Mexican Agricultural Policy in the Shadow of the US Farm Crisis

Abstract

Writing about the impact of the US farm crisis on Mexican agricultural policy1 is a high-risk enterprise — for a political scientist doubly so. On the surface the US farm crisis is difficult to understand, thanks to the remarkable difference between scholarly treatments and popular renditions in the press and in the US Congress. Projecting the future relationship between the US farm system and Mexican agricultural policy is even more difficult, as both countries are wracked by major economic problems, policy reversals, poor policies that spawn more problems to be attacked by new policies, and so on. Most ominously, no one seems to have tried to relate the US farm crisis to the politics of Mexican agriculture, despite the topic’s obvious attractiveness as a research and political issue. But, despite these cautions, there is a need to put a political perspective on phenomena that are generally considered economic. This paper offers a first encounter.KeywordsAgricultural PolicyCommodity PriceDebt CrisisFood PolicyAgricultural TradeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.