Feeding Mexico
The Political Uses of Food since 1910- Editors:
- Publisher:
- 2001
Summary
Winner of the 1998 Michael C. Meyer Manuscript Prize!
Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 traces the Mexican government's intervention in the regulation, production, and distribution of food from the days of Cardenas to the recent privatization inspired by NAFTA. Professor Ochoa argues that the real goals of the government's food subsidies were political, driven by presidential desires to court urban labor. Many of the agencies and policies were hastily set in place in response to short-term political or economic crises. Since the goals were not to alleviate poverty, but to provide modest subsidies to urban consumers, the policies did not eliminate destitution or malnutrition in the country. Despite the minimal achievements of these interventionist policies, the State Food Agency provided a symbol of the state's concern for the workers. The elimination of the Agency in the 1990s prompted social protest and unrest.
Feeding Mexico is the first study to examine the creation of networks to deliver food products, the relationship of these channels of distribution to the food crisis, and the role of the state in trying to ameliorate the problem. Based on exhaustive research of new archival material and richly documented with statistical tables, this book exposes the dynamics and outcome of social policy in twentieth-century Mexico.
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Bibliographic data
- Copyright year
- 2001
- ISBN-Print
- 978-0-8420-2812-7
- ISBN-Online
- 978-0-7425-7982-8
- Publisher
- Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
- Language
- English
- Pages
- 270
- Product type
- Edited Book
Table of contents
- Contents No access
- Abbreviations No access
- 1 Introduction: Food and Society in Post revolutionary Mexico No access Pages 1 - 18
- 2 From Local to Federal Intervention: Food Policy Priorto the 1930s No access Pages 19 - 38
- 3 Lázaro Cárdenas and the Politics of State Intervention,1934–1940 No access Pages 39 - 70
- 4· World War II, Economic Modernization, Food Crisis, and Urban Relief, 1940–1946 No access Pages 71 - 98
- 5 Between Economic Efficiency and Political Expediency, 1946–1952 No access Pages 99 - 126
- 6 Social Welfare and the State Food Agency, 1952–1958 No access Pages 127 - 156
- 7 Rural Crisis and the Creeping Hand of the State in the Countryside, 1958–1970 No access Pages 157 - 176
- 8 The Apogee of the State Food Agency, 1970–1982 No access Pages 177 - 198
- 9 Neoliberalism and the Dismantling of the State Food Agency after 1982 No access Pages 199 - 224
- 10 The State Food Agency and the Persistence of Poverty No access Pages 225 - 232
- Bibliography No access Pages 233 - 258
- Index No access Pages 259 - 270





