Backyard Agricultural Production as a Strategy for Strengthening Local Economy: The Case of Chontla and Tempoal, Mexico

Abstract

In order to define chain strategies for a backyard agricultural production system, this study identified agricultural products produced by high development priority communities with indigenous presence located in the Chontla and Tempoal municipalities in Veracruz, Mexico. The production system was integrated into a generic model decomposing the supply chain into hierarchical components. Data were collected through a face-to-face semistructured questionnaire based on statistical sampling of rural households, backyard producers, intermediaries, retailers, and wholesalers, as well as municipal authorities. The research was carried out from January 2017 to June 2018 and a computational program was designed to analyze the data. As a result, products were identified and their production destinations were quantified. Moreover, it revealed a backyard agricultural supply chain of five echelons with opportunities for improvement in areas such as unstructured agricultural processes and practices, inappropriate product storage and handling, and the lack of production records, and up to three intermediaries that sequentially drove up product cost in regional consumption centers. In this study, 20.9% of total production was destined for sale, 34.8% for self-consumption, and 44.2% was noncommercialized. Nopal, creole pumpkin, coriander, plum, passion fruit, and jobo were products with greater economic value for noncommercialized production. An improvement strategy would be to build inclusive agro-food chains through consolidated centers of backyard agricultural products.

Waste Matter of Cactus Cladodes (Opuntia spp.) Produced in Mexico for Innovation and Sustainable Development

“…and support the daily sustenance of their homes 31 . The "Foro Nacional de Nopal, Tuna y Maguey" indicated that the wasted matter of cladodes and its products have sufficient potential to generate income for Mexicoʼs agricultural gross domestic product (PIB) and have a high economic potential [19][20][21] .…”

Disaster Risk Reduction in Mexico

“…López- Sánchez et al (2019) present a hybrid algorithm as a solution method to the p-median model, which consists of combining two metaheuristics (GRASP) which is a greedy random adaptive search procedure, and a variable neighborhood search algorithm (VNS), finding that when solving a complete set of instances with different sizes, the hybrid GRASP_VNS algorithm obtains better solutions than the VNS algorithm or GRASP algorithm separately. Hu and Dong (2019) present a stochastic programming model for the location of facilities with inventory and selection of suppliers considering the different discounts offered according to the order quantity and the required delivery time, in order to generate different alternatives to help humanitarian, highlighting the importance of establishing a close relationship with suppliers for the supply of first aid items.…”

“…The aim is to segment a municipality into rural production micro-regions, for the inclusion of backyard agricultural producers into short-commercialization circuits as a strategy for strengthening the local economy (Sánchez-Galván et al, 2019) and as a learning mechanism that allows identifying the elements that determine territorial development. It can hypothesize that this study will contribute to establishing inclusive agro-food shorts chains for creating resilience in agricultural economic activities.…”