Mexico Acknowledges Effects of Food Crisis
I’m a little behind in posting this, but I was reminded of it again just the other day. In July, I posted a blog about the international food crisis and its effects on coffee-farming families we work with in Mexico (“Coffee Families Confront the International Food Crisis”). The Mexican government has stepped in to help regulate prices on basic commodities by putting a price freeze on 150 items, including tortillas, coffee and beans.
The article, “Mexico, Industry Agree to Freeze Prices on 150 Items,” at Bloomberg.com, looks at the effects of high inflation and a decrease in money being sent home by immigrants. According to the article, prices have increased 4.95 percent. Price increases are felt more acutely in the remote communities where coffee is produced. 
The author has a series of articles and also recently published a story looking into the effect of falling remittances (money sent home by immigrants) on the Mexican economy. The article cites a 2.2 percent drop in remittances for the first half of the year, which is the first decline in remittances since the government began tracking the data in 1995.
Anti-immigration forces may applaud the effectiveness of stopgap border patrol policies, but unfortunately this means that families in Mexico will suffer as people are shut off from reliable work and businesses in the US will be without labor as we enter the harvest season. And since we are entering the countdown to November elections, legislators will continue to avoid confronting the problem for fear of losing voters on both sides of the issue.