The Transformation of Rural Mexico: Reforming the Ejido Sector

Mexico's rural reforms of the early 1990s were designed to bring corn growers and other largely subsistence farmers into the cultivation of crops with appeal in global markets. This was to be accomplished through the reduction and eventual elimination of subsidies and guarantee prices to basic crops and a relaxation of tenure constraints on ejido land. Contributors to this anthology give us a close look at how the reforms have operated in fact, and how the approximately 25 million Mexicans still living in the countryside (about one-quarter of the nation's population) are responding to the ending of Mexico's 50-year experiment with communal land.