Seasonal food scarcity during pre-harvest months is, widely, considered to be the principal manifestation of food insecurity, for some 600 million members of smallholder families, who rely on a variety of coping strategies. This paper analyses both the peasant-economy variables that explain the presence and intensity of seasonal food scarcity, and the coping strategies of 120 rural households in a microregion of southern Mexico. We, also, examine how supply networks for six archetypical foods of the peasant diet express robustness or vulnerability during seasons of abundance and scarcity. The method combines surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, statistical models and social network analyses. Results show that 74% of households experience at least one month of food scarcity annually, and 34% of shortages last more than six months. In total, 29% of affected households gather wild foods, and 14% use intense coping strategies, such as international migration, taking out rural loans, and parental food buffering. During scarce seasons, self-sufficiency networks for maize and beans contract, but still maintain the food supply of peasant households, while cash-consumption networks such as those of beef become accessible only to a small sector of economically differentiated households. In contrast to the vast majority of research, which simply reports the presence of seasonal food shortages and describes the coping strategies of rural households, this paper provides an in-depth analysis—based upon a novel methodological integration—of the socioeconomic, agrifood, and land tenure conditions that may determine why many peasant territories in the Global South face the “farmer–food-scarcity paradox”.
La contingencia sanitaria COVID-19 pasó a ser una más, aunque no cualquiera, entre las crisis de diferente naturaleza y envergadura que suelen afectar al sector turístico en la Península de Yucatán. Ante la recurrencia de múltiples crisis, las cooperativas que se dedican al turismo comunitario han adoptado diversas estrategias para sobrevivir a los períodos de adversidad, destacando entre ellas la pluriactividad que ha sido la forma histórica y cultural de respuesta de los hogares campesinos a las eventualidades de sus prácticas productivas. Sin embargo, debido a la prolongada duración de la reactivación del sector ocasionada por el confinamiento de la emergencia sanitaria, las empresas de turismo comunitario que ya han visto afectados sus ingresos en más del 50% con respecto al 2019, están surgiendo nuevas respuestas y resistencias para lidiar con la ambivalencia de afrontar la pérdida de dos temporadas de alta afluencia, por un lado, y el no poner en riesgo la seguridad sanitaria de sus comunidades, por el otro. Entre las estrategias de respuesta sobresalen el retorno al autoabasto, el intercambio solidario de productos entre empresas sociales, el ahorro y la previsión; entre las expresiones de resistencia el blindaje de los pueblos y los conflictos intercomunitarios vinculados a reaperturas. Partiendo de la experiencia de acompañamiento a 24 empresas de turismo comunitario ante dicha coyuntura, en la última sección presentamos una reflexión teórica para imaginar las posibles reconfiguraciones post-pandemia que podría experimentar un turismo comunitario “profundo”, a la luz de ideas-fuerza como las de proximidad y cotidianidad turística.
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