Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies

This book, and the seminar on which it is based, were conceived as elements of a dialogue on the future of the Mexican countryside. Rural Mexico, like the rest of Mexican society, is changing rapidly in response to a variety of circumstances, many of which are very imperfectly understood. This book focuses on a central element in the livelihood of most rural people - the production and consumption of maiz - and on a key component of macroeconomic policy reform, that which has been concerned with reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of the maize provisioning system of the country. The concerted effort to restructure the entire maize pricing and marketing system, which has gone forward in conjunction with a broad ranging agricultural policy reform, affects the economic options, as well as the levels of living, of many different kinds of people in the Mexican countryside, and it does so in complex ways.