Agricultural livelihood transition in the southern Yucatán region: diverging paths and their accompanying land changes

Abstract

Land change science has demonstrated that rural livelihoods around the world both drive and reflect changing environmental regimes and political economic/structural transformations. This article explores the relationship between increasingly globalized rural livelihoods and in-place land change, assessing results from social surveys of smallholding households in the southern Yucatán region. We examine evidence for a transition in agricultural livelihood strategies as smallholders adjust to changing political economic and institutional conditions, and link these transitioning strategies to land use changes. Based on household surveys in 1997 and 2003, we comparatively assess both changes in the selection of livelihood strategies and in the land use and cover impacts of those strategies. Our results indicate that although impacts of given strategies have changed little over this period, there are increasing proportions of households pursuing two divergent adjustment paths—one of agricultural withdrawal and one of agricultural intensification and commercialization. We investigate what sociodemographic characteristics differentiate the groups of households following distinct livelihood strategies. Our findings point to the possibility of simultaneous and contradictory land change outcomes as smallholders adjust in different ways to their intensified incorporation into global economies.

Methods appendix

A few additional notes are helpful for a fuller understanding of our research methods:

Additional survey details

For additional detail on the 1997 survey, see Turner et al. (2004). The 2003 survey was part of a joint survey implemented in collaboration with Busch (Busch and Geoghegan, this issue), with the addition of one more ejido in the southern region. Due to the unavailability of a subset of households (45) from the 1997 survey, the 2003 survey added a set of replacement households (26) from the same ejidos. Households became unavailable either due to an unwillingness to participate in the second survey or due to a failure to persist in the ejido (either through death or through relocation within or out of the region). The 2003 survey also included 34 new households randomly selected from three additional ejidos, which were in turn randomly selected to represent better a group of newer and smaller ejidos in the southern reaches of the SY region.

Comparison with research by Gurri (this issue)

In addition to drawing on data from different sets of surveys and interviews, our research can be distinguished from that of Gurri by its different methods and an approach that takes the potential dynamism within sets of livelihood strategies as the point of departure. Gurri’s research points to the roles played by culture and family history (prior to arrival in the region) in the selection of livelihood strategies. Together, the two articles provide differing but complementary windows into understanding the changing human–environment relationship in the SY.

Division of households into the eight groups

As described in the methods section of the main article body, we divided surveyed households into eight groups based on their engagement in maize, chili, pasture, and cattle production. We determined how to define the groups based on the four main agricultural activities in the region, in a manner that could indicate different degrees of diversification among these activities. Knowledge of these four main activities comes from both the survey data itself and years of experience working in the region. We did not include agricultural activities that were rarely employed within the region, had no significant land use/land cover change implications, and/or were employed so widely as to not differentiate households (such as subsistence chicken raising). In addition, we included a few households in groups even in the absence of group-defining activities, if they did not otherwise fit another group and we also judged them to be a good group fit. These exceptions are detailed here:

Group 4(maize and pasture). Five households of the 34 in Group 4 did not cultivate maize in 2003. We included these five households in this group due to the high likelihood that these households cultivated maize in a previous year and would cultivate maize again in the near future.

Group 5 (maize, chili, and pasture). We included one household in Group 5 that did not cultivate maize in 2003 and only had chili and pasture. We included this household in Group 5 under the assumption of the milpa-pasture strategy.

Group 6 (maize, pasture, and cattle) and Group 7 (maize, chili, pasture, and cattle). In 1997, ten households in Groups 6 and 7 owned cattle, but reported no pasture lands; however, in 2003 all households reporting cattle also reported pasture lands.