This article by Carolina Hernández Calvario originally appeared in the November 10, 2025 edition of Revista Contralínea. 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.*
Environmental deregulation, the abandonment of the countryside, speculative practices regarding food prices, and the prioritization of property rights over human rights were key elements of neoliberal economic policy, whose impact on Mexican farmers is now a subject of reflection in our country.
The evidence of this model’s failure worldwide is extensive. It’s sufficient to observe that we are facing a unique crisis in agri-food production systems: while indicators point to a food crisis due to lack of access to food products among the poorest segments of the population, production levels and profits for large corporations continue to rise.
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) , from 1990 to 2024, global food prices increased by an average of 25 percent annually in real terms (adjusted for inflation). This problem is closely linked to speculative practices, given that production levels and stored food stocks have remained relatively stable, and have even shown a slight increase in recent decades. As a consequence of this serious situation, the aforementioned organization forecasts that by 2050, nearly two billion people worldwide will not have access to sufficient food for their survival.
Given this scenario, and within the framework of a new relationship between the Mexican State and the agricultural sector, in 2021, with President López Obrador at the helm, a series of reforms to the Operating Rules of the Program for the Promotion of Agriculture in Mexico were approved, aimed at guaranteeing and strengthening national sovereignty through the proposal of a system to rescue the Mexican countryside and the search for food self-sufficiency; with the correction of economic and social disparities among producers as its central focus.
This is a truly Herculean task, considering that one of the effects of neoliberalism on the Mexican countryside was the creation of an individual, impoverished, and input-dependent producer who, according to official data, remains the backbone of our society. To put it in figures, small-scale producers generate 54 percent of the value of agricultural production in Mexico and 85 percent of rural employment.
With the beginning of this new relationship, the aim is to reverse the policy of exclusionary subordination promoted by agribusiness. To this end, the Mexican State has resumed its role as a productive manager in this sector, seeking to replace the large agribusinesses that fulfilled this function during the neoliberal era. As part of this new strategy, the Undersecretariat of Food Self-Sufficiency began promoting an alternative production model, aimed at generating a new agricultural productive subject, one that develops its activities under an agroecological model based on local needs and collective practices. This approach sought to combat: i) the marginalization of agricultural production activities, ii) the decline in income and the consequent impoverishment of Mexican farmers, and iii) the decline of rural life and the emergence of diversification in the sector. These phenomena arose as a mechanism to compensate for the drop in income linked to agricultural production.
Consistent with this transformation policy, President Claudia Sheinbaum has also undertaken actions aimed at improving the living conditions of Mexican farmers. These include: i) direct support focused on small and medium-scale grain producers, delivered before planting to finance the purchase of inputs or the contracting of services related to planting; ii) direct support for coffee and sugarcane growers, who face a landscape of low international and national prices; and iii) the inclusion of producers from highly and very highly marginalized Indigenous communities, who for the first time are the beneficiaries of a public policy supporting productive development.
As is well known, only by producing our own products in a self-sufficient manner will we be immune to the speculative practices that are currently occurring worldwide. This strategy involves advancing on two fronts: 1) towards greater domestic production of grains, particularly corn, beans, wheat, and rice; as well as milk, beef, pork, chicken, and fish; and 2) towards the supply of inputs required for food production, such as seeds, biofertilizers, and machinery and equipment that will allow us to transition to sustainable production models.
Therefore, it is important that at this moment, as a society, we begin to expose the falsehood of those who claim to be concerned about this food crisis, yet simultaneously present themselves as staunch defenders of the (no more than 10) multinational corporations that currently dominate food production. And academia must also begin to question the technoscientific approaches—aligned with the technocratic production logic that benefits corporate structures—that maintain that social problems in rural Mexico can only be addressed with technological solutions. In other words, they obscure the political nature of the solutions required, disregard the ethics behind the scientific and technological developments implemented in this sector, and exalt immediate practical utility as the criterion of truth.
Carolina Hernández Calvario is an academic at UAM Iztapalapa. Her field of specialization is political economy.
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this scrapper has gotten better; nice work.