Obese Mexico

Last year, on the occasion of Visti a Vedrò, we interviewed Davide Cadore, who told us about the experience of Nutricity, a company and agency focused on food and nutrition research. Starting with this profile on Mexico, we are launching a collaboration with him and Nutricity that will allow us to deepen, through a wide-ranging effort, Lo Spazio della Politica's research on the intersection of sport, health, welfare systems, agriculture, eating habits and food innovation.

That Mexico is a country of stark contradictions is news a century old. In constant conflict with the United States throughout the 1800s, the object of Spanish ambitions that sought to violate the principle of the Monroe Doctrine — "the Americas for the Americans" — Mexico went through long years of civil war that led to a regime lasting nearly 70 years, revolutionary in name but social-democratic and chiefly corrupt in practice, emblematically contradictory even in its very name, "partido revolucionario istitucional".

Mexico is a difficult country in physical and geographical terms as well. It is vast in size (200 million hectares), of which only 24 million can actually be used for agriculture, with a population estimated at around 112 million inhabitants according to the most recent available census, concentrated in megalopolises such as Mexico City, perennially on the podium of the world's most populous cities and at the top of less flattering rankings tied to crime and mortality rates.

The great food transition

But it is by looking at the country's economic and productive system that the contradictions animating the world's thirteenth-largest economy, according to the World Bank index, truly seem to explode.
In 2005 Goldman Sachs ranked the "land of the siesta" among the top 5 world economies for 2050, but the effects of the 2007 global banking crisis had repercussions on Mexico that seem to expose all of the country's fragilities. Energy resources, still largely publicly owned, represent the leading sector of Mexican industry, which is also the top automobile producer in the Americas thanks to US and Canadian offshoring to the famous maquilladoras. In this context, where telecommunications (Telefonica above all) and finance (Bolsa is the continent's third-largest stock exchange) also play a major role in the composition of GDP, agriculture still employs something like 20% of the population, while accounting for no more than 3% of domestic product, as in the wealthiest Western states. And it is precisely this contradiction that interests us most, because here the country's economic structure is inextricably intertwined with its social characteristics and national psychology.

While 90% of exports head in a single direction, the US, the North American neighbor and partner in the world's largest free trade agreement (Nafta) also supplies 55% of Mexican imports.
Despite the free trade agreement signed with the EU in 2000 and the one being finalized with China, Mexico remains heavily dependent on the US market, as demonstrated by the dire effects of the 2007 banking crisis.

Contrary to the European example, characterized by a certain homogeneity of internal markets, a comparison between Mexico and the United States appears risky even after 20 years of Nafta in operation.
It must be acknowledged that the feared trade diversion effects did not materialize, and that the bet on the growth of a genuine Mexican domestic consumer market proved unprecedented. The speed with which an "omnivorous and ravenous" domestic market was born and developed brought with it a twin phenomenon, itself a child of the dynamics tied to the internationalization of markets: the persistence of heavy pockets of poverty and malnutrition. In 2008 the International Life Science Institute, speaking of Mexico, described what was being recorded in the country as one of the greatest food and nutrition transitions of our times. And indeed, comparing the data on food consumption that the Mexican government has collected since 1958, the change of course in the Mexican diet leaps strikingly to the eye, especially over the last 20 years. In 1999 the data collected revealed eating behaviors (particularly among women under 50) resulting from the developments following Nafta's entry into force: after cereals, the largest share of daily calories came from massive consumption of so-called "soft drinks" — packaged beverages such as coffee, tea, and sweetened and carbonated drinks in general. Mexico's consumption of so-called "soft drinks" is unequaled anywhere in the world, at around 160 liters per person per year.

Mexico's food transition brings with it an upheaval in the somewhat stigmatized paradigm of rapidly developing countries: not so much economic development at the price of persistent pockets of poverty, but rather the overwhelming emergence of pathologies typical of affluent Western society — what we usually call "diseases of affluence," such as type 2 diabetes, which together with obesity now afflicts a staggering share of the population, with healthcare costs that risk becoming unsustainable, since these are diseases requiring continuous, personalized care.

Obesity, the scourge of Mexico

While on the one hand diseases attributable to diets lacking in vitamin and protein variety, such as goiter and anemia, still appear widespread, on the other hand the abuse of carbonated and sweetened beverages — which in some regions represent a more convenient and cheaper source of hydration than water wells — has made obesity the scourge of Mexico (it is estimated that the obese now make up 1/3 of the population, approaching 70% if only the adult male population is considered, according to data released by GAIN, the Global Agricultural Information Network, in 2010, a research body of the US Department of Agriculture). Ironically, during 2012 the Mexican Parliament rejected a bill proposing a 20% surtax on "soft drinks" on the grounds that this fiscal tightening would have caused a marked regression in access to and supply of drinkable liquids, since access to drinking water cannot be guaranteed to the entire population.

Mexico has made giant strides in telephone technologies, as the immense fortune of Carlos Slim, the magnate of Latin American telephony, reminds us, as well as in the banking and insurance sectors tied to the US giants across the border, but the limits of a never-completed infrastructure system of basic services (water, electricity, gas) remain on the table.

Over the past 30 years, Mexican politics has tried to compensate for these structural shortcomings by pushing a potentially substitutive network of commercial services, deployed on a very large scale and at rock-bottom costs. Nafta played a fundamental role in all this, making it possible to develop distribution networks for soft drinks, fast food, and canned and packaged food products capable of reaching the most remote corners of the country at prices affordable even for the less well-off classes. And this is precisely where the problem lies. With this system the country was able to enjoy undeniable short-term economic growth advantages, clearly setting itself apart from the many cases of stunted development that characterize the Latin American continent, but in the long term it hints at a risk that is difficult to calculate in terms of public sustainability on the healthcare front. Entire areas of the country have gone from a state of malnutrition due to lack of food to a state of malnutrition due to a hypercaloric diet, rich in fats and based on large quantities of very poor quality food.

From lemons to soda

From the macroeconomic standpoint, too, the problem presents itself in full view. Food distribution is a highly profitable market in Mexico, one that has absorbed a large share of the lowest-income segments of the population by offering them job opportunities. In numerical terms, according to Euromonitor estimates now dating back to 2008, the Mexican Food&Beverage market is worth about 14 billion dollars, a figure that explains why it is so difficult to launch health prevention policies that would require massive public investment. To be fair, a market for the production and distribution of so-called functional foods is developing in Mexico more than anywhere else in Latin America — a sector that in 2008, according to estimates by the Canadian Department of Agriculture, was worth the considerable sum of 8.5 billion dollars, a sign of growing awareness of the food-related problems afflicting the country.

While the low-cost product travels through the large-scale retail chain, which is very well branched out across the entire national territory, the functional food market is developing thanks to a growing independent distribution network, concentrated mostly in the urban areas of the tourist coastal regions and in the metropolitan areas of administrative and service centers, where financial resources well above the national average are concentrated and can therefore sustain the costs of greater attention to health. Agricultural production that is meager relative to GDP, and the insurmountable limit on the extension of cultivated land dictated by Mexico's geomorphology, then translate into an evident difficulty in finding satisfactory quantities of vegetable and fruit products on the market — the basis of any healthy diet.

And all this appears even more incredible when one considers that Mexico's agronomic vocation was never extensive grain farming, but rather prized fruit and vegetable crops destined for export markets. Just to give an example, half of the planet's lemons came from this land joining the two halves of the American continent. In the absence of investments to make a present but scarce resource like water accessible and affordable, homemade lemonade was replaced by "lemon flavor" sodas — cheaper, longer-lasting, easy to distribute and profitable.

Since 2009 a massive promotional campaign has been under way for "better-for-you" products — nearly 2,000 of them, to be exact — among which the almost one thousand low-sugar or low-sodium beverages stand out: a sign of an attention to health driven far more by market logic than by the interest of public decision-makers

We thank our friends at Lo Spazio Della Politica, with whom we are thus launching a pleasant collaboration.

Source: Original Article