This is an excellent volume on agricultural development issues in contemporary Mexico and the statecraft and market linkages between Mexican and U.S. agriculture. Eighteen articles by Mexican and U.S. contributors cover such areas as agricultural development strategies, trade policy issues, institutional development, agricultural research, small farmer technology, self-sufficiency, and multinational food and feed investment controversies. Ample empirical data are presented to document and shape effectively the issues in question. The quality of analysis and interpretation is uniformly high.
Several key conceptual frameworks shape the arguments of the volume. First, there is the historical perspective. Revealing historical insights on the different agricultural development paths in East Asia, the United States, and Mexico are offered by Bruce Johnston. More detailed and sharply contrasting profiles of U.S. agricultural development are presented by Luther Tweeten, on the one hand, emphasizing the positive role of the private sector, and Alain de Janvry and Ann Vandeman, on the other hand (the structuralist view emphasizing the limitations of private sector initiatives and the need for state action). Celso Cartas Contreras contributes a concise and well-argued analysis of the important contribution of the agricultural sector to the import substitution development strategy in postwar Mexico.
Agricultural trade patterns and macroeconomic and trade policy issues between the United States and Mexico dominate the second part of the work, largely based on well-documented experiences from the 1960s to the early 1980s. This constitutes the strongest contribution. A wide array of issues is dealt with, such as the growing negative agricultural trade balance in Mexico; the complicated interaction between trade policy and food self-sufficiency; the impact of unstable U.S. monetary policy on the overvalued peso and the consequent negative rates of protection (i.e., implicit taxation) of Mexico’s basic grains sector; the successful grain futures transactions of CONASUPO; the political economy of U.S.-Mexican competition for the U.S. winter vegetable market; the factors behind the decline in Mexican beef exports to the United States and the controversial role of U.S. firms in food processing in Mexico. Mexican development specialists Jaime Matus Gardea, Roberto Cruz Aguilar, Celso Cartas Contreras, and Eduardo Cifuentes contribute substantially to this section along with G. Edward Schuh, Roger Norton, John Conner, David Mares, James Austin, and Kenneth Hoadley.
The third perspective emphasizes the contrasting institutional, technological and human capital base in U.S. and Mexican agriculture through contributions by James Bonnen, Antonio Turrent Fernández, Cartas Contreras, Luz María Bassoco, Casio Luisselli, David Winden, and Deborah Eade. The performance of the recent high priority program for food self-sufficiency (SAM) is analyzed, along with the issues surrounding the technological constraints conditioning small-farmer rain-fed agriculture. Excellent summaries of all the issues are set forth by Winder and Eade and a discussion of future needs and priorities by Francisco Javier Alejo and Clark Reynolds. The editors should be commended for having produced the best documented and most carefully argued review in recent times of the troublesome and complex linkages binding U.S. and Mexican agriculture.
