El sector agroalimentario en la estrategia de crecimiento y desarrollo de México: de la sustitución de importaciones a la liberalización comercial

Abstract

The agroalimentary sector in Mexico’s growth and development strategy: from imports substitution to free trade. As from the seventies, the structuralistic approach to the theory of growth and development indicates that foreign trade becomes a restriction for itself, and the results of this assay confirm this idea. Although in the strategy of commercial aperture an explicit function is not assigned to the agroalimentary sector, meaning little support is given to this item, it has had, as a matter of fact, a better performance than the whole economy in the years of crisis. From the year 1986, when Mexico adopted the strategy of growth supported on the commercial liberalization, the agroalimentary sector has shown, almost every year, a commercial deficit, increasing the alimentary dependency from abroad, according to the evolution shown by the Mexican agroalimentary trade balance during the period of 1970-2000. The tendency of the agroalimentary production trade shows that the insufficient national input production for the agroindustrial subsector, coming basically from the farming subsector, leads to an important increase of the imports and aggravates the commercial deficit.