[De]Stabilizing the Neoliberal Food Regime: the Struggle for the Defense of Corn in Mexico

[DE]STABILIZING THE NEOLIBERAL FOOD REGIME: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE DEFENSE OF CORN IN MEXICO BY JOSE PERALTA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Zsuzsa Gille, Chair Associate Professor Assata Zerai Associate Professor Behrooz Gharamari-Tabrizi Associate Professor Rachel Schurman, University of Minnesota Abstract In 1994, the Mexican government started implementing the North American Free Trade Agreement in the context of a process of neoliberalization of its economy. This new framework demanded deep transformations on that country’s forms of production, commercialization, and consumption of food. The transition however, required that Mexicans accept that new order as normal. This is a multi-sited ethnography and multi-methods qualitative study that examines the on-going process of naturalization of the neoliberal food regime in Mexico and the attempts to destabilize it. I conducted participant observation, archival research, and in-depth interviews in the data collection. With a focus on corn, the most important Mexican food staple, this study examines five terrains of interactions in which the interests of the agro-food industrial complex are both advanced and contested. These terrains are: a) Oaxacan farmers’ work in two communities and their participation in entrepreneurial workshops, b) Mexican journalists’ participation in educational workshops provided by the biotech industry, c) the flourization of Mexican corn tortillas, d) graphic artists’ responses to government funded advertisement campaigns aimed at promoting their agriculture policies, and e) the divide between food sovereignty activists. These are five disparate arenas of stabilization of the neoliberal food regime in Mexico, in which this study recognizes neoliberalization as a transformation happening through peoples’ and institutions’ practices. From this perspective, not applied by most studies of the globalization of food and agriculture, I demonstrate that the neoliberal capital needs to stabilize its material transformation of the Mexican food systems by also reconfiguring ii peoples’ ways of relating to each other, as well as ways of eating (corn), listening and writing (about industrial agricultural technologies), and remembering (the social history of corn and tortillas). iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the people and institutions that made it possible for me to complete my dissertation. I am first thankful to my advisor Zsuzsa Gille. Her guidance and support were very important in shaping my studies and as I wrote my dissertation. I also want to thank professors Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Assata Zerai, and Rachel Schurman for their invaluable feedback on my dissertation. I am also thankful to the Department of Sociology, the Tinker Foundation, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies for providing me with funding to conduct my fieldwork and write my dissertation. Also, I thank the people in Mexico City and Oaxaca for their generosity in sharing with me their experience, knowledge, and friendship. They enabled me to learn what otherwise would have been impossible to figure out in the short time span of a year spent doing fieldwork. I am also indebted to my parents Percy Peralta and Sonia Olaechea as well as to my brothers Percy and Juan José, who, from a distance, on the phone and skype, were always with me. I am thankful to my partner Leisa Kauffmann for her words of encouragement, helpful comments on my work, and love, especially at times when the writing process became harder. Finally, I am also indebted to my dog, Maga, who patiently sat next to me during the long hours of writing and who took me for walks every day. v i Table of Contents List of Acronyms…………………………………………………………….…..….. vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………..…... 1 Chapter One Farming Corn, Facing the Entrepreneurial Challenge………………………………………...……………………………….....27 Chapter Two How to Write about Biotechnology: Mexican Journalists Get Trained in “Sound Science”…………………………………….….56 Chapter Three From flesh to flour: Globalizing tortillas and the gourmet response with native corn in Oaxaca…………………………......88 Chapter Four Drawing as a Weapon: Representations of Corn and Agriculture in a Time of Crisis in the Countryside………………………...…129 Chapter Five Mexican Food Sovereignty Activists and their Divide……………………………180 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………. 205 Methods Appendix………………………………………………………………...215 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….225 v List of Acronyms ADM Archer Daniels Midland AgroBIO Mexico Agro Biotechnology Mexico ANC National Agreement for the Countryside ANEC National Association of Rural Commercialization Enterprises APPO Popular Assembly of Oaxacan People BANAMEX National Bank of Mexico CAP Permanent Agrarian Congress CECCAM Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico CEDICAM Center for Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca CENAMI Center to Support Indigenous Missions CNC National Campesino Confederation CNI National Indian Congress CONASUPO National Company of Popular Substistence EZLN Zapatista Army of National Liberation FAPATUX Tuxtepec Paper Factory GATT General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs GEA Environmental Studies Group GIMSA MASECA Industrial Group GRUMA MASECA group ICAPET The Institute for training and Work Productivity vi IFIC International Food Information Council Foundation MASECA Aztec Milling Corporation MECNM Movement The Countryside Cannot Bear it Anymore Movement MICONSA CONASUPO's Industrialized Corn Inc. MINSA Industrialized Corn Corporation NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement ODRENASIJ Organization for the Defense of the Natural Resources of the Sierra Juarez PAN National Action Party PIPSA Producer and Importer of Paper Inc. PRD Party of the Democratic Revolution PRI Institutional Revolutionary Party PROCEDE Program for Certification of Ejidal Lands PROFECO Federal Attorney's Office of Consumer PROMAF Program of Corn and Beans RDM Network in Defense of Corn SAGARPA Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food SEDER Secretariat of Rural Development SEMARNAT Secretariat of Environmental Natural Resources SMNP Without Corn There is No Country Campaign UAM Metropolitan Autonomous University UCCS Union of Socially Concerned Scientists vii UNAM National Autonomous University of Mexico UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization UNORCA National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations UNOSJO Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca viii Introduction 1. Problem statement During the 1990s, the Mexican government signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, dismantled the national system of food staple redistribution (CONASUPO), and declared a constitutional amendment to allow the privatization of communal land. Those changes were part of a major transformation in Mexican food systems toward a neoliberal regime that promoted the expansion of the agro-food industrial complex while discouraging small-scale agriculture and traditional forms of producing and consuming food in Mexico. In the countryside, the State’s agricultural technicians and microfinance NGOs promoted the substitution of traditional corn agriculture with products with comparative advantages in the national and global markets. This context has turned the arrival of GMO corn to Mexico--first through unintended “contamination” and later through permissive legislation—a paradigmatic case of an immediate threat to Mexican food sovereignty, against which diverse citizen groups united. My research examines the forms by which the transition to a neoliberal food regime is being normalized by the intervention of corporate and state actors. In addition to developing entrepreneurial skills among farmers, these actors require transformations in food production, in the forms of communication about such agrarian changes, as well as in the forms food is eaten, and remembered. I will analyze responses to these transformations by studying the struggles around stabilizing neoliberalism in Mexico through an analysis of five scenarios with a focus on corn production and consumption: 1 the experience of farmers from the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, journalists attending to training workshops organized by the biotechnology companies, the flourization of tortillas, the resistance of Mexican graphic artists to government and corporate ad campaigns, and the difficulties of food sovereignty activists in forming coalitions. In 2001, after the discovery of GMO contamination of corn in Oaxacan milpas, different Mexican NGOs, indigenous coalitions, and farmers’ organizations came together to confront the introduction of GMOs in Mexican cornfields and the impacts of NAFTA1. The responses of these activists highlighted GMO contamination and its connections to NAFTA as a threat to the historical center of the origin of corn and to the epicenter of the world’s corn diversity. Due to the Mexican tradition of adaptation to and domestication of corn from pre-Hispanic times to the present, GMOs in Mexican milpas2 were also recognized as a wound to the “people of corn.” While most responses to GMO contamination in Mexico were approached in the context of a critique of NAFTA, other previous international agreements assumed by the Mexican government had already had a

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