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By Louis W. Goodman, Steven E. Sanderson, Kenneth Schwedel, and Paul L. Haber

Abstract

With one-fifth the population of the United States, Mexico has twice as many farmers generating one-sixth ofthe agricultural product on one-eighteenth the arable land. Up to ninety percent of these farmers and their dependents suffer some form of protein or calorific deficiency. In a phrase rural Mexico is overcrowded, underproductive, and immiserated. 

A complex and changing mosaic of tiny agricultural zones, Mexican agriculture has frustrated the many attempts of producers and government to regulate its yield, directions, priorities, and politics. Regional policies long have been discredited but no obvious national or local policy alternatives have emerged. 

Agricultural policy has changed according to major transformations in Mexican history: the Porfirian dictatorship, the Mexican Revolution, the Cardenas land reforms, the years of "economic miracle," and the recent food crisis. While rural crisis has been a dominant theme in all of these periods, state response to this crisis has been consistently inconsistent. With long-suffering rural voters constituting the bulwark of the dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party's eroding coalition, the rural crisis now takes on added political significance. 

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