Anti-globalization activists predict a disaster for Mexican agriculture when the country lifts tariffs on U.S. farm products in January, a move they say will displace millions of Mexican farmers and send them streaming to the United States.

The government says the import opening will make Mexican farms more competitive, bring new investment to the countryside and give factory jobs to those who now eke out a living on antiquated, overpopulated farms.

President Vicente Fox has come under pressure to rip up free trade accords and spend more subsidy money to protect Mexican farms. Fox, while a champion of free trade, has begun to concede the opening could create problems.

"I want to talk to (U.S.) President (George W.) Bush about the subsidies that the American government has decided to give and how to prevent them from affecting Mexican communities and producers," Fox told The Associated Press in a recent interview. "Otherwise, what you'll have is more migration."

For Americans already inundated by two decades of large-scale illegal immigration, the dire warnings seem a bit late.

But farm activist Luis Hernandez says things will get even worse in January when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) eliminates tariffs between Mexico and the United States on all but three products: corn, dairy and sugar. All tariffs will be removed in 2008.

"For the Mexican countryside, this is going to be devastating," Hernandez said. He predicted "an increase in migration, in bankruptcies, violence, and drug growing" as Mexican farmers turn to the only crops from which they can make a profit.

Farmers have already slaughtered cows and dumped pineapples on Mexico City streets, seized highways and blocked bridges in protests to defend a way of life on the hardscrabble farms where corn was first domesticated 4,000 years ago.

Today, Hernandez said, those farms largely serve as "vast parking lots for the unemployed." And they are full: While urban Mexican families have an average of 2.4 children, women in poor rural communities continue to have an average of four to five.

That growth - coupled with gradually disappearing farm jobs - is the main engine for the exodus. In 1990 Mexico had 9.8 million farmers; in 2000, there were only 8.6 million.

Many go to Mexico's burgeoning cities. Others leave for the United States and could help swell migration from 300,000 a year to 500,000 a year by 2030, according to Mexico's National Population Council.

The farms those migrants leave behind are tiny. Seventy percent of farmers have fewer than 12 acres (5 hectares). Many are communal or "ejido" plots that lack clear titles, making it hard for farmers to modernize, get loans or fuse smaller plots into viable farms. As a result, many don't live off their crops and haven't for years.

"A lot of people who call themselves farmers really aren't," says Ricardo Celma, Mexico representative of the U.S. Grains Council. "They're taxi drivers with some land."

Mexico does have highly productive commercial farms, especially in the north of the country, but they pay laborers as little as 20 pesos (US$2) a day and sometimes employ children. With farmers in such straits, NAFTA is an easy target - even though most of the tariffs to be removed in 2003 already are as low as 2 percent. Some threaten social unrest unless NAFTA is overturned.

"We have been exposed to unfair competition, and that will lead to the impoverishment of millions of our people, and may lead to acts of desperation," said the farm group El Barzon.

Yet while U.S. subsidies are an easy target, they may not be the real problem: Mexico's corn subsidies average out to 150 dollars a ton, well above the 85 dollars U.S. farmers are paid.

The problem is that most Mexican farmers produce so little they cannot get by even with subsidies: the nation's 8.6 million farmers produce about one-seventh as much as their 3 million U.S.counterparts.

"No country in the world could provide jobs for this many people in the farm sector," said Humberto Jasso, of the Economy Secretariat. "We have to provide non-farm jobs in rural areas, and that's an area where NAFTA can help."

But farm supporters have joined anti-globalization activists in opposing plans to bring maquiladora assembly jobs to rural southern Mexico, saying factory work would destroy Indian cultures rooted in the farming life. With the loss of farms such an emotional issue, some activists want the government to pay farmers merely to exist.

"We have to stop seeing farms as just mercantile production," said Victor Suarez, director the farm group ANEC. "Instead, we have to recognize people's right to be farmers ... and pay them for conserving their land, their culture."

That would be expensive. Mexico already spends 8.7 billion dollars a year on direct and indirect farm subsidies, close to the Education Secretariat's 10.4 billion-dollar budget.

"The only thing (more) subsidies would do is sink the whole country into poverty," said political analyst Sergio Sarmiento. "What we have to do is modernize land holdings and do away with communal farms."

Experts agree that Mexican farmers need affordable loans, improved disease-eradication and irrigation and fairer treatment from the United States, which many claim has used health or environmental standards to unfairly keep out Mexican products. What they don't need, analysts say, is more nostalgia.

"It's all very well that some people have romantic notions about people who are dying of hunger on the farm," Sarmiento said. "But it's not romantic."