WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 78

Ideal—well into the 1930s, and the Ideal Bakery certainly didn't live up to its name: thanks to antiquated
wrapping equipment, Ideal loaves tended to reach customers' hands covered in mold. As a 1939 survey
revealed, despite the promises of revolutionary governments, “wheat bread is almost a luxury good in
Mexico, destined almost exclusively for the middle and upper classes.” 50
Bad weather and poor corn and wheat harvests between 1943 and 1945 turned everyday grain scarcity
into acute crisis. Even with government bread subsidies, prices soared beyond the reach of urban con-
sumers. Roving gangs of frustrated consumers attacked bakeries in Mexico City, and bread riots spread
throughout the country. In May 1945, protests against a 100 percent increase in the price of bread shut
down the capital city of Veracruz state. That same spring, U.S. ambassador George Messersmith warned
Washington that without emergency shipments of corn and wheat, Mexico would “fly a [Communist]
red flag in three months time.” 51
U.S. officials responded with a mixture of anxiety and opportunism. A food crisis in Mexico
threatened to destabilize a southern neighbor already perceived as unpredictable and prone to anti-im-
perialist outbursts. At the same time, hunger could also create opportunities for the furthering of U.S
interests. The election of right-leaning Manuel Ávila Camacho as president in 1940 had signaled a turn
away from Lázaro Cárdenas's radical social reforms and anti-U.S. rhetoric, creating an opening for
closer ties with the United States. A friendly display of U.S. food power could help seal that rapproche-
ment.
With war-ravaged Europe absorbing all the grain America could spare, however, the United States
could not fight on another food front with exports alone. Rhetoric aside, U.S. farmers could not save
the whole world. Industrial food power would have to expand to include other weapons beside direct
exports of surplus grain. Henry Wallace, FDR's secretary of agriculture and then vice president, under-
stood this challenge as early as 1940. While representing the Roosevelt administration at President Ávila
Camacho's inauguration, Wallace observed the country's need for agricultural improvement firsthand
and listened to the new leader's plan. Ávila Camacho pledged to steer Mexico away from radical land
redistribution and support for peasant farmers. Instead, he would fight hunger and spur urban develop-
ment through investments in capital-intensive agriculture. On his return to Washington, Wallace set out
to convince policy makers that the United States must join in efforts to modernize Mexican agriculture,
for the sake of hemispheric security—even if it threatened grain exporters at home.
The Rockefeller Foundation, which had already begun to formulate similar ideas on its own, agreed
to the vice president's plea. As the foundation's influential report “The World Food Situation” declared
later, “The time is now ripe, in most places possibly over-ripe for sharing some of our technical know-
ledge with these people.” “Agitators from Communist countries,” the Rockefeller Foundation warned,
were taking advantage of America's failure to share its alimentary abundance. “Appropriate action
now,” the foundation argued, “may help [Third World countries] to attain by evolution the improve-
ments … which otherwise may have to come by revolution.” 52
EL TRIGO DE ROCKEFELLER
What the Rockefeller Foundation proposed had never been tried before: a private U.S. foundation, in
collaboration with Washington and a foreign government, would set out to transform the entire agri-
cultural system of another country, from the ground up, in the image of the United States. Maybe U.S.
farmers couldn't save the whole world from Communist takeover all on their own, but U.S.-style farm-
ing practices might.
In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation established the Office of Special Studies (later called the Mex-
ican Agricultural Program, or MAP) in collaboration with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. Over