Food In Mexico: Big-A Answers And Little-A Answers

If Mexico City showed me how Mexico's culinary past interacts with a highly industrialized version of a culinary future, I found new visions of that interaction in Guadalajara, a city of 1.6 million people a few hours northwest of the capital.

There, I met Eva Robles and Pepe Godoy of La Coa Collective -- a group on the avant-garde of Mexico's version of the local-food movement. (Coa is a kind of pointed hoe used by pre-Colombian farmers.) Godoy runs the small artisinal bakery Pan Arte in downtown Guadalajara; it wholesales to local restaurants and cafés. The bakery, along with a separate cafe project, funds La Coa's activist work, which is to defend the land rights of campesino smallholders against the claims of wealthy landlords. Robles, a trained lawyer, spearheads that task. Coa is also active in Defensa de Maiz, a broad-based movement to protect the biodiversity of Mexico's corn agriculture against encroachment from the large agribusiness firms that increasingly control the country's corn trade.

Read the full story

-OR-

More at the Huffington Post Food big news page

Comments

[joebiz]

Thanks for bringing light to the crookery south of the border. In another related issue, genetically altered corn was imported into Mexico and was actually being grown. When news came to the public, the government sought to quash the news.

http://www.theava.com/04/0218-chapela.html

[mexicanamerican1948]

Nafta has been a killer to the Mexican farmer. They cannot compete to the subsidized USA corn. This is not true free trade. However even if there were no subsidy to US corn, US corn is cheaper because of of efficiencies. That's why a protected market was good for the farmer. Bad part to the Mexican farmer , it forces them to leave the farm , go to the big city or cross the border. They go to California, then people complain of illegal immigration. Nafta has helped helped destroy one of the keys of the Mexican revolution, the ejido system for peasant farmers that's my opinion.

[JScott]

Interesting that when countries seem to adopt the US version of corporate commodity agriculture, people still starve, are still poor, and still poorly nourished, not just Mex. but Phillipines seems another sad example.

[darthdarcy]

Industrial HEMP grow it as a bio fuel and flourish and keep corn or maze as a food source for people and livestock...!

[Podewumun]

Americans would be wise to pay close attention to what's happening to Mexico's small farmers because the same fate awaits our own.