Malt Barley in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Brewing Industry, Centralized Knowledge, and the Green Revolution

1 Introduction

In the early 2000s, Mexico emerged as the global leader in beer exports. Though Mexico’s industry is now foreign-owned, it continues to expand, establish new markets, and serve as a model for competitors. The global shift to more open markets since the 1980s created the opportunity for this rapid growth. Mexico’s brewers were poised to take advantage of the opening due to structural changes in the industry during the 1950s and 1960s, when statist development spurred rapid industrialization concurrent with the Green Revolution’s transformation of agricultural production. The genesis of the Green Revolution lay in the early twentieth century exchanges of U.S. scientists and social scientists with Mexican agronomists around their shared concern with rural poverty.^[1] By the 1940s, these exchanges took on fresh energy, as the Rockefeller Foundation established a close collaboration with Mexico’s officials and agronomists to research and improve Mexico’s corn, wheat, and, later, sorghum yields, leading to the development of new technologies that ultimately accelerated agroindustrialization. While scholarship has focused largely on these crops, the Rockefeller Foundation also had an early interest in barley. This article examines how the concentration of Mexico’s brewing industry in the 1950s and 1960s was fueled in part by the influence that this international collaboration had on research and development of domestic malt barley sources. Inspired both by growing consumer demand and a nationalist development model focused on substituting for imports, industry owners adapted the new technologies and enforced them through a monopsony that centralized control over malt barley production within a single company. Their control was extended through the implementation of a contract farming system that provided profit-seeking intermediaries with a primary role in mediating the transfer of knowledge about these new technologies.^[2] Small-scale growers, who had long dominated malt barley production, were consequently marginalized and both local innovation and competition were stifled. In effect, the brewing industry, dominated by three companies, used its influence over the distribution of new knowledge about seed varieties, and over the credit and resources needed to disseminate them more widely, to facilitate rapid agro-industrial concentration in malt barley production. In the process, they replaced a formerly decentralized and disorganized knowledge system with a more centralized one developed by an industry monopoly and supported by a collaboration of U.S. and Mexican agronomists and officials.^[3]

Agricultural subsidies and public investment in infrastructure such as irrigation and transportation underpinned rapid urbanization and industrialization in mid-century Mexico, though the emphasis has largely been on the role of the state in pursuing policies that would drive down prices for food and industrial inputs. This article refocuses the lens on the role of urban industry itself in using new technologies to restructure production in one agricultural sector, barley, as it pursued industry consolidation. It begins with a brief overview of the history of Mexico’s brewing industry and the challenges it faced with sourcing malt barley domestically. It then traces Mexico’s collaboration with the U.S. amid its attempts to solve what postrevolutionary officials termed the “agrarian problem,” exploring how visions of rural social change in the 1930s evolved into a new focus on improving agricultural yields through the development and extension of new technologies by the 1940s. In a context of weak state support for agricultural extension, it shows how a brewing triopoly asserted authority over the malt barley sector by controlling the dissemination of new technologies of production generated through the U.S.-Mexico collaboration. It concludes by examining how, in this case, urban industry mediated the implementation of Green Revolution practices through the creation of a contract farming system that enabled profit-seeking intermediaries, whose primary allegiance was neither to agricultural extension nor even to the brewing industry, to mediate the exchange of new technologies across the malt barley knowledge system. With little concern for how the new practices “fit with the existing socioeconomic landscape,” they critically transformed the social and productive relations of malt barley production.^[4]

The focus of Green Revolution technicians in Mexico was never barley, but the knowledge and practices they promoted transformed the structure of agricultural production in sectors well-beyond corn and wheat, often in ways they did not anticipate. To be sure, public-private collaboration facilitated the transfer of knowledge about seeds that rapidly expanded yields among large growers across Mexico. But the state’s weak planning and extension efforts, the lack of resources and credit available for smaller-scale growers, and, in the case of the brewing industry, monopsonist practices that created a space for rent-seeking behavior by intermediaries, together limited local level adoption and adaptation of new practices.^[5] As historian Ted Beatty argues, the obstacles to technical adaptation and the creation of durable new knowledge systems and ultimately innovation in Mexico were diverse and determined to a great extent by local conditions that varied by region and sector.^[6] This article sheds light on how obstacles to the development and extension of new technologies of agricultural production that originally aimed to tackle global food insecurity created a space for brewers to adapt those technologies to instead meet the needs of urban industry.

Studies have already analyzed Mexico’s second Green Revolution, when private industry tied to international capital used new technologies to improve yields among profitable commodities, especially sorghum used as a feed crop for large-scale meat production.^[7] This article examines another dimension of how Green Revolution technologies served the globalization of markets and capital, in particular how one urban industry captured these technologies to serve mid-century developmentalism. By facilitating the substitution of imported malt barley, the Green Revolution provided a solution to one of the brewing industry’s most tenacious business problems. Doing so required the disruption of established social and productive relations among small- and medium-sized growers. Their incorporation as dependents in a new knowledge system both undercut local autonomy and accelerated the growth of rural inequality. It also enabled the consolidation of a brewing triopoly that, while poised for global expansion by the 1980s, had transformed agriculture into an engine of large industry growth in a way that ultimately made Mexico’s agriculture vulnerable to those same globalizing forces.^[8]

2 Malt Barley and the Consolidation of Mexico’s Brewing Industry, 1890–1930

Prior to the late nineteenth century, due to its high price and competition from locally-produced fermented beverages, demand for beer in Mexico was low, with consumption concentrated among the upper and middle classes, especially immigrants in northern Mexico. While the country had a handful of smaller brewers as well as two beer factories, in Toluca and Mexico City, by the 1880s, the majority of beer was imported from Great Britain, Germany, and increasingly the United States.^[9] Demand for barley in Mexico similarly was low, since Mexico’s culture and diet relied overwhelmingly on, first, corn and, after the Spanish conquest, increasingly wheat. The primary states growing barley in the second half of the nineteenth century were Hidalgo, Puebla, México, Tlaxcala, and Guanajuato, and the yield was used largely for fodder.

In the 1890s, cosseted by a more stable political environment that encouraged investment in industry, by the growth of the Atlantic world economy that facilitated technology transfer in the brewing industry, and by higher tariffs on imported beer, a mix of domestic and foreign investors began to build a modern brewing industry in Mexico. By 1900, Mexico had about 30 factories, though each produced in quantities that lagged substantially behind European and United States counterparts. Nevertheless, local producers had almost completely replaced imported beer by 1910.^[10] Some brewers began to mix domestic barley with rice to produce malt on a small scale, but the overwhelming majority of malt barley was imported, mostly from the United States and Germany.^[11] For its part, hops cannot be produced reliably in Mexico for climatological reasons and thus was, and remains, imported.

In 1906, the federal government supported the creation of Mexico’s first malt factory by allowing the tariff-free import of malt barley conditional upon brewery owners agreeing to develop its domestic cultivation. Now backed by the government, malt barley production expanded in the first third of the century and by the 1932, domestic producers were supplying over one-half of the brewing industry’s needs. The brewing industry by that time had achieved some vertical integration with the establishment of carton, bottle, cork, carbonic acid, and bottle cap production facilities, and some brewers were distributing on a national scale. Moreover, five companies – including the three that would eventually take over the entire industry: the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc, the Cervecería Moctezuma, and the Cervecería Modelo – controlled 77 percent of the production market share.^[12] The expansion of production was supported by agronomists who, urged on by industry and federal pressure, worked to develop new domestic sources of malt barley. They experimented in new locations (including in the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Querétaro, and Nuevo León) and with new varieties (both foreign varieties and by testing domestic varieties in new locations), measured output and quality (e.g. spike length, protein content), and gained new knowledge about the vulnerabilities of different strains to fungus or drought. The emergence of contract farming further encouraged domestic malt barley production since beer industry owners, whose investment groups also owned the malt factories, guaranteed the purchase of harvests and at higher prices than those growing barley for fodder. In 1932, for example, malt factories were paying close to seven times more for malt barley than growers earned for barley fodder.^[13]

But the federal government and brewers were not always aligned in their ideas about how best to develop the malt barley industry. For example, on July 1, 1931, the federal government put in place tariffs on malt barley imports equivalent to a bit more than 100 percent of their original value in the United States, seeking to protect domestic growers from international competition. But beer industry owners responded ambivalently to these tariffs. While they wanted to expand and secure sources of malt barley, their concerns about the quality, price, and supply of domestic sources led them to argue that tariffs ultimately hurt the brewing industry.^[14] Committed to developing domestic sources of malt barley that one day could fully meet industry demand, however, the federal government maintained the tariffs and continued to experiment with new varieties, anticipating that the high price of imports would one day make domestic sources preferable.^[15]

3 The Centralization of Knowledge: Revolutionary Politics and International Collaboration

Fueling the government’s support for the malt barley industry was its emphasis after the Revolution of 1910-1920 on solving Mexico’s agrarian problem. During the 1920s and 1930s, agronomists and government officials perceived the agrarian problem as largely a social and political issue and focused heavily on improving agricultural production through reforming land and social relations. They pursued some agricultural research, and occasionally sought out international collaboration and knowledge. But most saw agricultural research as largely a local affair, with innovation centered within networks of local growers. Persistent crises in agricultural production in the late 1930s, however, followed by wartime trade disruptions and the growing interest of the Rockefeller Foundation in advancing technical knowledge to solve global food shortages, led President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946) to turn away from land reform in favor of technical solutions to agricultural problems. In the end, however, the early impact was limited by the inability, or unwillingness, of agronomists and officials to penetrate the networks that sustained local knowledge systems, especially in corn production.

The government’s focus on the agrarian problem gave Mexico’s agronomists a prominent political role in the 1920s and 1930s and they soon reached out to peers in the United States and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union to seek assistance in developing Mexico’s agriculture, especially through better plant breeding. Early efforts at global outreach were weak, however, as agronomists were more taken up with the agrarian politics that dominated rural life in Mexico after the Revolution. As a result, and despite their purported obsession with seed selection, experiments and extension efforts were minimal. Moreover, agronomists believed that their professional status meant their focus should be on “high” politics, with the science of seed research beyond their area of expertise and interest. They argued that campesinos (peasant farmers) themselves should be breeding their own improved varieties under expert advice.^[16] Consequently, little agricultural research occurred in Mexico in the 1920s and early 1930s except what had long been taking place by growers at the local level. Facing criticism both for focusing on politics and for their disdain of agricultural research and farming, agronomists responded by blaming the government for its weak support for agricultural research.^[17]

Indeed, state and private sector support for agricultural research remained weak through the 1930s. The government of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) did send more agronomists abroad to study and welcomed United States-Mexican cooperation around rural reform and improving yields.^[18] But cardenista reforms centered less on the science of improving yields than on the political, social, and economic issues hampering production.^[19] By pursuing extensive land redistribution, which often put formerly fallow lands into cultivation, the state accomplished an immediate growth in agricultural yields. Agronomists, for their part, were crucial to the cardenista reform project, supporting land redistribution and changes in rural social relations. Research remained marginal to their efforts, and Mexico continued to rely largely on imported seeds and technology; what domestic innovation there was in seeds and soil practices still tended to be a local affair, as agronomists continued to disdain local contexts and knowledge. When they did involve themselves in local production, they often imposed their own ideas and seeds with little regard for local practices, with predictably poor outcomes.^[20] By the late 1930s, agricultural production was once again in crisis, and the earlier “euphoria” about increasing corn production dissipated in the face of renewed shortages and need to import corn. And once again, the blame fell on agronomists, whose lack of knowledge and experience, political aspirations, and contempt for campesino knowledge undercut their professional status, as well as scientific research.^[21] Importantly, however, cardenista reforms had established the foundation for a stronger institutional commitment to agricultural research.

The late 1930s crisis in agricultural production was exacerbated by wartime trade disruptions, leading the more moderate Ávila Camacho to shed the official ambivalence that had marked Mexico’s work with foreign experts in prior decades. This came on the heels of a visit to Mexico by former U.S. agriculture secretary and then Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who used the occasion of President Ávila Camacho’s inauguration to take an extended tour to survey Mexico’s agriculture and industry, often attended by Mexico’s new secretary of agriculture, Marte Gómez. Wallace had founded the Hi-Bred seed company in 1926, and unsurprisingly was concerned with what he saw as Mexico’s comparatively low productivity in corn. Upon his return to the U.S., he reached out to Raymond Fosdick, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, to press the Foundation to get involved with improving agricultural practices that could increase yields in Mexico. Wallace essentially “reformulat[ed Mexico’s] agrarian problem as a food problem, and the food problem as a matter of yields,” thereby “separat[ing] the technical problem of food production from its political and economic context.” This eased the way for the Rockefeller Foundation to get involved.^[22] When corn shortages reappeared in 1943, and amid a climate of wartime cooperation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Mexico’s Secretaría de Agricultura teamed up to formalize their collaboration through the creation of the Mexican Agricultural Project (MAP), headquartered at the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, in the State of México.

The Rockefeller Foundation had been founded in 1913 by the Rockefeller family to provide grants globally in support of public health, medicine, and science. In the following decades, its scope expanded considerably though remained focused on advancing technical knowledge, including, by the late 1920s, in the area of agriculture. When in 1943, they committed to collaborating in the development of agricultural knowledge in Mexico, the Secretaría de Agricultura formed the Office of Special Studies, which became the administrative home for the MAP. While formally a collaboration, the Rockefeller Foundation often internally viewed it as an opportunity to experiment in taking the lead in international technical cooperation.^[23] Indeed, at the outset, the Foundation effectively funded and ran the Office of Special Studies, with its director also serving as local director of the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico. Leading the team was plant pathologist J. George “Dutch” Harrar, who soon brought on board entomologist John J. McKelvey, soil scientist William Colwell, corn breeders Edwin Wellhausen and Lewis Roberts, and forestry expert and plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, who was tapped to head the wheat program.^[24] They brought with them the experiences and expectations of the U.S. land grant model, which was characterized by research, experimentation, and extension; extension was especially well-developed in the U.S. model, in part due to high demand from farmers.

Despite the dominance of U.S. technicians, the Secretaría de Agricultura was “pleased” to receive the infusion of Rockefeller Foundation resources to bring new vitality to agricultural science. Mexico’s agronomists, on the other hand, initially were less keen about it, in part because their approach to research was, as seen, focused more on the lab and textbooks than on experimentation in the field.^[25] They quickly caught on to the shift toward science in state programming, however; by the mid-1940s, they were increasingly collaborating with the MAP in order to offer purportedly technical rather than political solutions to production problems.^[26] The MAP would become the blueprint for the global Green Revolution to follow, though its origins and purpose remain under debate. Some U.S. policymakers welcomed the expanded role of the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, seeing it as fulfilling the aims of Cold War developmentalism that, in this case, would teach U.S. scientific agriculture to a developing country as a way to stop the spread of communism. To these policymakers, the Green Revolution was the antidote to the red one, as U.S. imperial ambitions, disseminated through technological dominance, shaped postwar global campaigns.^[27] However, as historians such as Tore Olsson and Nick Cullather point out, the origins of the Green Revolution did not lay in a stark division between north and south or in the global extension of the liberal capitalist project. Rather, according to Olsson, they lay in the efforts by the Rockefeller Foundation to end rural poverty in the U.S. south in the early 1900s, including through having U.S. agronomists connect with and learn from agronomists seeking to do the same in Mexico. Development may ultimately have served Cold War ends, in this case by transforming campesino agriculture to meet capitalist imperatives. But its origins lay in shared early twentieth century global efforts to transform rural peripheries, including the U.S. south.^[28]

Among the stated priorities of the MAP were soil management and use, plant breeding, and pest and disease control.^[29] In its early years, the MAP emphasized basic research in plant breeding and seed improvement, establishing the basis for the Green Revolution’s later focus on research in seeds.^[30] Staff at the MAP also saw agricultural extension as important, and identified the need for peasant-friendly methods that connected campesinos to existing knowledge and new seeds. But staff struggled to communicate with small farmers due to Mexico’s weak infrastructure for extension services and a lack of available resources, including transportation and staff, to travel to communities. MAP agronomists tried to reach out with leaflets and letters, but Mexico’s rural population was largely illiterate, and their impact was minimal. Moreover, while the MAP staff was strong on biology, agronomists often struggled to understand rural economics and sociology. Consequently, they most often failed to develop workable solutions to production problems at the local level. Ultimately, MAP agronomists concluded that Mexico’s government did not have the resources, structures, or will to build an extension system.^[31]

Though the Mexican governments of the 1930s and 1940s spoke of the need to develop the infrastructure to support agricultural research and extension, the reality was that politics, resource limits, bureaucratic obstacles, professional disdain, and rural underdevelopment continued to impede it.^[32] During its 20 years under the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Office of Special Studies never managed to accomplish any serious improvements in agricultural extension, and technological diffusion remained “haphazard”. According to one report, the decision was made to limit extension in large part because of a lack of basic research to provide extensionists with the “facts and materials” they would need to carry out their work. The Office of Special Studies thus decided to focus first on research; any extension that did take place was typically with literate audiences that sought it out directly from that office.^[33]

Just a few years after its founding, the MAP ran into problems with the administration of President Miguel Alemán (1946-1952), whose agricultural aims were less about rural development than national yield. Aligned with a Cold War politics that demanded a developmentalist approach to the Third World, President Alemán abandoned reforms targeting rural inequality in favor of state support for agroindustry that fueled urban industrial growth. The new emphasis on agricultural modernization focused on rapidly increasing productivity through the use of foreign technologies, “especially those associated with the development of ‘miracle’ seeds,” and subsidies and credit for large-scale growers.^[34] The conflicting approaches of the Alemán administration and the MAP to improving agricultural production were stark.^[35] For example, during the 1940s, the MAP had pushed for the research and promotion of synthetic seeds to grow corn because yields were higher and they did not require farmers to purchase new seeds each year. The Alemán administration, by contrast, heavily favored and promoted hybrid seed varieties, even though they had lower yields and required annual purchases of new seeds and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, putting them out of reach of small farmers. Under pressure from the state, by the early 1950s, the MAP abandoned research into synthetic corn varieties.^[36] Moreover, by 1949, the alemanista state refused to cooperate with the admittedly timid extension efforts of the MAP. For their part, foreign technicians discovered that the land grant model that had proven so successful in the U.S. did not translate easily to the Mexican context, where subsistence rather than commercial farmers dominated corn production. Whereas farmer demand for research and extension was high in the U.S., subsistence corn farmers in Mexico historically had relied on their own entrepreneurial initiative to innovate, and thus MAP researchers struggled to connect with them. By contrast, U.S. technicians had more success in working with Mexico’s wheat growers, who compared to their corn growing counterparts, were more commercial.^[37] Extension efforts therefore limped along until 1953, when, under the administration of President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–1958), the recently-renamed Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería finally established an extension service, though it, too, was slow to develop.^[38]

Regardless of conflicts between U.S. and Mexican officials and agronomists over agricultural development, Cold War technopolitics found fertile home in Mexico, as Mexico’s mid-century developmentalists eagerly allied with foreign technocrats in their shared view that science and technology could provide a non-ideological path from underdevelopment to capitalist modernization.^[39] Importantly, philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation played a central role in reorienting domestic research projects around the world to support U.S. Cold War aims. While agronomists relied on science to assert the apolitical nature of their research, by the 1950s, they ultimately aided the United States’ soft power imperialism by building collaborations in support of modernization imperatives that transformed global agriculture to fit Cold War developmentalist politics.^[40]

This shift in the role of the MAP was revealed in its technical training for Mexico’s agronomists. Between 1943 and 1960, the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería commissioned about 550 Mexicans to work with the Rockefeller Foundation. In that same period, more than 150 Mexicans, of whom 52 received PhDs, received over 250 fellowships to study. At first, Mexican trainees were sent to U.S. land grant colleges, but by the late 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation was directing funds to three universities in Mexico, in the cities of Chapingo, Saltillo, and Monterrey, to develop their capacity to train agricultural scientists at home. Marginalizing instructors and curricula whose orientation was peasant politics and agrarian reform, the new emphasis was on developing technical instruction that mirrored the mission of U.S. land grant colleges. Portrayed as nonpartisan, the decision to put aside discussions of the organization of production in favor of its technical aspects was in fact a deeply partisan decision in 1950s Mexico. By assigning professional status to those with technical skills in agronomy and marginalizing a generation of agronomists whose expertise had been the politics of agrarian reform and the social organization of production, the MAP supported a developmentalist agenda that sidelined local producers in favor of research and teaching that served government and agroindustry.^[41] Therefore, after three decades of dealing with Mexico’s agrarian problem, official support for the diffusion of new knowledge to small-scale farmers remained haphazard.

4 Industrialization and the Decline of Local Knowledge

Official support for the diffusion of new technologies in the barley sector was even less consistent than in the wheat and even corn sectors, though the experience for small growers was distinct. The brewing industry was still grappling with tensions and problems over the domestic malt barley supply into the early 1950s. However, witnessing the transformations wrought by agricultural research and innovation elsewhere, and fueled by a mid-century developmental focus on substituting for imports, brewers began to pursue research more aggressively as a way to improve the domestic malt barley supply. Initially, they were backed by the MAP, government officials, and growers’ organizations, who collaborated with brewers in early research efforts. Put off by the role of large industry in pursuing research and concerned that a focus on malt barley was a deviation from its focus on food security, however, the MAP quickly retreated. Yet, the three big brewers persisted, each pursuing research to develop improved strains of barley. When a few years later the MAP once again became involved in research to improve barley yields, its technicians brought with them a new focus on agroindustry. They also arrived to a different context, one where the three large brewers had shifted from a focus on developing independent research agendas to a collaborative model that they believed would minimize risk and costs. In this case, a triopoly made up of the Cervecerías Modelo, Cuauhtémoc, and Moctezuma collaborated to deploy Green Revolution principles and practices in order to create and control a new knowledge network that provided them with unprecedented influence over the entire malt barley industry.

Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, Mexico’s brewing industry had benefited from a host of regulations, policies, and practices that supported industry growth and concentration, including limited global competition, favorable regulatory and tax policies, public and private investment in infrastructure and especially transportation, the promotion of agroindustry, and corruption.^[42] By the 1950s, it had become a triopoly dominated by the Cervecerías Cuauhtémoc, Moctezuma, and Modelo. The three brewers had accelerated industry concentration through investing in modern machinery and new facilities, as well as through expanding older factories, contracting with distant competitors to produce and distribute their brands in those regions, and eventually by merging with or acquiring these competitors. With this growth of production capacity alongside improved transportation networks, they were able to build markets regionally and nationally by the middle of the century.^[43]

As seen, a domestic malt barley industry had grown up prior to 1940, though with ambivalent support from brewers. But the wartime disruption to global grain production and trade convinced the three brewers to look more closely at domestic malt barley sources, even as their concern about its quality persisted. Barley suitable for malting differs from barley used for fodder due to its lower protein content (usually above twelve percent for fodder, lower for malt). Protein content is influenced by multiple factors, including fertilizer, soil, sunlight, and variety. Controlling for these factors is a challenge, and often barley growers were forced to sell their product at a lower price for fodder for failing to meet brewing industry standards.^[44] Tensions between growers and maltsters over barley quality were fueled by the fact that maltsters paid higher prices for imported malt barley, even for barley of the same quality as domestic. These tensions flared in 1952, when maltsters dropped the price for domestic barley even further, to 20 percent below the 1951 price. Maltsters blamed market saturation for this decision, though small growers represented by the Confederación Nacional de la Pequeña Propiedad Agrícola pointed out that malt factories were still importing barley and paying twice the price of domestic.^[45]

The 1950s brought new supply challenges to the brewing industry. In that decade, the industry entered into a period of rapid growth spurred by industry consolidation and growing domestic markets, putting new demands on malt barley supplies. Faced with persistent problems with supply, quality control, and tensions with domestic growers, the brewing industry began to look more closely at ways to use new technologies to transform domestic malt barley production. The owners of the Cervecerías Cuauhtémoc, Moctezuma, and Modelo therefore welcomed the chance to collaborate with the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería, the Rockefeller Foundation, and growers’ organizations such as the Asociación Mexicana de Cebada Maltera, to modernize the industry.^[46] While scholarship on the MAP focuses almost exclusively on its work with corn, wheat, and later sorghum, the Rockefeller Foundation in fact had an early interest in Mexico’s barley production. In 1948, the MAP established its second experimental research station, La Cal Grande, in Guanajuato, which was to focus on research in cereal grains, especially sorghum and barley. The choice to focus on barley was a departure for the MAP, since its stated priority was food security. But barley was only a minor, albeit growing player in Mexico’s agricultural profile in the 1940s and 1950s, and even then, only about ten percent of it ended up in the Mexican diet. Nevertheless, working with the Asociación Mexicana de Cebada Maltera, MAP investigators began research and testing with barley in the early 1950s. By 1954, however, they had abandoned this research under pressure from the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería. Internally, the Rockefeller Foundation noted that since barley was not vital to the Mexican diet, it was best not to resist this pressure due to the politically sensitive nature of agricultural policy, especially with a commodity that had so much support from private companies. The Asociación Mexicana de Cebada Maltera expressed disappointment with this decision. Within two weeks, a plant pathologist from the University of Wisconsin wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, urging its staff to restart their barley research program in Mexico to serve as support for a similar program in the U.S., where barley was a staple in the food, beer, and fodder industries. But barley was not a staple of the Mexican diet, and the researcher could cite only one maltster in Mexico who was interested in barley’s food applications.^[47]

For the next two years, the three big brewers – Cuauhtémoc, Moctezuma, and Modelo – worked separately with growers, agronomists, and officials to experiment with new barley strains. This was not surprising, considering the industry’s long experience with developing domestic know-how across the production and distribution chain through working with foreign experts and by importing and adapting foreign technologies.^[48] They experimented principally with strains from the U.S. with the goal of expanding domestic cultivation marked by kernels that were “mellow, heavy, plump, clean, unbroken, bright, low in moisture, uniform in germination, not too high in protein, and having proper diastatic [germinating, resulting in enzymes that convert starch to sugar] power,” to quote U.S. maltsters on the desired qualities of malt barley.^[49] The brewers’ most pressing challenge was climate, with Mexico’s distinct weather patterns influencing yields and quality. For example, dry weather during the growing period can produce a larger proportion of thin kernels that are too high in protein for malting, and wet weather during harvest can cause field-sprouting or molding.^[50] Almost immediately, the three big brewers ran into problems with the U.S. strains, including with weakened stalks that led them to fall over, with the grain separating from the plant, and with late maturation, all caused principally because the strains were not adapted to Mexico’s climate.^[51]

Problems with imported strains led the three big brewers each to attempt the complex and risky task of developing their own locally-adapted strains of domestic malt barley. However, they quickly realized the high costs and obstacles to conducting their own research and development. By mid-decade, they decided that cooperation, rather than competition, would allow them to scale up research and production of domestic malt barley with less risk and individual expense.^[52]

Their decision to scale up research and development coincided with an acceleration of official support for agroindustry. By early 1957, and in cooperation with the Asociación Mexicana de Cebada Maltera, the MAP petitioned the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería for permission to restart its research into barley. Avoiding the question of food security all together, their focus would be solely on barley for malt and fodder. Their renewed attention led them to identify the key factors leading to the poor quality of Mexico’s malt barley, including uneven fields, unsuitable soils, the use of low-quality seeds, plagues, bad weather, poor cultivation practices and pest control, and harvesting practices that led to spike damage.^[53] But they now abandoned any focus on seed varieties and practices that could thrive under the marginal conditions in which most growers operated. Instead, they prioritized developing varieties that were suitable for Mexico’s soil and climate but under the more modern technological conditions of readily available irrigation and direct combine harvesting.^[54] Moreover, arguing that malt barley could be a more stable source of income for growers, the MAP worked to induce campesinos to switch from growing other crops to growing malt barley using propaganda, credit, technical assistance, and guaranteed prices and purchasing.^[55]

To facilitate collaboration with each other and officials, in 1958, the three big brewers jointly formed Impulsora Agrícola, S.A. de C.V., a company whose purpose was to develop and manage reliable domestic sources of malt barley and to ensure equitable access to malt barley among the brewers, with each company’s share of the harvest determined by their national market share in beer sales. In essence, Impulsora Agrícola enabled the three brewers to reduce competition for malt barley while sharing the transaction costs of developing that industry. Through the end of the twentieth century, Impulsora Agrícola grew to have a variety of functions related to modernizing and expanding domestic malt barley production. Among these were technical and technological research, the generation and provision of high-quality seeds that met the norms of the Servicio Nacional de Inspección y Certificación de Semillas, and technical assistance, most often in the form of credit for growers to purchase seeds, pesticides, and herbicides from Impulsora Agrícola.^[56] Impulsora Agrícola also negotiated guaranteed price, credit, and purchase agreements between maltsters, the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería, and producer organizations (usually the Unión Nacional de Productores de Cebada), contracted with storage warehouses, and managed the receipt of harvests. Contracts also established terms for the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and around agronomic practices.^[57] Most importantly, Impulsora Agrícola created a vast contract farming system that controlled the entire domestic malt barley harvest from the provision of seed to growers to the distribution of malt barley to malt factories; through the use of intermediaries such as producer organizations or agents, brewers and maltsters never had to deal directly with small- and medium-sized growers, whose access to new technologies was now mediated through these intermediaries.^[58] Malt barley subsequently grew into a concentrated, domestic agroindustry wherein, by 1960, domestic producers were providing close to 100 percent of industry demand.^[59]

With the formation of Impulsora Agrícola, the malt barley industry evolved into a monopsony, with the company controlling both the production by and purchase of malt barely from growers, and its distribution to malt factories also owned by the major brewers.^[60]

Fig. 1

Origins of Malt Consumed in Mexico (in kilograms). Source: A. Serrano, La industria de la cerveza en México, Documento interior 25-15, Departamento de Investigaciones Industriales, Banco de México, S.A. December 1955, pp. 9, 29, 42; La Cerveza y la Industria Cervecera Mexicana, p. 181; and U.S. Tariff Commission, Barley, Hulled or Unhulled, appendix B. Historical data on malt production in industrial censuses often does not match data produced by the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP). Despite discrepancies, scholars agree that the malt industry grew quickly in mid-century to meet surging demand.

As a result, a formerly decentralized and disorganized knowledge system that had tied together barley growers, maltsters, brewers, agronomists, foreign technicians, and state officials became highly centralized, with new technologies controlled by a brewing industry monopolized by three companies and backed by a collaboration of U.S. and Mexican agronomists and officials seeking to modernize global agriculture. New knowledge and technologies were now deployed through technical assistance that arrived only minimally through extension efforts and more commonly through contracts and credit often arranged by intermediaries who now exercised extraordinary control over the production chain.^[61] Decisions around production practices therefore no longer rested with the grower and their knowledge of local soils, varieties, and weather. Rather, it flowed from a collaboration of U.S. and Mexican agronomists in the MAP working with private industry to secure a rapid growth in yields. While large growers in well-irrigated areas thrived, the cost to campesino knowledge, autonomy, and practices in areas that still engaged in traditional agriculture was high, especially with regard to native seed varieties.^[62]

5 The Institutionalization of Knowledge: The Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agrícolas

Since the founding of the Office of Special Studies in 1943, the Mexican government had slowly assumed more responsibility over its funding and positions were increasingly filled by Mexicans returning from training at U.S. graduate schools. By 1956, the Office of Special Studies had grown to employ 18 Rockefeller Foundation staff and over 100 Mexican scientists, though leadership remained in the hands of Rockefeller Foundation staff.^[63] But in 1960, the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew formal leadership of Mexico’s agricultural research and extension programs. And on January 1, 1961, the MAP merged with the Office of Special Studies, which the Secretaría de Agricultura had formed in 1943 to serve as the administrative home of its collaboration with Rockefeller Foundation researchers, to create the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agrícolas (INIA), part of the renamed Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería; its mission was to foster basic and applied agronomic research.^[64] While Mexicans assumed a larger role in this new organization, key Rockefeller staff who had been leading foreign efforts in Mexico since the 1940s, including Edwin Wellhausen and Norman Borlaug, continued to work with the INIA and to exercise substantial influence. Nevertheless, after two decades of U.S.-Mexico collaboration, a new generation of Mexican scientists had emerged to lead not only the INIA, but also the national agricultural university in Chapingo (which had a graduate program in agricultural research), most other large agricultural colleges, and even sections of the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería itself.^[65] For the next 20 years, MAP-aligned scientists, which included a mix of Rockefeller Foundation staff and MAP-trained Mexican agronomists, led Mexico’s agricultural research agenda, including the majority of large divisions within the INIA.^[66]

Headquartered in Chapingo, the INIA operated eight regional research stations by the early 1970s. Its biggest research efforts remained focused on improving seeds. Reed Hertford, an economist with the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stated that from the founding of MAP in 1943 through the 1960s, “Agricultural research in Mexico [was] largely synonymous with seed improvement.”^[67] Indeed, in 1963, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería created the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). With a mission to export the “agricultural innovation” that had been taking place in Mexico since 1943, it was reorganized as a non-profit research and development institution in 1966. Its first leader was Edwin Wellhausen, who had first come to Mexico in the 1940s to lead the MAP’s corn-breeding efforts, but who had soon after taken over the MAP itself, which he led until 1958.^[68] Today, CIMMYT is one of 15 research centers around the world supported through the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).^[69] Still headquartered in Mexico, it operates regional offices in various locations around the world and hosts the world’s largest collection of corn and wheat varieties.

As Mexican scientists took on more leadership over agricultural research in the 1960s, it changed little in how the brewing industry collaborated with officials. By 1962, Impulsora Agrícola backed the INIA as it published a booklet describing and promoting techniques for malt barley production, aptly subtitled “Higher quality brings higher prices.” Written by INIA agronomists, its primary purpose was to describe the malting process so that growers could develop an appreciation for why buyers were so insistent on certain qualities in malt barley, revealing the persistent knowledge deficit spurring tensions between growers and maltsters. The booklet contained recommendations for producing high-quality malt barley, including the use of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and well-cleared land to avoid mixture with other seeds. It also recommended specific certified varieties of barley, advising that they not be mixed with common barley varieties during planting. It also detailed recommended production practices, such as allowing the grains to mature completely so that they would be of similar size and full-bodied rather than thin; harvesting before the arrival of rains, since damp grain did not malt properly; techniques to avoid broken grains, since they, too, negatively impacted malting; and directions for how to maintain the proper humidity and temperature during storage. Specifying the traits desired at the point of purchase, INIA agronomists described a clean grain of good color with no evidence of fungus, harvested at the right moment of maturation, and stored following industry recommendations. They also urged growers to test the quality of their harvest before delivery with a simple germination process so they would know in advance if their grains satisfied industry requirements established by the Dirección General de Normas of the Secretaría de Industria y Comercio in 1962, which would tell them the price they could expect.^[70]

Impulsora Agrícola also worked with the INIA to develop new seed varieties, subsidizing INIA research into genetic combinations that could lead to varieties adapted to the different regional climates and soils across Mexico.^[71] Experimentation began in a laboratory, and then was tested at agricultural research centers in Roque, Guanajuato and in Hermosillo, Sonora, and at two pilot plants, including a micro-malter and a micro-brewery.^[72] By the 1960s, researchers in Mexico had developed five new six-spiked barley varieties, including Toluca I, Promesa, Porvenir, Apizaco, and Apan.^[73] The new varieties were distributed through the Productora Nacional de Semillas (PRONASE), created in 1961 by the federal government to promote the production and use of certified seeds from improved plant varieties.^[74]

One of the earliest successes of the collaboration between Impulsora Agrícola and INIA was Toluca I, which the INIA promoted heavily in its 1962 publication. Between 1958 and 1964, Toluca I grew from being responsible for 1.1 percent of total national malt barley production to 46.51 percent.^[75] In expanding its dominance, Toluca I closed out opportunities for growers who still planted native varieties; for example, campesinos in Tlaxcala complained that brewers now refused to buy their malt barley because it was grown using semilla criolla, first brought to Mexico by Spaniards in the sixteenth century and commonly planted by campesinos.^[76] Similarly, INIA researchers developed recommendations around production practices that they disseminated through publications and experimental farms, the latter of which allowed agronomists to demonstrate directly to growers the advantages of the new varieties of barley.^[77] However, like access to Toluca I, the obstacles to accessing this new knowledge were high for small-growers, who often found themselves at a geographic, material, and cultural distance from these extension efforts. As a result, they were ultimately incorporated into the new knowledge networks through intermediaries who would become their primary point of contact with Impulsora Agrícola.

6 Politics, Profiteers, and the Limits of Contract Farming

By the 1960s, Mexico was experiencing the rewards of 20 years of an activist state promoting and protecting urban industry. The brewing industry continued to grow through the 1960s and 1970s and emerged as one of Mexico’s biggest success stories, with national production more than tripling from about 572 million liters in 1953 to almost 2 billion liters in 1975.^[78] As the brewing industry continued its rapid expansion, the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería sought to support the industry by pushing to intensify and extend malt barley production to meet surging demand. Officials stated their intention to expand agricultural extension projects to bring new techniques to growers and to implement quality norms to minimize the chance that harvests would be rejected by buyers.^[79] Yet, as before, state-led agricultural extension efforts remained underfunded through the 1970s, and reliable connections between research centers and producers never materialized.^[80] Moreover, while research into new varieties of barley in the 1960s was relatively substantial compared to prior years, the INIA still favored research and development in other agricultural sectors. In 1965, the INIA published a comprehensive 400-page guide that provided “all available results that [were] fruit of their investigations and were related to principal cultivation of the agricultural regions in the country.” The guide included a wealth of regionally-specific information about seed varieties, pesticides and fertilizers, climate and growing seasons, irrigation and much more for corn, wheat, sorghum, cotton, beans, potatoes, vegetables, and many other agricultural products. Yet, barley received less than one page of attention, with the most important piece of information referring growers to follow fertilizer recommendations for growing oats.^[81]

Weak state-led extension and technical assistance programs enabled the intermediaries and buyers who dominated Impulsora Agrícola’s contract farming system to assume a critical role in shaping production. Contracts could determine a range of factors, including price, seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, land use, and production processes. Often buyers for Impulsora Agrícola provided credit, inputs, and technical support, all with the goal of ensuring reliable access to a standardized product at a guaranteed price.^[82] Contract farming typically shifts risk onto individual growers, who assume responsibility for the costs associated with changes in weather, pests, market instability, or labor issues. For example, in the case that a grower produced grains whose quality was too low to be sold to Impulsora Agrícola, intermediaries would purchase the harvest at a lower price, and then mix it with higher quality malt barley grown by others to then be sold to Impulsora Agrícola at the higher price. To be sure, working with a contractor connected small growers to markets, credit, and technical assistance that would otherwise often have been denied them. But this access came from a position of dependency that curbed grower rights and autonomy, a situation that was exacerbated in Mexico’s malt barley industry because, as a monopsony, growers were dealing with a single buyer: Impulsora Agrícola.^[83]

Medium- and large-growers most often contracted directly with Impulsora Agrícola to receive seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides on credit to be paid back when they turned in their harvest. Credit in essence became one of the most influential vehicles for delivering technical assistance, serving as the mechanism through which contractors shared new techniques and products. In return, growers would need to meet requirements about land use, quality, and price. Usually within a week after the delivery of the harvest, growers working directly with buyers from Impulsora Agrícola would receive payment at the pre-determined, guaranteed price. Large- and medium-sized growers could contract directly with Impulsora Agrícola, rather than through an intermediary, because they had the capacity to meet the company’s requirements. In the 1960s, these included a technical requirement that trucks delivering harvests meet a minimum size requirement to be allowed to deliver directly to Impulsora Agrícola’s facilities, and a legal requirement that growers seeking to work directly with maltsters be in the Registro Federal de Contribuyentes of the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público. These requirements had the advantage of lowering costs for Impulsora Agrícola, since limiting their contact to only those who could deliver larger harvests meant hiring fewer technical advisors and other personnel.^[84]

Most small growers could meet neither the technical nor legal requirements to work directly with Impulsora Agrícola. They therefore had to go through either producer organizations or intermediaries to contract with Impulsora Agrícola. Producer organizations, however, were often engaged in organizational politics and were not equipped to work effectively or consistently with Impulsora Agrícola in this capacity; additionally, they often paid growers less than intermediaries and took longer to distribute payments.^[85] As a result, intermediaries became key actors in the barley industry, signing contracts with Impulsora Agrícola that gave them access to seeds that they then distributed to growers on credit on which they charged interest, often at usurious rates. They provided growers with a coupon that guaranteed purchase of the harvest in an amount correlated to the seed distributed. Typically, payment to small growers after they delivered their harvest would take much longer than to large growers receiving payment directly from Impulsora Agrícola, perhaps a month or more. If a small grower tried to challenge the conditions of the contract farming system, they would be shut out of opportunities to sell to malt factories and be forced to sell their harvest for fodder at a lower price.^[86]

Intermediaries developed an extraordinary amount of control over the barley-malt-beer production chain in the 1960s by taking advantage both of the vulnerabilities of small holders desperate for income and of the efficiencies built into Impulsora Agrícola’s harvest collection practices.^[87] In a context of weak government support for agricultural extension, low levels of public credit, especially for small growers, and high levels of local corruption, profiteering intermediaries and hoarders, whose primary allegiance was neither to agricultural extension nor even to Impulsora Agrícola, mediated the dissemination of new technologies in malt barley production. Through the 1960s, grower complaints about speculation and exploitation at the hands of intermediaries and hoarders were steady. For example, growers accused intermediaries of charging higher rates for seeds than allowed for by industry agreements or, more commonly, of falsely alleging that barley was of poor quality to allow them to pay lower prices for it.^[88] In essence, intermediaries and hoarders were accused of subterfuge to get around price guarantees between Impulsora Agrícola and campesinos; by driving down prices and taking advantage of small growers, intermediaries were even blamed for the outmigration of campesinos from the countryside.^[89]

Small growers pushed back against the conditions of the contract farming system, urging agricultural credit unions and producer organizations to appeal to the federal government to take action. Through the Unión Nacional de Productores de Cebada and its regional affiliates, all part of the ruling party-allied Confederación Nacional Campesina, they pressed the federal government to intervene to guarantee prices, assist with credit, and create more options for delivery of their harvests, all of which would diminish their dependence on intermediaries.^[90] For a brief period, it seemed like the pressure had worked. In the mid-1960s, the government played a larger role in negotiating the relationship between growers and the industry. In 1965, the Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería coordinated an agreement between the Unión Nacional de Productores de Cebada (the barley malt growers association), and the Cámara Nacional de la Industria de la Cerveza y de Malta (the national chamber of brewers and maltsters) that guaranteed prices for that year’s harvest, including differential prices for Toluca I and semilla criolla. The agreement also enabled growers to sell directly to maltsters, who through Impulsora Agrícola agreed to cover the cost for barley to be brought to malt factories by train. Growers could only be penalized on price if their product had excess humidity, if they used unapproved seeds, or if germination exceeded industry regulations.^[91] But the influence of the agreement was limited by the fact that the focus of the Unión Nacional de Productores de Cebada remained more on politics than on helping small growers gain autonomy and access within the contract farming system. Other producer organizations, such as the Unión Nacional de Cebaderos, also worked to improve conditions for growers, but they were often overshadowed by the politically-connected, ruling party-allied Unión Nacional de Productores de Cebada, limiting their ability to represent grower interests.^[92]

The malt and beer industries, for their part, remained on the sidelines of grower organization politics. While concerned about the impact of turbulent organizational politics on production, they saw producer organizations as a potential filter managing the contractual relationships with growers that could help them expand production to meet industry demand. Amid a lack of coherent and well-funded state-led extension programs, owners saw that producer organizations could be key in disseminating new technologies and processes to geographically-dispersed growers.^[93] But producer organizations remained mired in politics and largely failed to fulfill that role.

Instead, intermediaries remained a controlling actor in the malt barley industry.^[94] By the 1970s, even brewers were complaining, accusing hoarders of creating supply bottlenecks. Though they relied on intermediaries to connect them to small- and medium-sized growers, they now viewed intermediaries as their principal problem to expanding and modernizing the malt barley industry. But experts were skeptical that the brewing triopoly would intervene to facilitate direct contracts with small growers. Rather, the beer industry’s steady growth put constant pressure on the malt barley industry to continue the expansion and intensification of domestic production at all costs. By that time, imported malt barley accounted for less than two percent of the total consumed.^[95] In the face of the unrelenting pressure on the brewing industry to meet the exploding demand for Mexican beer, exasperated agricultural researchers at the National Center for Teaching, Research, and Extension of Chapingo asked simply, “With what barley are they going to produce it?”^[96]

7 Conclusion

The disruption to rural social relations caused by the arrival of new technologies of agricultural production in mid-century Mexico was extensive. But, as seen, official support for these new technologies remained strong because they promised higher yields and less dependence on grain imports. Yet the Green Revolution, in the end, fell short of fulfilling these promises. While production did expand substantially due to the work of the MAP, the trade-offs were high in the form of a narrowed genetic base, the displacement of small-scale farming, and rural-to-urban migration.^[97] Moreover, the MAP “matched the needs of a particular group of farmers whose resources were greater and who tended to be located in Northern Mexico.”^[98] Indeed, the MAP was never able to transform corn production in the way foreign technicians intended, in part because their experience with the U.S. land grant model did not translate well to Mexico’s largely subsistence-based corn farming. As a result, as corn consumption increased during the twentieth century, Mexico’s reliance on corn imports grew along with it. Even the wheat sector, which due to its comparatively heavier reliance on large-scale farming made it more attractive to the MAP, had ambivalent results. In some years, Mexico’s wheat production filled domestic demand, but the industry continued to rely on price subsidies, and it was never able to break its reliance on imports consistently. Food insecurity may have diminished between the 1940s creation of the MAP and the 1970s, but dependence on staple grain imports persisted; by 1989, “Mexico had become one of the largest food-deficit countries in the developing world, having to import 40% of its grain requirements.”^[99]

Barley was never a focus of Green Revolution technicians and officials in Mexico, yet the promotion and protection of commercial agriculture with research, public loans, subsidies, and investment in infrastructure served the interests of its large-scale producers. Investment in irrigation, in particular, transformed the industry by shifting production away from the central valley, where scarce rains, longer growing seasons, and less capital available for new technologies characterized the situation for the small-scale growers there. By the 1970s, Impulsora Agrícola turned its focus to irrigated regions that employed newer and larger-scale production processes and technologies in states such as Querétaro, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and further north.^[100] At the same time, the obstacles to creating a durable new knowledge system that could transform the industry among medium- and small-farmers located in the central valley remained in place, including the lack of direct access to new technologies due to capital constraints and the control of the production chain and thus technological diffusion by profiteering intermediaries. As Edwin Wellhausen succinctly summed up, “All farmers have not benefited equally from the technological advances [of the Green Revolution].” Unable to purchase the new technologies of malt barley production – new seed varieties and the fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and irrigation they required – campesinos were increasingly closed out as agrobusiness concerns exercised growing influence over agricultural decision-making.^[101] As historian Mikael Wolfe concluded in his study of water management in La Laguna in the first half of the twentieth century, “Mexico’s agricultural modernization, which included adoption of the water and chemical-intensive Green Revolution, resulted in a sharp upward distribution of social, economic, and natural resources to the disproportionate detriment of ejidos and Mexico’s food self-sufficiency in basic staples by the 1970s.”^[102]

This “upward distribution” was facilitated by public disinvestment in research and extension, especially after agricultural surpluses in the late 1960s convinced the government that research was no longer a priority. Many INIA regional research stations consequently had low activity during those years, a situation worsened by low salaries and poor career opportunities that drove out experienced researchers. After decades of U.S.-Mexican collaboration around expanding Mexico’s agricultural research and extension capacity, research stagnated. While technical education in agricultural schools continued to grow slowly, the reality was that “many more people with a fundamental knowledge of the basic sciences and rural-development skills [were] needed.” Moreover, public disinvestment in research and extension “prevent[ed] the spread of modern technology to a greater number of farmers.”^[103] This created an opportunity for the private sector to mediate the implementation of Green Revolution technologies and, in the case of the barley industry, to adapt them to serve the needs of urban industry.

By then, a brewing triopoly with a monopsony over the malt barley industry gave the private sector an unusual level of control over agricultural research and extension.^[104] Limited competition allowed for the marginalization of traditional practices and the centralization of authority over the use and dissemination of new technologies. An extensive contract farming system ensured the unidirectional flow of information and technologies to most medium- and small-growers, as intermediaries sought profits through taking advantage of grower dependency and coercive mechanisms such as conditional credit, limiting local adaptation and innovation. The Green Revolution thus restructured agriculture to serve a developmentalist project that prioritized urban industrial growth at the expense of local practices.

Barley was Mexico’s first grain agroindustry to develop an extensive contract farming system. Others would follow during the neoliberal transitions of the 1980s and 1990s, as they restructured in order to take advantage of more open global markets.^[105] The malt industry continued to grow and innovate during these decades, with Impulsora Agrícola supporting new, more modern malting facilities and larger-scale growing practices. But the malt barley industry could not keep up with surging demand as Mexico’s beer took over global markets; malt imports have consequently grown in part because they are cheaper and easier to access than domestic sources, which often still are grown and processed far from breweries.^[106] What has not changed in recent decades is Impulsora Agrícola, which continues to provide opportunities to domestic growers while using its dominance to manipulate prices and purchasing. And as the brewing industry grows into a global behemoth, locals continue to complain of their loss of autonomy to make decisions over local production.^[107]