With irrigation they doubled the yield, giving poor farming families more to eat. Their children gained weight and succumbed less to common health problems. The death rate of under-fives dropped from 34 per cent to around 6 per cent. In explaining the dramatic improvement people gave some credit to better healthcare but said the big difference was their joint struggle to win their constitutional land rights. Such an interpretation of health is consistent with the Alma Ata Declaration s insistence that health depends on equity.
Most children can survive without medicine, none without food.
Unfortunately, in the 1990s the peasant farmers of Mexico are seeing the gains they made reversed. Mexico has an enormous foreign debt and in exchange for new loans has been subjected to stringent adjustment policies. Land-ownership is concentrating again into fewer hands including those of US agribusiness transnationals. More than a million small farmers have lost their holdings and migrated to city slums, where unemployment soars. The village health team in Mexico, along with thousands of concerned groups around the world, are coming to realize that new strategies comprising local action with global solidarity are needed to counter the transnational power structure.