Mexican food policy, 2013-2017

How did Mexico’s National Crusade Against Hunger take shape, who benefitted, and what were the impacts in targeted rural communities?

For my dissertation, I researched a flagship government anti-hunger policy in Mexico, the National Crusade Against Hunger (“Crusade”) from targeted communities in rural Oaxaca and Mexico City. The initial design of the Crusade responded to Mexican activists seeking to rebuild a Mexican food system on the basis of the country’s small farmers, as well as international policy guidance on how to reduce hunger through food policy, as was done in Brazil in the early 2000s. In practice, however, the Crusade primarily increased commodity food aid to targeted populations, including in small farming communities.

Convening 28 high school and university students from two communities targeted by the food aid in a Participatory Action Research framework, I led this team in exploratory interviews and focus groups, coproduction of research hypotheses, design and execution of a household survey instrument, and application of qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis to our data. Concurrently, I conducted interviews in Mexico City and Oaxaca City with bureaucrats, researchers, and NGO figures engaged in the Crusade and analyzed public data for over 10,000 government contracts to follow the politics and economic flows of the food aid.

The results of this project illuminated:

1) the struggle of activists to build a Mexican food system based on smallholder production and nutritional health protection;

2) the businesses that benefitted most from public contracting for food assistance during the Crusade; and

3) the disconnect between government food assistance programs and the broader socio-environmental relations that targeted rural populations—many Indigenous— emphasize when discussing values around food and nutrition, including water quality, soil health, and human health as one field of vision.