Mexico: López Obrador’s First Year

Although some of the programmes in this area are among the government’s priorities, as of August 2019, they had significantly underspent the resources they had been allocated for 2019. This was the case of the ‘Farming Credit’ programme (which provides accessible loans for agriculture and transfers of livestock) and ‘Planting Life’ (a programme to plant fruit trees and trees for timber in the south-east region of the country), both of which seek to benefit small-scale farmers by providing support to boost their income. By this date they had only made progress against their targets of 29% and 39%, respectively. Nevertheless, in the 2020 budget, the ‘Planting Life’ programme received an increase of 62% relative to 2019. Resources for the ‘Farming Credit’ programme were reduced by 76%, but subsidies for basic goods increased by 61%.