sustainable. Accountability to the local community and a commitment to long-term funding are essential to the success of such a massive project.
Beyond the Big Beautiful Bill: Investing in Entrepreneurs to Rebuild America’s Heartland
Regardless of the shortcomings of Sembrando Vida, what lessons can we apply to create an American Sembrando Vida?
Instead of a ham-fisted safety net, cheese caves in Missouri and endless wars, which destroy human life and the planet, we invest in farmers, ex-coal miners, youth and veterans to work on agroforestry plots—integrating timber, fruit orchards, and traditional crops across thousands of abandoned acres in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, or the Central Plains.
The upside? Healthier soils, more resilient food systems, expanded mental and physical health care for participants, and a new wave of local entrepreneurship from co-ops and farmers markets selling innovative products, artisanal honey, vanilla, and a myriad of organic fruits and vegetables—just like in Durango, Veracruz and Chiapas. That’s the kind of long-view thinking our country needs.
If our country redirected even a fraction of the trillions allocated in the Big Beautiful Bill for corporate tax breaks and endless wars, we could fund pilot programs like Sembrando Vida in key regions, bringing back local farms, community connection, and value to rural America.
Working Families First: CPI’s Bold Plan to Rebuild the Nation
Let’s be real: America’s safety net is fraying, public spending favors the ultra-wealthy, corporate monopolies and a low wage police state. America deserves more than fake nostalgia and lying politicians. Let's forge a new path that restores our foundations.
If you're tired of watching America unravel at the seams while billionaires rake in tax breaks and working families are left behind, partner with CPI to demand legislative pilots that mimic Sembrando Vida—agroecology paychecks, youth green corps, rural support. Draw lines between Medicaid/SNAP cuts, environmental degradation, and the mass displacement of rural families. Tell that story at town halls and campaign events.
CPI is a grassroots organization for real change that puts Working Families First and challenges the Imperialist/Globalist power structure.
Plug into CPI. Join the effort, learn advocacy messaging, help recruit more voices, and build coalitions. Try a one-month free trial membership today.
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