Forest loss in the tropics is one of the most critical contemporary environmental problems. Understanding the complex sociopolitical and ecological forces operative in producing this problem has thus ...become an important scientific mandate. Some recent literature has suggested that modern market economy trends in Latin America—namely, rural out-migration and policies strongly favoring high-input, industry-based agriculture—have helped curtail and sometimes revert the net loss of tropical forests, mainly through afforestation of land abandoned by smallholders. Government in Mexico, a megadiverse country with one of the biggest out-migration and remittance economies in the world, has excelled in applying free-market policies and in discouraging historical smallholder agriculture. Our analysis of Mexico's development path and of recent deforestation and reforestation trends at the national, regional, and local levels shows that, contrary to expectations, net deforestation is still occurring, and that other development, agricultural, and reforestation strategies are needed.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Sustainability assessment oriented to improve current systems and practices is urgently needed, particularly in the context of small farmer natural resource management systems (NRMS). Unfortunately, ...social-ecological systems (SES) theory, sustainability evaluation frameworks, and assessment methods are still foreign not only to farmers but to many researchers, students, NGOs, policy makers/operators, and other interested groups. In this paper we examine the main achievements and challenges of the MESMIS Program (Spanish acronym for Indicator-based Sustainability Assessment Framework), a 15-year ongoing effort with impact in 60 case studies and 20 undergraduate and graduate programs mainly in Ibero-America that is attempting to cope with the stated challenges. The MESMIS experience shows that it is possible to conduct sustainability assessments in the context of small farmers through a long-term, participatory, interdisciplinary, and multi-institutional approach that integrates a solid theoretical background, a field-tested operational framework, learning tools specifically devised to facilitate the understanding of sustainability as a multidimensional and dynamic concept, and a growing set of case studies to apply to and get feedback from users. Specifically, through the dissemination of the MESMIS assessment framework in a large set of case studies in a contrasting set of social-ecological contexts, we have been able to: (a) characterize the NRMS, their subsystems, and their main interactions; (b) link attributes, i.e., general systemic properties, with sustainability indicators to assess critical socioeconomic and environmental aspects of the NRMS; (c) integrate indicators through multicriteria tools and to expose the multidimensional aspects of sustainability; (d) propose an initial multiscale assessment to articulate processes and actors at different spatial scales; (e) develop multimedia learning tools, i.e., Interactive-MESMIS, to help users understand dynamic concepts, trade-offs, and counter-intuitive behavior; and (f) promote participatory processes through role-playing games and agent-based simulation models. Key challenges are related to the need to conduct long-term longitudinal studies that fully capture system dynamic properties while at the same time actively involving relevant stakeholders through creative and lasting participative processes. We outline an improved assessment framework that should help move the program in this direction.
Although deforestation remains a continuing threat to both the natural world and its resident human populations, a countervailing land cover dynamic has been observed in many nations. This process of ...landscape turnaround, the so-called forest transition, holds the potential of regenerating ecosystem services by sparing land from agricultural activities and abandoning it to forest succession. Here, we present a case study of a long-term process of forest transition that is ongoing in the Patzcuaro watershed of the state of Michoacán, Mexico. The research to be discussed comprises a remote sensing analysis designed to (1) capture the land cover impacts of a multidecadal process of trade liberalization (1996–2018); (2) ascertain the role that land tenure plays in land use dynamics affecting forest cover, and (3) resolve forest cover types into native forest, secondary vegetation, and “commodity” covers of fruit trees, in this case, avocado. Mexico presents a useful case for addressing these three design elements. Our analysis, undertaken for both private property and collective modes of resource management in five communities, reveals a forest transition annualized at 20 ha-yr−1, or a gain of eight percent for the period. This translates into a relative rate of forest transition of 0.39%-yr−1 which is three times faster than what is occurring in the temperate biome on a national scale (0.07%-yr−1). Most of the forest transition is occurring on private holdings and stems from field abandonment as farming systems intensify production with avocado plantations and cow–calf operations. As this study demonstrates, forest transitions are not occurring ubiquitously across nations but instead are highly localized occurrences driven by a myriad of distal and proximate factors involving disparate sets of stakeholders. Consequently, policy makers who are keen to expand forest transitions to fulfill their national climate action commitments under the Paris Agreement must first promote research into the complexity of landscapes and drivers of land change at regional and local scales.
Rural life in México has changed drastically over the past several decades in the wake of structural reforms in the 1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) implemented in 1994. ...Researchers predicted dire consequences for smallholder farmers following trade liberalization and in certain respects the prophecies have been fulfilled. Indeed, many regions experienced significant out-migration as smallholders, unable to compete with global maize imports without price subsidies, sold or abandoned their lands, making way for the expansion of industrial agriculture into forests, secondary vegetation and primary crops. Nevertheless, many smallholders have adapted to the new economic environment with farming systems that manage risk by diversifying portfolios to incorporate commercialized maize and livestock production. This article examines the evolution of smallholder farming systems since the mid 1980s, when the impact of neoliberal reforms emerged, using data collected from field research on 130 smallholder farms in the Pátzcuaro Lake Watershed (PLW) in the State of Michoacán. Farmers in the PLW have been characterized as traditional peasant farmers, planting crops for subsistence, including a diverse array of domestic maize varieties and practicing limited animal husbandry with chickens, turkeys, pigs, an oxen and a cow or two for milk. But the results presented in this article show that the traditional peasant farming systems in the region have changed substantially to a highly diversified agriculture-cattle-forest system. Most notable changes include the use of fertilizers and pesticides; and the increase in livestock herd and reorientation to beef production. The results demonstrate the resilience of smallholder farmers, while at the same time raising potential concern that increased reliance on livestock and beef production specialization, might lead to shifts in farming systems that replace domestic maize varieties with hybrid corn used primarily for animal feed and thereby leaving vulnerable the genetic reservoir of traditional maize landraces.
How globalization impacts native land cover has become an important issue in studies addressing environmental change, which draw explicit attention to processes of cause and effect operating over ...significant distances. The literature shows that globalization constitutes an important underlying driver of both deforestation and forest transition via demographic and economic phenomena such as migration and remittance flows. Yet, little is known about how global forces mold the spatial structure of agro-commodity production and how this impacts the balance of forces affecting land change at the meso-scale, within the boundaries of the nation-state. The research presented here fills this gap by examining production networks for Mexico, a large OECD country with complex land change dynamics that has recently experienced a dramatic opening to the world economy. Specifically, we consider how maize and beef commodity chains evolved over the past few decades into a highly interdependent maize-cattle complex, and suggest linkages to patterns of land change at the national scale. Using land cover maps for 1993, 2002, and 2012, at the national scale, governmental statistics and datasets, interviews with key informants, and field observations the article provides an analysis of the impact of neoliberal reforms on the changing geography of beef and maize production, and argues that this process underlies the evolution of Mexico's land change regime, both before and after the NAFTA reforms. As such, the article presents an account, and a case for further research on the topic of how teleconnections are constituted by spatially-extensive food production networks.
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•Tracks emergence of telecouplings as function of globalization.•Links Mexico’s trade liberalization to telecoupled deforestation and GHG emissions.•Demonstrates that intensification ...of Mexico’s beef production does not spare land.•Transnational deforestation leakage with domestic deforestation reductions.•GHG emissions from cattle herd greatly exceed GHG emissions from deforestation.
This article analyzes how trade liberalization in Mexico, particularly following the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has transformed that nation’s cattle economy into a feedlot system manifesting multiple telecouplings and based on the transnational provision of inputs. A conceptual model is presented that suggests how environmental effects involving land use and GHG emissions emerge from changes in the beef supply chain. The article then presents an empirical analysis establishing that the production of corn and beef has intensified in the wake of NAFTA, and that deforestation rates have declined over the same period. Evidence is also presented showing that this has not precipitated a land sparing effect, given the leakage of deforestation into Central America, which supplies Mexican feedlots with 36 % of their source materials. The article calculates associated GHG emissions and establishes that enteric fermentation dominates deforestation as a source, and that ∼14% of GHGs produced by the post-NAFTA Mexican supply chain are emitted in Central America. This raises accounting questions for signatories to the Paris Climate Treaty, given commitments are nation-based.
Global land change continues to concern both scholars and the general public. Loss of tropical forest, in particular, creates significant impacts with respect to biodiversity resources and the carbon ...cycle. Recently, researchers have grown hopeful that countervailing processes of forest recovery, often referred to as forest transition, will mitigate environmental damage imposed by forest loss. The UN’s REDD program has served to focus attention on how to reduce deforestation and encourage forest transitions. Such policy initiatives are praiseworthy, but their ultimate success depends on uncovering the underlying drivers of land change (LC), whether forest loss or gain. Adding complexity to the policy debate are the far-reaching impacts of globalization. The dissertation seeks to add to our understanding in this regard by undertaking a national-scale study aimed at comprehending how globalization affects LC processes. Specifically, the dissertation links broad shifts in national LC dynamics with spatial shifts or re-territorialization of food commodity chains, in the context of neoliberal reforms affecting a domestic economy. It addresses the combined issues of forest loss and forest gain as they occur within the borders of an individual nation by assessing the changing territorial imprints of beef cattle and maize (M&B) production in Mexico. LC is often driven by agricultural change, so it should come as no surprise that substantial research identifies M&B production as a proximate cause of Mexican LC. However, this research goes a step further and embeds this proximate causation within the broader social structures from which it originates, namely those associated with globalized commodity chains. In doing so, the project's novel approach addresses LC through constructs drawn from Economic Geography. Two research hypotheses are advanced: (1) that the production geography of M&B commodity chains shifts over time, triggered by neoliberal reform, and (2) that shifts in source regions for both commodities explain patterns of land change across Mexico, with some areas experiencing forest transition and others deforestation. To address these hypotheses, the dissertation employs a mixed methodological approach, which includes formal and informal interviews with firms and key informants, field observations, and spatial econometrics using land use data from agricultural census and national land cover data for the years 1991 and 2007. My results suggest that neoliberal reform is redefining M&B production geography. The rise of the Mexican feedlot and the maize flour industry are intimately related with the adoption of free trade policies and transfer of prior governmental functions in the food sector to private agents. The dissertation shows that the spatial changes of the beef component of the M&B commodity network correspond in many ways to changes in forest cover. When herds diminish, there is FT; when herds expand, forests are lost. The econometric analysis confirms this pattern. Deforestation in Mexico continues to slow down, in part, with the help of large volumes of corn imports from the US and cattle smuggled from Central America.
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