Mexico’s Hunger Crusade: A Political Ecology of Government Food Assistance and Community Health in Oaxaca, Mexico, 2013–2018

Abstract

This dissertation research explores the nuances and contradictions of food aid for rural families in the neoliberal food regime era through a case study of Mexico’s National Crusade Against Hunger (“Crusade”), the flagship social development strategy of the Peña Nieto administration (2013-2018). Initially, the Crusade was publicized as a sweeping new commitment to guarantee food security through direct food assistance to families in extreme poverty, supporting local agricultural production, reducing post-harvest losses, and strengthening community participation. In practice, it was used in fraudulent diversion of public resources and expanded food aid contracts to channel new levels of industrial food commodities and advertising into rural agricultural communities already suffering from staggering increases in diet-related illness.Using an embodied political ecology framework and an array of ethnographic, online-archival and community-based research methods, this study evaluates the political economy, knowledge politics, and the diverse visceral (mind-body) sensations involved in the food aid for beneficiaries in two rural communities in the southern state of Oaxaca. Findings show that the Crusade captured civil society efforts to curb agri-food industry power and attenuated them in an implementation of increased food aid through monopolistic contracting. The food aid itself, in combination with accompanying nutritional education, produced contradictory material and discursive effects for local residents, especially women. Rural youth from the two communities targeted by the Crusade who participated in research training, activities and interpretation of findings in association with this project articulated their perspectives on the importance of food quality in food security, among other concerns, and gained positive experiences through expanded geographic mobility and new social connections. Centering the knowledge and perspectives of food aid beneficiaries with extensive labor experience in comparative agricultural systems and rural students whose life trajectories will influence Mexico’s food systems in the coming decades, this research argues that conceptions of food quality are central to the reinvestment of food aid beneficiaries –mostly women— in self-provisioning agricultural practices. While many participate in food aid programs out of economic marginalization and the discursive constructions that frame good motherhood in terms of participation in government food assistance programs, they also express a strong critique of industrial food in programs to address food insecurity.