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

Fray Diego Durán, in his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, described how Itzcoatl and Moctezuma the Elder distributed the chinampas of Xochimilco and Chalco among Mexica nobles in order to feed Tenochtitlan and assert the legitimacy of Aztec imperial rule. Now Enrique C. Ochoa has explained a similar feat in modern Mexico, the creation of an elaborate welfare bureaucracy dedicated to providing cheap food for the nation's capital in order to maintain political support for the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The State Food Agency, as Ochoa refers to the succession of programs officially known by the acronyms CRMT, NADYRSA, CEIMSA, and CONASUPO, began operations in 1937 under the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas and by 1980 its diverse holdings of food processing factories and retail outlets ranked it among the largest industrial groups in the country. Economic crisis and neo-liberal reform soon brought down the state-run enterprise, and the last Agency program, a subsidy on tortillas for the poor, was abolished by Ernesto Zedillo in 1999. One year later, the PRI lost its seven-decade monopoly of the Mexican presidency.

As Ochoa shows, the State Food Agency was not only a tool for assuring political power, but also a vital component of the PRI's long-term development strategy. In order to guarantee efficient supplies, Agency purchasing programs favored the development of large-scale commercial agribusiness, particularly in the northwestern states, and ignored ejido farmers scattered across the countryside. By driving down rural wages, this policy ensured a generation of urban migrants to provide labor for the growing industrial sector. Once they reached the city, workers' protests about low factory wages were restrained by the availability of cheap food, which provided the carrot to complement the stick wielded by corrupt union bosses and the army. Thus, at each step along the way, the welfare bureaucracy actually contributed to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.

One of the most important public policy lessons revealed by the book is the degree to which political crises dictated the program's development. The Agency began as a Cardenista attempt to integrate small farmers into national markets, but urban inflation and worker protests in the late 1930s forced the government to purchase grain from large commercial producers instead. Although expanding the transportation network, building rural warehouses, and developing producer cooperatives remained priorities throughout the 1940s and 1950s, persistent urban food shortages prompted the diversion of these efforts in favor of provincial cities and the nation's capital. The Agency only extended its welfare campaign into the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s as rural poverty began to fuel political protests and guerrilla movements. Technocratic administrations of the 1980s and 1990s, following austerity programs dictated by the International Monetary Fund, privatized the Agency's commercial assets without addressing the needs of the poor. An atmosphere of crisis management, running throughout the Agency's history, made it impossible to implement long-term plans to develop economic infrastructure, let alone to address the problems of poverty and malnutrition.

Finally, Ochoa offers a compelling agenda for future research both by scholars and, perhaps, by prosecuting attorneys as well. The Agency's own internal auditors found that by the 1980s, only 14 centavos out of every peso invested in corn market operations actually reached either producers or consumers. Despite countless accusations of corruption, little hard evidence has emerged so far, although the charges brought against longtime Agency official Raúl Salinas de Gortari may herald future investigations by prosecutors without PRI affiliations. Relations between the Agency and private-sector food manufacturers, while not necessarily illicit, also demand more thorough study than Ochoa has provided. Nevertheless, this outstanding work is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand Mexican politics in the twentieth century or to improve Mexican standards of living...