Key takeaways
- Mexico’s landmark right-to-food law, passed in 2024, casts light on the thorny process of food system reform.
- Passage took years of effort. A supportive presidential administration, strong legislative coalition, and input from civil society, researchers, and policymakers all played important roles.
- Despite this legislative victory, implementation has stalled. Political turnover, opposition, and the breadth of the law’s content have delayed its enactment—showing the challenges of reform.
At least 30 countries around the world have an explicit right to adequate food embedded in their constitutions. But only a handful, including Brazil, Ecuador, India, and Nepal, actually have a legal framework that allows citizens to exercise that right. Without such a framework, legal scholars argue, it is difficult to ensure that governments follow through on the constitutional guarantee and can be fully accountable for delivering the right to food.
In April 2024, Mexico tried to address this weakness by enacting the General Law on Adequate and Sustainable Food, known as by its Spanish acronym, LGAAS. The General Law provides a practical legislative framework to guide Article 4 of Mexico’s constitution, which states that people have the right to nutritious, sufficient, and quality food. The emphasis on nutritious food is critical in a country where almost 37% of adults live with obesity and 18% have diabetes. Article 4 was considered a major achievement when passed in 2011, but it lacked a legal framework to ensure enforceability.
The General Law, therefore, is an important milestone in an ongoing struggle to guarantee the right to food in Mexico. However, more than two years after its passage, it remains largely unimplemented. The story of the LGAAS casts light on the arduous efforts required to not only codify and guarantee a right to quality food but also achieve meaningful food system reform. It offers insights for officeholders, policymakers, and stakeholders seeking to effect change, and for researchers trying to understand evolving food system governance.
How, then, did the Mexican Congress come to approve the General Law in 2024—ultimately winning a unanimous vote in the Chamber of Deputies? And why, despite broad public support, does it remain unimplemented today?
Comprehensive legislation
The LGAAS aims to guarantee citizens’ food rights by establishing a range of government structures, programs, and partnerships at the federal, state, and local levels focused on promoting healthy, sustainable food supplies and diets.
Thus, the law includes a vast and novel array of provisions, comprising 111 articles. A central focus is the protection of culturally appropriate food by elevating food sovereignty, defined as the capacity of Mexicans to determine their own priorities in the production, supply, and access of food, and promoting consumption of domestically produced agricultural products. To do this, the Secretariat of Health (SALUD) must develop regional food baskets that prioritize locally and sustainably produced food that adheres to each region’s cultural traditions. Meanwhile, the Secretariat of the Economy (SE) sets maximum food prices for these baskets to ensure they are affordable.
Other provisions include expansion of the national free lunch program to include healthy foods, establishment of state-level grain reserves under the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER), more stringent regulation of restaurants, and mandatory labels on products that contain genetically engineered ingredients.
The law also mandates the creation of a National Interagency System of Health, Food, Environment, and Competitiveness (SINSAMAC), housed under the presidency, to define Mexico’s national food policies. SINSAMAC is intended to facilitate coordination across ministries and levels of government to oversee implementation of all of the General Law’s provisions. The same structures are to be replicated at the state and municipal levels, with local food committees established by communities.
Building momentum
Formulating and ultimately passing this comprehensive law required years of effort by a range of supporting organizations, multi-stakeholder bodies, and legislators, continuing through periods when passage seemed at best a distant goal.
A key development was the 2009 formation of the Mexican chapter of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Parliamentary Front Against Hunger (PFH). The PFH encompasses the legislatures of more than a dozen Latin American and Caribbean countries where different political parties work with civil society, academia, and national and international organizations to elevate the right to food to the highest level of each country’s public agenda. In Mexico, the PFH’s advocacy proved instrumental to the ultimate adoption of Article 4 in 2011.
After 2011, at least four efforts to pass a comprehensive legal framework to support Article 4 failed for various reasons, including the lack of a sympathetic legislative coalition. Nevertheless, the PFH continued to make progress on discrete sets of policies and laws relevant to food and nutrition, including the Family Farming Law in 2015 and the Modification of the General Law on Health in 2019.
A key change in presidential administrations
The 2018 election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to a six-year term reshaped the political landscape around food system issues. López Obrador, a major figure on the Mexican left, won in a landslide, and party coalitions led by his National Regeneration Movement (Morena) expanded their majorities in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies.
Under López Obrador, Morena had a pro-agrarian orientation. His electoral campaign platform emphasized food self-sufficiency, support for smallholder farmers, and a reversal of trade and agricultural policies that had led Mexico to become more dependent on food imports from the United States. Consequently, while nutrition has been on Mexico’s policy agenda for almost two decades, the López Obrador administration took an avid, explicit interest in food system reform rarely seen in previous presidencies.
Under his tenure, the Intersectoral Group on Health, Food, Environment, and Competitiveness (GISAMAC) was established in February 2019 to coordinate a food systems approach among multiple Mexican stakeholders. These included SADER, SE, and SALUD, as well as the Secretariats of Public Education and Labor and Social Welfare; the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition; the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples; and the National Institute of Public Health (INSP), among many other bodies. INSP, in particular, has been instrumental in providing the empirical foundations for many of Mexico’s public health policies.
Sharpening global focus and legislative push
The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) in New York provided key impetus to action. Between April and August 2021, Undersecretary of Health Ruy López convened a series of dialogues with GISAMAC participation in the runup to the UNFSS. The dialogues involved active stakeholder engagement with human rights, consumer rights, nutrition, and agroecology civil society organizations. These included PFH, Power of the Consumer (El Poder del Consumidor), Alliance for Health Eating (Alianza por la Salud Alimentaria), and Without Maize There Is No Country (Sin Maíz No Hay País), FIAN International, Greenpeace, FAO, UNICEF, and several others.
GISAMAC took the lead in drafting the General Law, drawing on policy proposals that emerged through the dialogues.
Senator Ana Rivera, a member of Morena and the PFH, who also has an agricultural training background, then introduced the bill proposing the General Law in the Senate in October 2021.
López Obrador had already enacted several measures that would become central to the General Law’s emphasis on food sovereignty, including a decree in 2020 revoking permits from Mexico’s biosafety authorities for genetically modified (GM) imported maize—which largely came from the United States—and a decree in 2023 banning the use of GM maize for dough and tortillas and for animal feed. GISAMAC played a key role in drafting the 2023 maize decree, as well as Mexico’s front-of-pack warning labeling laws that were rolled out in 2020.
Victory in Congress
Yet, the bill languished until Rivera became president of the Senate in 2023.
Senate presidents in Mexico have procedural power, allowing Rivera to place the LGAAS on the agenda for floor debate and prioritize it over competing legislation. In February 2023, Rivera and the president of the Senate’s Commission on Social Development and Well-Being, Marcela Mora Arellano, co-organized a high-level forum focused on the LGAAS, with invited experts from INSP and elsewhere.
In September 2023, the Senate approved a draft decree for LGAAS, sending it to the Chamber of Deputies for review and approval. It was unanimously approved in March 2024 and entered into force the following month.
Areas of concession and contestation
While Mexico has been a global leader in nutrition and health policy, pushing for taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages in 2014 and front-of-package warning labels in 2020, it has nonetheless encountered corporate resistance along the way in achieving these policy reforms. For instance, in 2022 major food companies unsuccessfully challenged in the courts regulations on front-of-package labeling for packaged foods.
Corporate interests also had previously expressed concerns about components in the proposed General Law. The National Agricultural Council (CNA), an umbrella group representing the interests of various food and agricultural corporations, had publicly criticized in 2023 López Obrador’s bans on GMO maize and the use of glyphosate. The CNA claimed there was insufficient scientific evidence to prohibit glyphosate and argued that agrochemical alternatives might be more costly for producers, decrease productivity, and raise food prices.
The LGAAS’ inclusion of the precautionary principle (Article 36), which implied continuing to ban or limit such technologies and included more stringent labeling requirements, thus continued to be a source of discontent for the business community. The U.S. government also opposed certain policies written into the LGAAS, such as the 2023 maize decree, claiming that it violated the United States-Mexico-Canada (US-MCA) trade agreement; these provisions were already under litigation at the time of the LGAAS publication.
GISAMAC first attempted to bypass some of these pressures by excluding corporate actors from the group’s policymaking activities. Yet, concessions among other stakeholders soon became inevitable to ensure LGAAS moved forward. For instance, several stakeholders, such as UNICEF, had wanted legal regulations against the marketing of unhealthy foods to children; this provision was ultimately dropped in order to avoid jeopardizing the overall passage of the bill. (The precautionary principle language remained.)
Eventually, some supporters decided that the proposed text was so wide-ranging—touching on production, procurement, retail, and consumption—that it was better to push through an imperfect draft that could win enough votes than to hold out for the perfect outcome.
Obstacles to implementation
After final passage in 2024 came the next challenge: implementing LGAAS. The law’s breadth has presented serious hurdles in that regard. The regulations that guide the LGAAS implementation were originally supposed to be published by October 15, 2024. Now, more than two years after the law took effect, those rules still remain unpublished, provoking disappointment and frustration from key stakeholders instrumental to passage. In April 2026, more than 70 civil society organizations and hundreds of academics issued a declaration demanding the publication of the LGAAS regulation, the creation of SINSAMAC, and provisions on food labeling and GMO warnings.
At least two factors help to explain the delays. First, opposition by corporate actors and key ministries to the LGAAS, specifically around the GMO provision, may have convinced the current government to delay implementation. Second, the October 2024 deadline fell right after López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, took office. Although also a Morena member, Sheinbaum appointed a new cabinet after her inauguration on October 1, impacting many of the key ministries, including SADER and SE, creating turnover among bureaucrats who had been central to drafting LGAAS.
One bright spot, however, is Mexico’s federal structure and the fact that the LGAAS specified that each of the country’s 31 states (and Mexico City, not a state but with equivalent status) was required to enact its own law and to proceed with implementation. Several states, including Colima and Morelos, have approved their own laws guaranteeing access to adequate and sustainable food and establishing the food system local committees specified in the LGAAS.
Broader implications
Mexico’s experience is, so far, a partial success story—a historic and globally rare legislative achievement mostly stalled in the final implementation stage. This offers several important lessons on the political economy of food system reform.
First, a strong coalition of Mexican and transnational partners was critical to the development of LGAAS. The longstanding activism of a dense network of local civil society organizations and leading research institutions with global actors, such as FAO and UNICEF, shaped the policy agenda over a period of years and kept discussions on it front and center.
Second, LGAAS’s journey from an aspiration to law was propelled by policy champions who were able to seize critical windows of opportunity; specifically, the López Obrador administration’s interest in promoting food sovereignty created a favorable environment for promoting agroecology practices, improving health and nutrition, and preserving indigenous food traditions.
That alone was not enough, however, given the clashing interests and complexity of Mexican politics. The advocacy and political acumen of Rivera and her allies, combined with Morena’s legislative majority at the time, proved vital to propelling the agenda through the legislative process.
However, windows of opportunity are, by definition, temporary. A third lesson is that passing a law is only half the battle. Maintaining political momentum after passage, up to and through implementation, is equally important. In some ways, the impressive breadth of LGAAS became a weakness when the practicalities of financing, regulating, and monitoring its provisions became clearer. Now, the activity advancing the law’s provisions in Mexico’s states may well determine whether it becomes a replicable model or a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of overly ambitious legislation.
Danielle Resnick is a Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Markets, Trade, and Institutions (MTI) Unit and a Non-Resident Fellow with the Brookings Institution Global Economy and Development Program; Fiorella Espinosa de Candido is a Food Systems Consultant and previously worked as a nutrition official with UNICEF Mexico. Opinions are the authors’.
