[De]stabilizing the neoliberal food regime: the struggle for the defense of corn in Mexico (2024)

Agriculture and Human Values

The social life of the tortilla: Food, cultural politics, and contested commodification

2000 •

Elizabeth Barham

The evolution of the narrative of corn in Mexico from impediment to progress, to a commodity and as heritage

2018 •

Alexandra Littaye

Corn in Mexico has been a source of conflict, commodity and fetishism. This chapter traces the evolution of narratives surrounding corn in Mexico to underline how these effect the country’s food security and capacity for self-determination. Various actors have appropriated the discourse surrounding corn to set political and economic agendas. This chapter explores how corn has been described as a subsistence crop, inferior to its European counterpart wheat, a commodity crop and more recently, as a heritage symbolic of Mexican identity. It appraises how transnational entrepreneurship can address issues of the marginalization of indigenous farmers in Mexico by exploring the ways in which pinole, a traditional food made of corn, was highlighted by grassroots movement Slow Food as an “endangered food”. As concluded, each discourse has had profound effects on the social, economic and politic fabric of Mexico.

THE DEBATE OVER FOOD SOVEREIGNTY IN MEXICO

M. Guadalupe Rodriguez Gomez

In 2007 a popular movement called Sin maíz no hay país y sin frijol tampoco emerged in Mexico, in response to the domestic food crisis. This was conceived as the leading edge of the 2007 and 2008 global food crises. The movement advocated for the protection of domestic staple agriculture and food sovereignty. It sought to create fair competition between US and Mexican farmers by encouraging the re-negotiation of the Agricultural Chapter of NAFTA; and to defend native varieties of corn against their replacement with GM. This presentation examines responses by both Mexican society and state to this food crisis. It focuses on meanings, ideas, actions, relationships, and processes that dominant and popular groups set in motion. It identifies the ways in which the Mexican neoliberal state has manipulated the market according to the principles of “competitive and comparative advantages,” to redistribute public resources unequally among producers and to open Mexican food market to imports. It argues that the Mexican state’s food market interventions are contradictory since (1) it legitimizes neoliberalism by claiming that the market should be the only force shaping internal production; and (2) Mexican agriculture is more exposed than ever to the negative impacts of global trade. Accordingly, Sin maíz no hay país is an illustration of less-privileged farmers and urban groups’ struggle against Mexico´s neoliberal food and agriculture policies and global food market instability, while promoting small-scale staple farming.

LAW, FOOD, AND CULTURE: MEXICAN CORN’S NATIONAL IDENTITY COOKED IN “TORTILLA DISCOURSES” POST-TLC/NAFTA

Ernesto Hernández-López

This essay offers a brief inquiry concerning food and national identity as expressed in the law. It examines how in 2008 the Tratado de Libre Comercio de America de Norte/North American Free Trade Agreement (TLC/NAFTA) eliminates Mexican tariffs for corn imports from the U.S. or Canada. Corn is examined as a product steeped in centuries of cultural significance for Mexico. This essay prepares a three-course argument. Section I incorporates insights from the food studies discipline to argue that beyond serving for nourishment food possesses enormous cultural and commercial value. This creates a ripe and abundant subject for legal analysis, focusing on how the law frames these tastes. Section II analytically serves up the cultural importance of food in Mexico's political economy. It shows how food is stewed within a discourse of national identity on a global table. This identity is imagined as a community with competing menu options of nationalistic and domestic and foreign and neo-liberal. Current tariff elimination resembles a historic and cultural tortilla discourse, which poses corn and its use by popular sectors against modern interests. Section III describes a re-imagination of food and national identity within the confines of Mexican law and the recent tortilla price crisis.

Geoforum

Making sense of food system transformation in Mexico

2020 •

Fiona Gladstone

Mexico is in the grips of a public health crisis related to its changing food system, characterized by dramatic increases in diet-related illness. Ideas on how to reverse these trends stretch from top-down nutrition education to demands for regulation of the food and beverage industry. Taking a different approach, this paper focuses on the perspectives and practices of rural Oaxacans, drawn from qualitative research conducted in seven communities over six years. We find an emergent critique of the contemporary capitalist food system rooted in embodied engagements with food production, preparation, consumption, and community history. We analyze these findings through the lens of Gramsci's concept of 'good sense,' understood as the critical-thinking basis for revolutionary transformation among subaltern classes. We situate this idea within literature on embodied knowledge and visceral politics, suggesting that such ideas and perceptions have the potential to challenge the growing hegemony of the corporate food system in Mexico and contribute to broader social movements in defense of Oaxacan land and life.

Corn Meets Maize: Food Movements and Markets in Mexico (book review)

Mindi Schneider

Agrarian winners of neoliberal reform: The ‘Maize boom’of sinaloa, mexico

Stuart Sweeney

Agrifood Vulnerability and Neoliberal Economic Policies in Mexico

HUMBERTO GONZALEZ, Alejandro Macias Macias

This article studies the impact of neoliberal policies that have been implemented by the Government of Mexico from the 1980s on the food-base of the country. These policies have made the living conditions of large sections of the population precarious, making it harder for them to gain access to a diet that is sufficient, healthy, nutritious, and culturally acceptable. The article uses the concept of agrifood vulnerability to determine the social and environmental risks to which individuals, groups, sectors, and nations are exposed. This helps define the extent to which neoliberal policies provide, or do not provide, capacities and skills for individuals, groups, and nations to resist and recover from natural, economic, and social threats. These threats can put sustainable production and the access to food by present and future generations to risk. The concept of agrifood vulnerability can thus be used also to analyse the discriminatory food policy that prevails on a national and global scale.

Gabriela Pechlaner and Gerardo Otero. 2010. “The Neoliberal Food Regime: Neoregulation and the New Division of Labor in North America.” Rural Sociology. 75(2):179–208.

Gerardo Otero

Geopolitics

Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds, Everyday Practices, and Food Security in Mexico

2014 •

Emma Gaalaas Mullaney

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally-adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially-bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labor in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so. This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.