Land Change Regimes and the Evolution of the Maize-Cattle Complex in Neoliberal Mexico

Abstract

Abstract. 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 OPEN ACCESSLand 2015, 4 755 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.

Agricultural Land Use Change after NAFTA in Central West Mexico

“…A similar process has been found for cattle production in Mexico. Due to rising beef demand in the US market, cattle ranching has increased in Mexico, causing land use change and deforestation in the southern area of the country [41].…”

Bridging different perspectives for biocultural conservation: art-based participatory research on native maize conservation in two indigenous farming communities in Oaxaca, Mexico

“…Despite the differences linked to ethnicity in this study, we believe there is no strong basis to claim that the different perceptions collected can be explained primarily by ethnicity. External influences that differ among communities, such as agriculture policies and trade agreements resulting in bankruptcy (CONEVAL 2016;Eakin et al 2015;Sweeney et al 2013), migration, TV and Internet fostering cultural changes (Robson and Berkes 2011b) and substitution of maize farming by other sources of livelihood (Galvan-Miyoshi et al 2015), are all important factors currently affecting the conservation of crop biodiversity.…”

Land-use change in a telecoupled world: the relevance and applicability of the telecoupling framework in the case of banana plantation expansion in Laos

“…With the banana case in mind, we could, for example, have turned to the global production network framework from economic geography (Henderson et al 2002, Challies 2008, Coe and Yeung 2015 for analyzing the economic telecoupling identified, as is increasingly done in LSS (e.g., Galvan-Miyoshi et al 2015, Hauge 2016. The global production network offers a comprehensive framework for understanding flows and distribution of power and value, as well as the social, institutional, and territorial embeddedness of actors in transnational production networks (Coe and Yeung 2015).…”

“…Social-ecological systems scholars have made similar efforts to address teleconnected vulnerabilities in environment and livelihood change (Adger et al 2009). Others have begun to engage with flow-based analyses using global value chain and global production network approaches adopted from economic geography (Garrett et al 2013, Galvan-Miyoshi et al 2015.…”