| Resumen: |
This article presents the Mexican approach to fighting food insecurity and promoting sustainable rural development through
the two-track framework. Like most developing countries, Mexico is characterised by a higher incidence of rural poverty than
urban poverty, with over 3 million rural Mexicans living in poverty. In this context, policies should target the rural poor to
provide social protection that addresses access to food and targeted inputs for agricultural production.
To conceptualise the Mexican experience of supporting rural livelihoods, we put government policy initiatives into three
categories: food subsidies, cash transfers, and agricultural support. The first two categories relate to current social protection
policies in Mexico. In the social protection scheme the government has outlined two broad objectives: to provide universal
access for social services (i.e. health, education, social security, housing) and to provide cash for immediate consumption needs
aimed at covering the most marginalised populations (Yañez et al., 2000). Finally, Mexico’s agricultural support has the objective
of supporting rural livelihoods by offering payment subsidies as a direct transfer for agricultural support.
Mexico’s food subsidy programmes are implemented by the Secretara de Desarrollo Social (SEDESOL) and covers all of the federal
government’s social protection policies. The current trajectory of Mexican social protection is transitioning away from in-kind
transfer schemes once supported by the Compañía Nacional de Subsistencias Populares (CONASUPO). Under the direction of Mexico’s
former Undersecretary in the Ministry of Finance, Santiago Levy, the adoption and expansion of a Conditional Cash Transfer
(CCT) programme known as Oportunidades has been the focus of the government’s poverty alleviation strategy since 1997.
Nevertheless, to provide social protection for the marginalised rural population that does not have access to Oportunidades |
