Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 (review)

Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910. By Enrique C. Ochoa. Latin American Silhouettes. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 267 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

Feeding Mexico is a detailed story of the changing fate of the poorest segments of Mexican consumers. It traces the swings in public policy with painstaking attention to the modifications in the institutions charged with regulating urban food supplies. After a cursory review of official interventions during the colony and independence periods, we are taken through the changing bureaucratic structures and policy directives that determined the availability and accessibility of food to Mexico City's poorest people during succeeding presidential terms. Only during the 1960-90 period did state intervention have any significant impact on these matters in other parts of the country, and then always less effectively than in the capital. With neoliberal reform, the effort is being terminated.

A Mexican politician's suggestion of an alternative title, "Starving Mexico," follows from his concluding chapter, "The Persistence of Poverty," where Ochoa finds that "[t]he Agency was not created to eradicate poverty" (p. 232), but rather to court organized urban labor. In meticulously tracing the bureaucratic pirouettes forced upon the State Food Agency (the name he uses to give consistency to its changing titles), we are treated to an example of "the paternalistic role of the government in attempting to 'feed' the population . . . [by using] the rhetoric of the revolution to intervene in the economy . . . to ameliorate social conflict" (pp. 14-15). Of course, the concentration on food supply policies throughout the period was not the result of a munificent recognition by enlightened policymakers of a problem but rather a response to popular action and short-term political or economic crises. Ochoa does us a great service by delving into the details of the exercise of power to ferret out its material and social impacts; only the meticulous search of obscure archives that underlie this monograph could produce this wealth of information.

The exercise in historiography illustrates well the quantitative bent of the UCLA Latin American Institute. It is profusely adorned with 44 tables that offer a potpourri of data about purchases, sales, storage, consumption, prices, and trade. Unfortunately, there is no index of tables and no long-term series of key information to allow the reader to examine the evolution of the Agency's operations or of any facet of production, distribution, or consumption of basic foodstuff in Mexico.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the book is its failure to integrate food production into the examination of food supply and distribution policies. Although the author chose to focus on other problems, his frequent references to the impact of agricultural production and research policies on the peasantry might have included some further consideration of their role in domestic food supply. Of particular note is the inability of the Rockefeller Foundation's Office of Special Studies to get their bean and hybrid maize seeds into production: no mention is made of the foreign technocrats' insistence on disbanding the Mexican Instituto de Investigaciones Agrícolas that concentrated on open-pollinated seeds, more readily accessible to the poverty-stricken farmers without access to credit. Nor does Ochoa discuss the dramatic increase in yields produced by these same peasants that underpinned the short-lived period of food self-sufficiency, an achievement directly related to the breadth of the Mexican land reform despite the absence of significant support programs.

I was disappointed by the absence of any discussion of the wartime authorities' decision to not supply maize to Mexico in 1943 during a period of extreme shortages occasioned in part by the planting of large areas in oilseed crops to support the allied war effort. Only the forceful intervention of the American ambassador to Mexico forced a change in policy, thereby staving off further riots and hardship in urban Mexico.

Ochoa's volume offers a wealth...