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

This article focuses on how Mexico’s brewers, backed by a collaboration of U.S. and Mexican agronomists and officials who together developed the foundations of the Green Revolution, facilitated the centralization of decision-making over new technologies of production in the malt barley industry in the mid-twentieth century. Brewers developed and enforced an extensive contract farming system dominated by a single company that gave them substantial control over the dissemination of new knowledge about seed varieties, but which created an opportunity for profit-seeking intermediaries to assume a primary role in mediating the transfer of these new technologies to small farmers. In doing so, they enabled the consolidation of a brewing triopoly that, while poised for global expansion by the 1980s, contributed to higher levels of rural inequality as it deployed Green Revolution technologies to serve large industry growth. This article therefore examines a key, though often underexplored dimension of the Green Revolution, in particular how urban industry captured new technologies aimed at ending food insecurity to serve mid-century industrialism.