Tortilla Wars.

The Mexican tortilla is under siege by U.S. multinationals, NAFTA, government downsizing, and white bread. Mexicans cans eat lots of tortillas--3,650 a year on average, for each man, woman, and child. But averages are misleading. In Mexico, there are bread-eaters and there are tortilla-eaters. Bread people are most often members of the middle and upper classes and of European descent. Tortilla eaters are often poor and dark and of Indian and mestizo lineage. They are in the majority.

Tortillas can be eaten solo, wrapped around a filler of roast pork in a taco, or deployed in the tostada, the flauta, the chalupa, the sope, the zapato the chimichanga, and the enchilada. Tortillas can be as big as bicycle wheels (a Oaxacan specialty), as fat as a prized hen (Michoacan's gorditas), or as small as a poker chip (a treat sold on Mexico City streets). Most often, tortillas are fashioned from corn, but floppy white flour tortillas are featured in the north of the country.

For nine decades, Dona Teresa Garcia's daily routine has been governed by the tortilla. Arising in the frozen dawn, Dona Teresa, a Purepecha Indian matriarch who counts great-great-grandchildren among her descendants, chops wood, lays the fire on the hearth in the leaky plank kitchen, and sets about grinding purple Indian corn on her rough stone matate. Whipping a big clay comal (griddle) onto the morning blaze, she slaps out the tortillas (uchuskatas in Purepecha) for the first meal of the day.

Later, Dona Tere will set the corn to soak in big clay pots filled with a solution of cal, or quick lime. In the evening, she gathers her granddaughters around her and they shuck the new corn that has been drying on stalks down in the valley below this remote hillside hamlet. Teresa Garcia is one of the few women to farm her own fields here in Tanaco, 200 miles west of Mexico City. She keeps the rough-hewn cabin where she stores the harvest full to the roof.

Like most country fare, Dona Tere's tortillas are a lot more substantial than what most city dwellers eat. The seed stock of her maize has been protected for centuries, and the Indian "pinto" corn produces a thick, sturdy tortilla, while city tortillas are often thin as toilet tissue and fashioned from a corn-flour mix rather than the whole kernel.

Tortilla dough is manufactured in two distinct ways in Mexico today. The ancient way favored by Dona Tere now accounts for less than half the tortillas sold in Mexico City. The new way is to use corn-flour mix, most of it marketed by the Maseca-Gruma empire. Archer Daniels Midland owns 22 percent of Maseca-Gruma.

NAFTA opened the floodgates to cheap, high-tech corn from the United States and Canada. Fourteen million tons were bought in 1998, almost tripling pre-NAFTA levels and exceeding limits set by the free trade treaty by millions of tons; imports were supposed to rise gradually over a fifteen-year period. Mexican farmers could not compete, in large part because most corn in Mexico is grown on tiny plots of less than five acres and farmed by hand. The onslaught is driving small Indian farmers out of the domestic corn market and pushing them off their land.

The Cargill Corporation and other transnationals are taking their place. The largest privately owned corporation in the world, Cargill chalked up a half billion dollars in profits last year on sales of $51 billion--roughly the equivalent of Mexico's entire federal budget. According to industry estimates, in 1998 Cargill accounted for 40 percent of Mexico's grain imports and bought up to 10 percent of the harvest. This year's numbers are expected to be 50 percent and 30 percent.

Making matters worse, the Zedillo government is dismantling the federal grain distribution agency, Conasupo. The agency was first established sixty years ago to feed the poor and keep farmers on the land. It has fallen into ill repute in recent years as former directors like Raul Salinas, brother of former president Carlos Salinas, brought in shiploads of bad beans and radioactive milk and used agency trucks to move drug loads north. It also made the Maseca-Gruma company rich.

The owner of Maseca-Gruma--Roberto Gonzalez Barrera, known as "the King of the Tortilla" and a Forbes magazine-celebrated billionaire--has had a lifelong friendship with the Salinas family. During the presidency of Carlos Salinas, the federal grain distribution agency shifted all its subsidized corn sales to Maseca, freezing out the nixtamaleros (people like Dona Teresa, who produce tortillas by the old method), who were forced to buy corn at the market price. The market price for corn was much higher than the subsidized price Conasupo offered to the harineros (flour folks). The policy switch handed Gonzalez 52 percent of the national tortilla market. So grateful was Gonzalez to Carlos Salinas that he provided him with a private jet to flee Mexico after brother Raul was indicted for murder.

For some, the tortilla is an extension of the spoon--used to sop up spicy moles and exotic chile sauces. But for too many Mexicans, the tortilla is all there is to eat. Thirteen million children living in what the government calls "extreme poverty" derive 80 percent of their caloric intake from tortillas, according to studies by Dr. Adolfo Chavez at the National Nutrition Institute. In many communities, Dr. Chavez laments, even beans have become a luxury. The National Nutrition Institute calculates that 40 percent of the Mexican population of 96 million suffers from some degree of malnutrition and three out of every ten citizens, or 29 million people, are afflicted with anemia.

Because the diet of so many poor people is dependent on the tortilla, health authorities have proposed to enrich tortilla masa with five nutrients. But in February 1999, the enriched masa was still not available at all the inner city tortillerias.

On New Year's Day, the Zedillo administration closed down its big-city tortilla subsidy programs that have kept the urban poor fed for generations. It also announced the unprecedented, if short-lived, liberation of tortilla prices--which meant removing governmental controls and allowing the tortilla to find its true price on the market. The most essential product in the diet of poor Mexicans shot up to six pesos a kilo (about thirty-five tortillas) before the Commerce Secretariat moved to fix the price again--at 3.5 pesos, more than doubling tortilla prices from the previous January. Then plummeting oil prices resulted in three steep budget cuts. Hopes for continued subsidies finally died in the 1999 budget, which is the most austere since the lean years following the revolution.

Mexicans get rattled when tortillas are hard to find. The last time the national palace was burned to the ground was by an angry mob after the 1910-1917 revolution, when tortilla stocks ran low. In May of 1995, at the nadir of economic collapse sparked by peso devaluation, residents of a down-at-the-heels Monterey railyard colony stopped a freight train and broke open boxcars filled with imported corn. Police were summoned, and the clashes that ensued had the look of a scene from the Mexican revolution. "At least I have some corn for tortillas," one woman, the grain hidden away in her apron, told the national daily La Jornada.

The nexus between NAFTA and the tortilla supply is illustrated by a curious incident that took place in 1995, the treaty's second year, when the imports began to soar. U.S. and Canadian yellow feed corn is considered inferior here and is supposed to be destined exclusively for animals. To make this clear, the shippers started pumping green dye into the boxcars of corn headed for Mexican livestock. Within weeks, green tortillas started showing up at many of the nation's 40,000 tortillerias.

John Ross's first work of friction, "Tonatiuh's People," was recently published by Cinco Puntos Press (El Paso).