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My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive. International markets and all that

• stevenwoo 2mo ago
  NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.
  • WarmWash 2mo ago
    Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options. People constantly repeat this, but it's flat out wrong. The best way to apologize for people who, is to say that they don't have enough time to cook between all the jobs they have.
    • Retric 2mo ago
      > cheaper than heather options Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern. Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc. Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.
      • WalterBright 2mo ago
        I bought over a pound of steak the other day for $5. (Yes, it was on sale. But it is frequently on sale.) Along with a potato for 50 cents, that's cheaper than a bag of Doritos. Oh, and I bought a banana for $.22. Cooking a steak takes about 10 minutes. Microwaving a TV dinner ($7.50) takes more time.
        • mike50 1mo ago
          And the time for cleanup?
        • nosmokewhereiam 2mo ago
          Wait til you find out what's in a $5 steak! Our cheapest grass-fed tenderloin is $10 for a half pound cut. One. In a poor northern state. We had that cow two years and didn't supplement grain. Cheap as you can grow them. With a $5 steak, it might as well be corn chips.
          • WalterBright 2mo ago
            The $5 steak is the steak that's on sale. It doesn't affect the food value or the taste. A pound of steak is good for 4 meals for me. You can have your corn chips. No thanks.
        • asgraham 2mo ago
          Microwaving takes less attention and less skill, though. And less cleanup. And you don’t need to own a pan. And you don’t need to own spices (steak is a bad example ofc). And you don’t need to think about the side dishes. And you don’t need to agree on what’s for dinner. And I think it’s worth repeating, you don’t need any skill and can’t really screw it up. And you don’t need to worry about it going bad because you were too lazy to cook it. Etc. Processed food may not be cheaper, but the flavor:effort ratio is waaaaaay higher.
          • WalterBright 2mo ago
            Throwing a steak in a frying pan is about the same effort as a microwave frozen dinner, and is objectively cheaper. There's no universe where processed food is cheaper.
            • Retric 2mo ago
              You can microwave a meal by tossing it into the microwave and walking away, you need to actually participate in cooking a steak and then clean up several surfaces. The stake is conservatively 10x as much effort and time is money, plus microwaves use far less energy. Processed food isn’t a single unified thing, the prices definitely overlap but the minimum and maximum prices for processed foods are lower. That’s why our food supply ended up looking like it does, economies of scale beat home cooking. That’s true even going back thousands of years where communal cooking drastically reduced the fuel needs in warm climates.
    • jrflowers 2mo ago
      > Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options. I have bad news for you about flour
      • fragmede 2mo ago
        I have some good news for you about insects! https://3cricketeers.com/products/pure-cricket-powder https://3cricketeers.com/products/pure-cricket-powder
        • jrflowers 2mo ago
          Only fifty dollars per pound for crickets? That’s a steal
  • b112 2mo ago
    Likely, and then... after Mexican farms went out of business, they added biofuels, the price spiked, and Mexico had no domestic corn people could buy. It's sort of what they want for Canada. They keep trying to attack our protected agricultural sectors, and no sane country doesn't protect their food supply. Amusingly, they want 10% of our dairy market (as a start), and they already have a few percent. Yet we're 1/10th the size of them. So they make a massive fuss, over 5 additional percent of our market or so, which for their market size is 0.5% of its overall size. The US economy won't even notice, but the Canadian market will 10x as much. It's just petty.
    • snayan 2mo ago
      Yeah, but our dairy quota system is kinda fucked imo. We've created a market where the quotas are estimated to be worth somewhere between 40-45 billion. This financialization and the fact that banks have leant heavily against the quotas is part of the reason we're unwilling to move on this aspect in negotiation imo. I'm not saying that there's not value of protecting our food supply. But, in an affordability crisis, kinda feels this should be on the table for discussion given our supply chain management costs the average consumer an extra $250 a year or so.
      • b112 2mo ago
        That's quite cheap then. You see, the Americans are liars, as you may well know. They get upset at supply management, but they do it too. Instead of controlling production, and setting fair prices for producers, they handle it, like a bunch of nitwits, on the backend. They buy up excess milk, make cheese out of it, to artificially keep the market price high, and then store it for decades as it rots, in large underground limestone caverns. They buy out herds if production levels are too high. They have bought out large numbers of farms more than once, spending enormous sums, to reduce the supply. In fact, the American government has cost the American consumer far more than a measly $250 per year, for they force higher pricing too. And to do it? They spend like crazy, they spend tax money like crazy. But here's the thing. Every single government handles food production in some way. Every one. And the result is upward pricing pressure, almost always. We act responsibly. Sanely. The Americans just shrug their shoulders, blather on about not interfering, then do it anyhow regardless. Do not fall for their lies. It's all they do these days. The only goal they have, is to make us far more dependent upon them.
  • stinkbeetle 2mo ago
    This chart https://statbase.org/data/mex-prevalence-of-obesity-among-adults/ https://statbase.org/data/mex-prevalence-of-obesity-among-ad... Says that obesity was shooting up in Mexico before that. The obesity rate doubled in the 15 years before NAFTA. After NAFTA the rate doubled again in about 30 years. I can't really see any obvious change after 1994. Are these numbers incorrect, or were you meaning some other metric of obesity or obesity epidemic?
    • stevenwoo 2mo ago
      Good point. I should have written something like correlated with urbanization and other factors. But ever increasing percentage is a correlation. The USA obesity rate has stabilized for a year iirc, but those of Mexican heritage have some unique vulnerabilities to obesity as well so a multi factorial issue.
• ALLTaken 2mo ago
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