En el presente artículo se examinan las estrategias productivas instrumentadas por los campesinos del oriente de Tabasco, para responder a las reformas estructurales. Al analizar los patrones de cambio de uso del suelo en sus parcelas, de 1988 a 2004, se identificaron dos tipos de sistemas productivos: a) agricultura de autoconsumo y b) ganadería de cría alternada con cultivos básicos. Más que tratar de ser competitivos, las estrategias campesinas buscan minimizar los riesgos para mantener su condición de productores y asegurar la subsistencia de la unidad familiar en el corto plazo. La disyuntiva campesina es continuar con la ganadería, que conlleva costos elevados para el medio ambiente y de la cual parecen condenados a ser excluidos, o incursionar en opciones forestales que pueden ser rentables a futuro. Se concluye que las políticas públicas deben fortalecer los medios de vida de las comunidades, según un enfoque amplio de desarrollo rural.
Global environmental problems such as climate change are not bounded by national borders or scientific disciplines, and therefore require international, interdisciplinary teamwork to develop understandings of their causes and solutions. Interdisciplinary scientific work is difficult enough, but these challenges are often magnified when teams also work across national boundaries. The literature on the challenges of interdisciplinary research is extensive. However, research on international, interdisciplinary teams is nearly non-existent. Our objective is to fill this gap by reporting on results from a study of a large interdisciplinary, international National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education (NSF-PIRE) research project across the Americas. We administered a structured questionnaire to team members about challenges they faced while working together across disciplines and outside of their home countries in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Analysis of the responses indicated five major types of barriers to conducting interdisciplinary, international research: integration, language, fieldwork logistics, personnel and relationships, and time commitment. We discuss the causes and recommended solutions to the most common barriers. Our findings can help other interdisciplinary, international research teams anticipate challenges, and develop effective solutions to minimize the negative impacts of these barriers to their research.
In the last decade, jatropha-based bioenergy projects have gotten significant attention as a solution to various social, economic, and environmental problems. Jatropha's popularity stemmed out from different discourses, some real and some perceived, in scientific and non-scientific literature. These discourses positioned jatropha as a crop helpful in producing biodiesel and protecting sustainability by reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels and increasing local, rural development by creating jobs. Consequently, many countries established national policies that incentivized the establishment of jatropha as a bioenergy feedstock crop. In this paper, we explore the case of jatropha bioenergy development in Yucatan, Mexico and argue that the popular discourse around jatropha as a sustainability and rural development tool is flawed. Analyzing our results from 70 semi-structured interviews with community members belonging to a region where plantation-scale jatropha projects were introduced, we found that these projects did not have many significant social sustainability benefits. We conclude from our case that by just adding bioenergy projects cannot help achieve social sustainability in rural areas alone. In ensuring social sustainability of bioenergy projects, future policymaking processes should have a more comprehensive understanding of the rural socioeconomic problems where such projects are promoted and use bioenergy projects as one of the many solutions to local problems rather than creating such policies based just on popular discourses.
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