Mexico pays heavy price for imported corn

Mexico’s food production and distribution system faces a mounting crisis, as the official statement released after recent talks between Presidents George Bush and Felipe Calderón obliquely acknowledged. During their meeting, the leaders agreed to form a binational working group on the subject but rejected the option of revising the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Instead, they called for a “smoother transition” for small-scale farmers, who comprise as much as one-fifth of the Mexican population. “Yes, no, maybe so,” in other words. Rural poverty has to be addressed and, politically speaking, it must be linked to immigration reform, which is a pressing issue both within U.S. and between Mexico and its northern neighbor.

Corn is at the heart of Mexico’s food crisis. Tortillas are crucial for calories and even protein in the traditional Mexican diet. Therefore, it was serious when the price of corn skyrocketed earlier this year, due in part to increased U.S. demand for ethanol. The price of tortillas shot up by between 40% and 100% in a single week. According to Víctor Quintana, a former lawmaker and leader of the Frente Democrático Campesino a peasant organization in the Mexican northern state of Chihuahua, the fallout will continue in the form of higher, prices of other basic foods like eggs, milk and meat.

Tortilla Protests

Corn, the classic Mexican staple, is imbued with symbolic significance. In Indigenous religious traditions, it is quite literally the equivalent of God-given manna. Today, Mexicans depend on tortillas made from ground corn as they did before the Spanish Conquest. Wheat in the form of bread may have made heavy inroads into the diet of Mexico’s urban middle class. But at the very least half of Mexico’s 100 million not just eats tortillas, but relies on corn, together with beans, for up to half of their protein intake. This is particularly true with children. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a drastic increase in the price of tortillas. It has already provoked massive protest marches, and not surprisingly, of a fervor akin to bread riots.

“Let them eat cake” were the infamous words from the mouth of a French queen who later lost her head. Calderón, who only recently assumed the presidency, amid popular dissent over the legitimacy of his electoral win, when the corn crisis broke. He was slow to act, never committed to defending the regulated price of the staple, and eventually resorted to jawbone-style negotiating with wholesalers and tortilla-sellers, urging them not to gouge. The gentleman’s agreement that resulted capped the tortilla prices at 8.5 pesos per kilogram and was only signed by some 5,000 out of Mexico’s more than 100,000 tortilla sellers. Calderón´s head is still attached to his body but the political furor is far from past. Indeed, in mid-February milk and meat prices began to spike, because Mexican cows are fed corn.

Abyss

The wave of rising prices of staple foods is indicative of deep-running currents in the economy and society. First, there is an abyss dividing the productive and commercial sectors. This is not the United States, an all but entirely urbanized and suburbanized nation, where farming is mechanized and largely centralized in the hands of global capital, at the same time that its production is subsidized by the government to the tune of $30 billion annually. In Mexico, over 20% of the population still works in agriculture. Government technical assistance, credit and all manner of economic involvement in the primary sector were slashed more than a decade ago. It was as though the sector were subjected to a line-item veto. Indeed, this watershed change occurred through an executive decision, taken by former President Carlos Salinas (1988-1994), still possible in the days before Mexico threw out the long-standing official party, Partido Revolucionario Institutio