Feeding Mexico

The Political Uses of Food since 1910

Edited by Enrique C. Ochoa

Publication date:

01 July 2000

Length of book:

267 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780842028127

Winner of the 1998 Michael C. Meyer Manuscript Prize!

Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 traces the Mexican government's intervention in the regulation, production, and distribution of food from the days of Cardenas to the recent privatization inspired by NAFTA. Professor Ochoa argues that the real goals of the government's food subsidies were political, driven by presidential desires to court urban labor. Many of the agencies and policies were hastily set in place in response to short-term political or economic crises. Since the goals were not to alleviate poverty, but to provide modest subsidies to urban consumers, the policies did not eliminate destitution or malnutrition in the country. Despite the minimal achievements of these interventionist policies, the State Food Agency provided a symbol of the state's concern for the workers. The elimination of the Agency in the 1990s prompted social protest and unrest.

Feeding Mexico is the first study to examine the creation of networks to deliver food products, the relationship of these channels of distribution to the food crisis, and the role of the state in trying to ameliorate the problem. Based on exhaustive research of new archival material and richly documented with statistical tables, this book exposes the dynamics and outcome of social policy in twentieth-century Mexico.

Chapter 1 Abbreviations
Chapter 2 Introduction: Food and Society in Postrevolutionary Mexico
Chapter 3 From Local to Federal Intervention: Food Policy Prior to the 1920s
Chapter 4 Lazaro Cardenas and the Politics of State Intervention, 1934–1940
Chapter 5 World War II, Economic Modernization, Food Crisis, and Urban Relief, 1940–1946
Chapter 6 Between Economic Efficiency and Political Expediency, 1946–1952
Chapter 7 Social Welfare and the State Food Agency, 1952–1958
Chapter 8 Rural Crisis and the Creeping Hand of the State in the Countryside, 1958–1970
Chapter 9 The Apogee of the State Food Agency, 1970–1982
Chapter 10 Neoliberalism and the Dismantling of the State Food Agency after 1982
Chapter 11 The State Food Agency and the Persistence of Poverty
Chapter 12 Bibliography
Chapter 13 Index

Economists once praised the 'Mexican miracle' of rapid growth achieved through 'stabilizing development,' but the real miracle of the postrevolutionary era was maintaining political stability despite a wide gap between rich and poor. Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 shows how the ruling party constructed a welfare system that both subsidized industrialization and bought social peace.