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Near the front line of the Zapatista rebellion, Alfonso Romo's computer-driven greenhouses are yielding world-class fruit and vegetable seeds.
And Romo's farmer partners, working fields as small as half an acre, say they are doubling or tripling their harvests of genetically engineered tomatoes, tobacco, melons and cucumbers.
It's a collaboration that, in the shadow of the Chiapas insurrection, is turning potential guerrilla recruits into entrepreneurs in agricultural biotechnology.
Romo didn't set out to create an alternative to revolution. Indeed, his team steadfastly eschews any involvement in the political turmoil that has engulfed Chiapas since the Jan. 1, 1994, uprising demanding better treatment for the state's indigenous people.
But his multinational company, Grupo Pulsar, is working close to the fire. Indeed, so close that his employees stood guard at the gate to the greenhouse complex at the time of the uprising.
Moreover, Romo's initiative was made possible by 1992 land-reform measures allowing peasant farmers to own the land they work--a historic free-market shift in Mexico's land-use policy that is fiercely opposed by the rebels.
While negotiations between the government and the rebels have stalled over land reform and other issues, violence continues apace--most recently a firefight in June that left nine dead. Economic stagnation has deepened.
Through it all, Romo's agriculture project has proceeded: creating high-tech partnerships with small farmers working their own land, then splitting the profit. Analysts say that such initiatives--rewarding peasant farmers fairly and drawing them into the formal economy--will help Mexico to achieve sustained economic growth.
"These are all absolutely the right directions to go in, and it might be a model program not only for Chiapas but for many parts of the country in which the employment base in agriculture has been stagnant or shrinking for many years," says Wayne Cornelius, political scientist and research director of the Center for U.S-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego.
Romo, 47, is chairman of Grupo Pulsar, based in the northern city of Monterrey. One of Mexico's few genuinely multinational corporations, Pulsar has squarely staked its future growth on ag-biotech.
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Pulsar's agribusiness subsidiary, Empresas La Moderna (ELM), includes Seminis, the world's largest producer of fruit and vegetable seeds, based in Saticoy, Calif., and other subsidiaries working in exotic ag-biotech areas such as germ plasm...