Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Enrique Mejía

Location: Sweden
Primary academic field: Economic history and human ecology
Award category: PhD Holder

Guidance Memo

• Title: Priced out: Living in the shadow of industrial animal feed
• How to cite: Enrique Antonio Mejía. Priced out: Living in the shadow of industrial animal feed. Tiny Beam Fund, 26 May 2026, https://doi.org/10.15868/socialsector.52170.
• What We Learned From It:
  • This report shines a spotlight on one of industrial food animal production’s less visible consequences: Its negative impact on farmers of white maize in Mexico, focusing on the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico.
  • In Guanajuato smallholder farmers grow WHITE maize (the kind that goes into tortillas) for human food. But the price they get for their maize is not connected to how much it costs them to grow it. Instead it is based on futures contracts on the Chicago Board of Trade in the U.S. Those contracts price a different type of maize - YELLOW maize grown in the United States, and the farmers in Mexico have nothing to do with this maize. This yellow maize is imported into Mexico to feed animals raised in industrial facilities there. The price of yellow maize is always lower than that of white maize; it is exported at prices averaging 14 percent below production costs, kept cheap to feed industrial food animal production. As a result, farmers of white maize in Guanajauto are being priced out of their livelihoods.
  • The connection with yellow maize in the U.S. and the Chicago Board of Trade was not always there. It was built over eighty years through a series of policy decisions that dismantled government price supports and opened Mexico’s borders to cheap American imports.
  • Four possible futures for the Mexican countryside: 1) Nothing changes. 2) Fair pay and persistence. 3) Managed "modernization". 4) A different agriculture entirely.
  • Recommendations for changing course: Start with the cost of farming in Guanajuato, not creating cheap meat. Make the guaranteed price actually attainable. Give farmers more options to sell to. Map and fund criollo maize conservation now. Support rural community organizations. Understand the impacts of the industrial grain-oilseedlivestock complex and the pursuit of cheap meat.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

• This application focuses on a "hidden" impact of industrial animal agriculture that is seldom discussed because it seems indirect and distant. But look closer, the ramifications are in fact deep and troubling. The "hidden" impact is this: Due to the need to come up with enormous quantities of grains to feed the vast number of industrially farmed animals, the industrialization of livestock production has profoundly shaped what, where, and how grains are grown. Maize in rural Mexico - considered to be the cradle of maize domestication - serves as an excellent illustration of this impact. Instead of growing a diversity of traditional maize varieties and species, small-scale farmers in rural Mexico choose to grow only maize most suitable to be used for feeding industrial livestock. This negatively affects traditional farming practices and contributes significantly to the loss of agrodiverstiy.
• The attention to the big picture and larger context, taking into account historical forces and broad developments such as how U.S. agriculture policies and the North America Free Trade Agreement play important roles. Tiny Beam Fund is in favor of analyses that are well-rounded and nuanced, not too narrowly focused, black-and-white, or viewed with "tunnel vision". The applicant will take a political economy and economic history approach to understand the wider context.