The basics

What’s more basic than food?

While I would like to believe the Mex Files is “arguably LatAm’s best written blog“, there is no way I could have written as well, or in such depth, as Esther Buddenhagen (aka Buddenbrooks)’s  “From Xico” on the critical issue of Mexican (and human) life that affects all of us on the planet: who controls our food and fiber?

• One Reason Mexicans Head to the US for Work: Coffee looks at the relationship between growers of this one commodity (and I think coffee is one of the four basic food groups all by itself), emigration, environmental degradation and corporate control.
• In A Local Mexican Response to Big Agriculture: Palm Oil NO in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz Esther writes of the conflict between farmers who want to produce for the local markets and demands for exports (which may not even be profitable for the producer nation as a whole).
• In a short post, Mexico, US, High Fructose Corn Syrup and Sugar, Esther doesn’t need to spell out the problem. Mexico is traditionally a sugar producer and the land of corn, yet is being inundated by corn sweeteners from the United States which exacerbates the very conditions she sees in other commodities.

I live in Sinaloa, where we have been growing opium poppies since the 1880s, and commercial marijuana since the 1920s. Like the farmers in Veracruz, our farmers are at the mercy of businesses seeking a foreign consumer market, and — like the Veracruz coffee growers — are locked into a controlled market that leaves only two choices: emigrate, or become a pawn of the businesses controlling the market.

Like the palm oil growers, our growers are at the mercy of the fickleness of foreign political policies. Encouraged at one point (during World War II) to plant more opium poppies, and by steady demand for the commodity since the 1980s, returning to basic foodstuffs production is a radical — and, much more than in Veracruz, suicidal — decision.

And, being flooded with other “junk” from the north (firearms and bling, just for starters), made from the profits of our agriculture, the economic incentive for basic foodstuffs is being destroyed as surely as the sugar and corn growers here are being forced into pauperdom.

Sure, it’s more fun, and you get the kudos writing about the attention grabbers like migration, narcotics, violence, and political unrest — but we’re looking at the symptoms of a problem, and not the problem itself. And that, unarguably, is the more important thing to blog about.