Illegal-crop cultivation and the emergence of nontraditional peasant livelihoods and agrobiodiversity-containing landscapes in Oaxaca, Mexico
Open Access
- Author:
- Tamariz, Gabriel
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 22, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Melissa Wright, Major Field Member
Karl Zimmerer, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Guido Cervone, Major Field Member
Brian Thiede, Outside Unit & Field Member
Brian King, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Illegal crops
Agrobiodiversity
Vulnerability
Collective action
Political ecology
Social-Ecological Systems
Land systems
Violent environments
New rurality - Abstract:
- Scholarly work has analyzed the nexus between illegal drug economies and agrarian and socio-ecological change amidst neoliberal globalization and the so called War on Drugs. Specifically regarding illegal-crop cultivation, four main processes of transformation have been studied to-date: land use and land cover change; biodiversity change; livelihood change; and forced displacement. This literature has provided productive insights but leaned towards generalizations of negative (and even catastrophic) consequences derived from the cultivation of illegal crops. In order to avoid said generalizations and develop this research further, the dissertation investigates how the cultivation of illegal crops transforms peasant livelihoods and landscapes through a multi-site approach in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The overarching framework of analysis of this research involves and develops a conceptual integration of social-ecological systems and political ecology. More specifically, the dissertation engages four main theoretical themes within the environmental governance and the agrobiodiversity-containing landscapes core areas in Nature-Society Geography: (i) The political ecology of violent conflict; (ii) Social- and political-ecological vulnerability theory; (iii) Relational approaches to society-agrobiodiversity interactions; and (iv) Agrarian and land-system change in sending areas of migration. The methodological approach involves a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods of data generation and analysis that include structured/semi-structured interviews in prisons, statistical analysis of secondary data, and remote sensing analysis of satellite imagery. With a particular focus on four features of social- and political-ecological transformation—agrobiodiversity, physical violence, migration, and land-system change—the main research questions are the following: (1) How do the cultivation of illegal crops and related violence interact with production and consumption of smallholder agrobiodiversity?; (2) How do local resource governance and conflict management institutions mediate cooperation and conflict in the management of illegal crops?; and (3) How does illegal-crop cultivation transform land systems and influence migration dynamics? Major findings highlight the role of peasant agrobiodiversity and local resource governance and conflict management institutions on mitigating violence and de-agrarianization. Overall, findings suggest that illegal-crop cultivation has unique and nontraditional features that run contrary to general trends of agrarian change in the Latin American countryside in the last decades; that is, contrary to the effects that neoliberal globalization has had on peasant societies. Illegal-crop cultivation in Oaxaca has thereby fostered a counter-hegemonic process of re-peasantization by nontraditional means.