Evidence for Change: The Case of Subsidios al Campo in Mexico

Abstract

The Subsidios al Campo campaign used Mexico’s freedom of information laws to obtain official data on the recipients of agricultural subsidies, and then published the data online. Its analysis brought a large amount of new information into the public domain, and managed to shift the debate about agricultural subsidies from a focus on their overall size to a discussion of how equitably they were being distributed, challenging a powerful agricultural industry in the process. The Mexican Ministry of Agriculture reacted by reforming the system to ensure that subsidies were flowing only to those that needed them.