Peasant and indigenous households in Mexico have undergone recursive crises for decades caused by economic, socio-environmental, climatic, political and/or social events, which exacerbated vulnerabilities.
The overlapping of these vulnerabilities influences control and rights of inhabitants over territory, which in turn suppresses certain voices, reproducing political and economic exclusion. Spaces of unequal distribution of risk, marginality, and vulnerability are recreated crossed with differences due to gender, generation, ethnicity, and social class. Abrupt agrobiodiversity losses have occurred over the last three decades.
Rich milpas (polyculture based on maize) have been transformed into maize monocultures. Lack of political support as well as a shortage of labour and insufficient market opportunities have driven this agrobiodiversity decline. But in recent years, traditional maize landraces have found a new niche in the “gourmet” restaurants of Mexico City and touristic cities. Peasants are beginning to specialise in high value varieties of traditional maize landraces for the “gourmet” market, renting lands and depriving small scale peasants of land to cultivate their own milpas. At the same time, peasant and indigenous populations are consuming hybrid white maize from Sinaloa. Is this a question of food justice, land justice or both?
Speaker
Elena Lazos Chavero is a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) since 1992 and the coordinator of the Values Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). As an interdisciplinary researcher with degrees in biology and social anthropology, she has a wide range of research interests that include the long-term evolution of rural commons, history of rural conflicts and rural development, the institutional dynamics of social-ecological systems, the contradictions of traditional environmental knowledges, and the challenges of community-based management to achieve food sovereignty.
She is also interested in the risks of agrobiodiversity loss, particularly, the loss of different maize populations, and culture and power around the conservation of natural commons. She is currently working on three projects: i) Can livestock raising be sustainable in the tropical lands?; ii) Are edible insects the future of food? The case of grasshoppers in Mexico; iii) Loss of agrobiodiversity: food and land injustice in Central and South of Mexico. She has published eight books and more than 110 articles and chapters. She has supervised more than 60 theses on a wide range of political ecology issues.
For more on the Food Equity Centre, please see here.
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