Mexican Corn Crisis (Post-NAFTA)

The collapse of Mexican smallholder corn production after NAFTA’s 1994 implementation, driven by a twentyfold increase in cheap US corn exports — often priced below US cost of production, a textbook definition of dumping. The number of Mexican corn producers fell by roughly a third; income from corn dropped 66 percent; Mexico went from near self-sufficiency (7% imports) to roughly 38% import dependence.

The corn crisis is the material substrate beneath the more abstract legal changes of the 1992 Article 27 reform. It is the mechanism through which neoliberal agrarian policy translated into rural displacement, outmigration, and illicit crop adoption — Mexican poppy cultivation grew from 5,000 hectares in 1995 to 32,000 in 2016. Any account of the post-2000 expansion of drug-producing communities that skips the corn crisis is incomplete.