Calderón's New Plan to Help Mexicans Eat

Felipe Calderón announced a plan to help stabilize the prices of basic staples yesterday. The 19-piece scheme involves a variety of measures, from removing tariffs on wheat and rice to subsidizing fertilizer for small farmers. Calderón is promising big money to support the plan; some $20 billion of windfall oil profits will go toward maintaining gas prices at their present level, and another $450 million will be used to pay for increases in the payments to Mexicans enrolled in Oportunidades, the government's targeted welfare program.

I'm interested to see what independent economists say about the plan; as a matter of policy, it's a bit out of my depth. Thus far I've heard only one government expert discussing it, and he was predictably biased. From a political standpoint, this should be a winning strategy for the PAN. The party is already viewed as a basically responsible entity, a party that can be trusted to run the federal government, unlike the PRD. The main complaint against the PAN is that it is home to a lot of right-wing kooks, which it is. However, Calderón is said to be pretty distant from the looniest wingnuts, and if he makes a consistent effort to tack visibly to the center, the PAN could eat into a lot of soft center-left support for the PRD and PRI. However, popular skepticism being what it is, one program will not be enough to recast the PAN. Indeed, the reaction of many campesino organizations to Calderón's 19 points was decidedly hostile.