This editorial by José Romero originally appeared in the November 7, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media*, or the Mexico Solidarity Project.*
The Mexican countryside has been dying for 40 years, and the government watches with the serenity of someone who mistakes charity for justice. They talk about food sovereignty while importing millions of tons of grain; they celebrate self-sufficiency in speeches that aren’t even enough to fill a silo. The country that could have been an agricultural powerhouse resigns itself to surviving on band-aids, managing its decline with welfare programs that change names but not their underlying logic. The countryside isn’t in crisis due to a lack of money, but rather due to excessive improvisation and a lack of direction.
The current government presents itself as a transformative project, but its agricultural policy retains the same old structure: scattered subsidies, an omnipresent bureaucracy, and an absolute disdain for production. Direct transfers are multiplying, guaranteed prices are being announced, and promises of justice for farmers are being made, but the land is producing less and the country is importing more. Poverty is being subsidized instead of productivity being incentivized; money is being handed out, but markets and technological capacity are not being built. The State has become a distributor of checks, not a promoter of development. And the most serious issue is that this abdication is being sold as a virtue: welfare is being disguised as ideology, and mediocrity as social policy.
The Mexican state has lost control and watches as added value, foreign exchange, and technology flow out of the country. It is the silent denationalization of agriculture, presented as a commercial success.
The disappearance of ASERCA [Agency for Marketing Services and Agricultural Market Development] and contract farming was the final blow to production certainty. Those instruments offered price protection and market stability. They weren’t perfect, but they worked. Their elimination left producers at the mercy of the international market. Per-ton subsidies, sudden tariffs, and emergency government purchases don’t replace planning: they only prolong the disaster. Mexico traded agricultural policy for bailout policy. A country that cannot guarantee the price of its harvest cannot guarantee its future.
After the dismantling of CONASUPO [National Company for Popular Subsistence of Mexico, regulated price of basic goods and guaranteed price of corn] in the 1990s, ASERCA represented a limited substitute for the old coordinating state: a neoliberal version that, while insufficient, offered stability. While CONASUPO integrated production, procurement, and distribution under the logic of national development, ASERCA was its technocratic remnant. The difference between the two encapsulates the decline of the state: from producer to mediator and then to spectator. With the disappearance of ASERCA, the institutional abandonment of the Mexican countryside was complete.
For decades, CONASUPO embodied the idea of a developmental state: one that coordinates, produces, and distributes to reduce structural inequalities. It purchased domestic harvests at guaranteed prices, stored them in thousands of warehouses, and ensured the sale of basic foodstuffs in rural stores. It provided stability not only for producers but also for consumers, guaranteeing a social supply network that no longer exists. Its dismantling, under the doctrine of the market, marked the beginning of the current crisis: silos were dismantled, procurement was privatized, and food sovereignty was abandoned in the name of efficiency.
Today, Mexico’s major agricultural exporters are no longer Mexican. The most profitable supply chains—avocados, berries, fruits, and vegetables—are controlled by foreign corporations like Driscoll’s, Mission Produce, and Del Monte, which coordinate production and export from outside the country. And in the grain sector, the dominant trading companies are Cargill, ADM, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus: all foreign-owned. Mexico exports with foreign capital and imports its food with foreign capital. The state has lost control and watches as added value, foreign exchange, and technology flow out of the country. It is the silent denationalization of agriculture, presented as a commercial success.
Movimiento Social por la Tierra (MST) de México
The result is a fractured agricultural system. A handful of export producers maintain their competitiveness thanks to their technology, while millions of farmers depend on subsidies that barely cover their planting needs. Between these two groups, the majority of medium-sized producers—those who should be sustaining the domestic market—are doomed to abandonment: too large for welfare programs and too small for commercial credit. This void destroys the productive fabric and condemns the country to food dependency.
The paradox is brutal: a government that proclaims itself transformative has ended up consolidating the old model of domination, where the campesino is grateful for subsidies instead of demanding a fair market. Rural justice is not achieved with handouts, but with productivity, organization, and knowledge. No society emancipates itself by distributing gifts. Sovereignty is not attained through speeches, but with investment, technology, and public intelligence. The self-sufficiency it boasts of is nothing more than a reflection in the desert: a mirage that evaporates before the reality of an exhausted countryside and a State that has forgotten its most basic duty: to produce in order to live with dignity.
José Romero is Director General of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), appointed by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. CIDE is a publicly-financed social sciences research center aiming to impact Mexico’s social, economic and political development.
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