Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.

View on HN

This chart

https://statbase.org/data/mex-prevalence-of-obesity-among-ad...

Says that obesity was shooting up in Mexico before that. The obesity rate doubled in the 15 years before NAFTA. After NAFTA the rate doubled again in about 30 years. I can't really see any obvious change after 1994.

Are these numbers incorrect, or were you meaning some other metric of obesity or obesity epidemic?

Good point. I should have written something like correlated with urbanization and other factors. But ever increasing percentage is a correlation. The USA obesity rate has stabilized for a year iirc, but those of Mexican heritage have some unique vulnerabilities to obesity as well so a multi factorial issue.

Likely, and then... after Mexican farms went out of business, they added biofuels, the price spiked, and Mexico had no domestic corn people could buy.

It's sort of what they want for Canada. They keep trying to attack our protected agricultural sectors, and no sane country doesn't protect their food supply. Amusingly, they want 10% of our dairy market (as a start), and they already have a few percent.

Yet we're 1/10th the size of them. So they make a massive fuss, over 5 additional percent of our market or so, which for their market size is 0.5% of its overall size. The US economy won't even notice, but the Canadian market will 10x as much. It's just petty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com