In May 2013 the government of Mexico revised its anticipated annual growth rate down from 3.4 to 3.1 per cent (the US rate at this time was around 2.4 per cent). Almost at the same time, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) declared that Mexico needed to get serious about structural reforms that would reduce job protections for unionised workers, increase competition in telecommunications and banking and reduce the size of the informal sector. After more than two decades of neoliberal reform, the OECD's solution to Mexico's ‘slow’ growth was more neoliberalism (see the Economist, 25 May 2013). These recent events echoed an observation in this volume's introduction: in 2004, confronted with evidence that poverty was growing in Mexico despite neoliberal policy reforms, the World Bank declared that those prescriptions had been inadequately applied and that the cure was ‘further doses of neoliberal reform’ (p. 13).

The editors of Neoliberalism and Commodity Production begin with this paradox – that despite the fact that market fundamentalism has had devastating effects for many Mexicans, and arguably for the Mexican economy as a whole, policy-makers continue to recommend more of the same. The volume's introduction lays out a clear definition of neoliberalism: ‘a right-wing economic philosophy that emphasizes laissez-faire free markets, free trade, and private property’, while eschewing government intervention and regulation (p. 1). It also provides a useful timeline of neoliberalism's implementation in Mexico. The editors’ stated goal is to move beyond sweeping statements about neoliberal policy regimes and political rationality (neoliberalism with a capital ‘N’) to accounts of how it is experienced in the lives of small producers in a variety of economic sectors (neoliberalism with a small ‘n’). The ‘small n’ neoliberal changes they document include privatisation of ejidal and communal lands; the removal of price supports for coffee, corn, beans, wheat and sugar; the opening of the Mexican market to vast quantities of subsidised corn from the United States; changes to laws governing water, mineral and timber rights that have enabled privatisation; privatisation and decentralisation of water and fisheries management; the drying up of credit for small-scale farmers; and the replacement of production supports for small farmers with income transfers through poverty programmes. Each chapter of this volume documents one or more of these processes. Taken together, the chapters show that neoliberalism across many sectors has driven small producers to migrate and has rendered entire communities dependent on remittances; at the same time, it has increased inequality by enabling massive transfers of assets from the poor and middle classes to elites. At the level of the nation as a whole, the editors make the case that neoliberalism has not only ruined entire sectors of the economy but has destroyed its integrative framework, leaving instead a set of disconnected centres of commodity booms and busts. The volume is organised around specific commodity chains as a way to trace connections between policy shifts at the national level (often mandated by international organisations) and the organisation of production in communities and localities. The editors argue that tracing the chains makes visible the sites where human beings ‘earn livelihoods, make decisions and cope with the ever-changing conditions of the particular industries and markets in which they take part’ (p. 15). It also links the decisions of the poor and middle classes to those made in corporate boardrooms and government ministries.

As is the case with most edited collections, the chapters in this volume are somewhat uneven and engage the book's overarching framework to different degrees. While the editors provide a clear definition of neoliberalism, some authors expand that definition considerably to include such disparate phenomena as democratisation, mercantilism and technocratic vision. Alvarez's paper on mangoes and limes argues that USDA regulation of Mexican fruit exports is a neoliberal trend, and while that is arguably true, it does not explain how that fits with a supposed hallmark of neoliberal policy emphasis: dismantling regulatory frameworks. Several authors seem to struggle to make connections between their case and larger policy changes. There is unevenness in the ethnographic detail and depth of analysis of the chapters, but in the end, the whole proves greater than the sum of the parts in the sense that the volume provides a fairly comprehensive picture of the grassroots consequences of market fundamentalist policies in rural Mexico over the last three decades.

This book is likely to be most valuable to scholars of Mexico who are looking for an overview of the grassroots dimensions of Mexico's economic development over the past few decades. It also provides useful case studies for a broader group of scholars and practitioners interested in rural development, small-scale agricultural production and community-based sustainability initiatives. The decision to focus on all aspects of neoliberalism, rather than, say, the effects of specific forms of privatisation or decentralisation, makes the work of less value to scholars who want to understand the specific impacts of policy change. The lack of attention to shifts in the agendas promoted by international organisations – for example, their turn to ‘soft’ or ‘second wave’ neoliberalism – will frustrate those who want to see more careful lines drawn between policy and local impacts.

While some scholars have suggested that we are now in a post-neoliberal period, the quotation from the OECD above suggests that such a view is optimistic at best. And even if economic crisis and worldwide protests against inequality have led to reconsideration of neoliberalism's merits as a political rationality and policy framework, the profound changes in local communities documented in this volume will be felt for a long time.