Mexican Corn Corporations Manipulate Prices

ByMexico Solidarity

This article by Braulio Carbajal originally appeared in the November 27, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

The country’s large flour mills have the power to manipulate corn prices by offering payments below production costs, both producers and the country’s antitrust authority agreed, which also determined at the time that there are no adequate conditions of competition in the sector.

Corn producers explained that companies like Maseca, Minsa, and Cargill continue to pay “unfair” prices for white corn, which is for human consumption and used in the production of masa and tortillas. They explained that while these companies sell a ton of flour for 17,000 pesos, they pay less than a third of that price for a ton of corn.

In October 2024, the now defunct Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE) preliminarily concluded that in Mexico “there are no competitive conditions in the market for nixtamalized corn flour sold to tortilla shops,” in a market dominated by Gruma, which has the power to “set high prices,” without other companies being able to provide sufficient competition.

“There is an oligopoly, meaning that a few companies control the market for buying corn for tortillas. The business in Mexico is in the hands of Gruma, Minsa, and Cargill. Given the limited number of buyers in the country, the sellers, in this case the small producers, have to accept the conditions set by these companies,” said Víctor Quintana, an expert in the agricultural sector.

At the time, the then COFECE estimated that Gruma accounted for between 50 and 90 percent of sales in eight regions into which it had divided the country.

“In some regions, almost nine out of every 10 kilos of flour are sold by Gruma. We identified a market share between two and nine times higher than its biggest competitor in each of the regions, with an average price almost 10 percent higher than that of its competitors,” the report stated.

It was revealed that Minsa, the company owned by the family of Altagracia Gómez, Claudia Sheinbaum ‘s business advisor, received a 346 million peso contract this year from the federal government, through direct award, “to fulfill the objective of the Rural Supply Program in its Corn for All Component.”

“There is a lack of will on the part of industry”

Rubén Vázquez de la Rosa, representative of the Committee for the Improvement of Guanajuato Agriculture, stated that large flour mills are manipulating the market by hiding behind the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to pay Mexican farmers the same price for white corn as for yellow corn, which is mainly genetically modified and comes almost entirely from the United States.

“Mexican corn is a specialty grain, non-GMO, and intended for human consumption. Flour mills sell a ton of flour for around 17,000 pesos, but they want to pay us a third of what it’s worth. We’re not asking them to lose money, just to reduce their profits a little. There’s a lack of will on the part of the industry,” he pointed out.

According to official data, between January and October Mexico imported 40.7 million tons of grains and oilseeds, an unprecedented figure since records began (1993), which also represents an increase of 3.5 percent compared to the previous record of 39.33 million tons reported in the same period last year.

Corn (both white and yellow) remains the main driver of growth in Mexican grain imports. In the first 10 months of the year, the country acquired a record volume of 21.2 million tons.