Ed Hughs is determined to save chili peppers and cotton for New Mexico growers. Hughs is an agricultural engineer with ARS's Southwestern Cotton Ginning Research Laboratory near Las Cruces. Heavily grown in southern New Mexico, cotton and chili cropsare important to both the state's economy and psyche. The chili pepper (also spelled "chile" in many parts of the country) is the state's cultural icon. Chili peppers are to New Mexico what wine is to France. But New Mexicans had to think the unthinkablein the late 1990s as they watched global trade--freed by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)--threaten to completely steal their chili pepper market. That market for red chili, green chili, jalapeno and cayenne peppers still generates more than 400 million dollar in economic activity in the state each year.
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