Toward a Political Ecology of Migration: Land, Labor Migration, and Climate Change in Northwestern Nicaragua

Radel, Claudia; Schmook, Birgit; Carte, Lindsey; Márdero, Sofía

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.04.023

Cited by 67 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Land policies in the study areas (including the tenure regime, and opportunities and transactions costs related to land sales and purchases) matter for how feasible and attractive land investments are. Infrastructure development, agricultural price policies, and output market regulations more generally are also critical for land-use decisions [42]. Further, government support programs (pensions and cash transfer programs such as Oportunidades in Chiapas and Mi Familia Progresa in Guatemala), and credit and insurance policies influence how important risk considerations are in migration decisions, and in the use of remittances and savings [6,15].…”

Section: A Migration-forest Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migration, Remittances, and Forest Cover Change in Rural Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico

Angelsen

Aguilar-Støen

Ainembabazi

et al. 2020

Land

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This article investigates how migration and remittances affect forest cover in eight rural communities in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. Based on household surveys and remote sensing data, we found little evidence to support the widespread claim that migration takes pressure off forests. In the Chiapas sites, we observed no significant changes in forest cover since 1990, while in the Guatemalan sites, migration may have increased demand for agricultural land, leading to an average annual forest loss of 0.73% during the first decade of the millennium. We suggest that when attractive opportunities exist to invest in agriculture and land expansion, remittances and returnee savings provide fresh capital that is likely to increase pressure on forests. Our study also has implications for the understanding of migration flows; in particular, migration has not implied an exodus out of agriculture for the remaining household members nor for the returning migrants. On the contrary, returning migrants are more likely to be involved in farming activities after their return than they were before leaving.

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Section: A Migration-forest Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migration, Remittances, and Forest Cover Change in Rural Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico

Angelsen

Aguilar-Støen

Ainembabazi

et al. 2020

Land

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“…Flooding is a routine occurrence in much of the monsoonal tropics, and many agrarian societies have developed land use and livelihood systems closely tied to annual inundation events. Despite well-developed repertoires of response, smallholder agricultural economies have been "double exposed" [1] to intensifying climate change and agro-industrialization over the past several decades [2,3]. These dynamics have increased the severity and frequency of flooding in many locations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flooding and Land Use Change in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia

Kelley

Prabowo²

2019

Land

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Flooding is a routine occurrence throughout much of the monsoonal tropics. Despite well-developed repertoires of response, agrarian societies have been 'double exposed' to intensifying climate change and agro-industrialization over the past several decades, often in ways that alter both the regularity of flood events and individual and community capacity for response. This paper engages these tensions by exploring everyday experiences of and responses to extreme flood events in a case study village in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, which has also been the site of corporate oil palm development since 2010. We first reconstruct histories of extreme flood events along the Konawe'eha River using oral histories and satellite imagery, describing the role of these events in straining the terms of daily production and reproduction. We then outline the ways smallholder agriculturalists are responding to flood events through alterations in their land use strategies, including through the sale or leasing of flood-prone lands, the relocation of riverine vegetable production to hillside locations, and adoption of new cropping choices and management practices. We highlight the role of such responses as a driver of ongoing land use change, potentially in ways that increase systemic vulnerability to floods moving forward.

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“…The villages of the study site in Nicaragua are located in the northern part of the country in the municipality of Somotillo, located in the low lying, coastal department of Chinandega, bordering Honduras (See Figure 1). Somotillo is part of the so-called "dry corridor", which covers approximately 34% of the national territory and where 80% of the country's population lives [29]. Over the last five decades, the climate in this region is becoming drier, with less frequent but more intense and unpredictable rains (see [28,30]).…”

Section: Study Sites and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Participant 2: To the same powerful people [who had it before], because a poor person wasn't going to buy 100 manzanas! In this neoliberal context, there are several obstacles to semi-subsistence production, including lack of access to credit, no or few extension services, lack of sufficient land, and climate change [29]. By the time the cooperatives were broken up, according to one farmer, "The most anyone had was 2 0.7 hectares.…”

Section: Nicaragua: Working To Stay On the Land Through Subsistence Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More instructive might be the median land holdings-3.2 hectares for non-migrant families and 5.2 hectares for migrant families-as most sampled households own less than the average. Renting land is a necessity for many families, especially those who are the most land poor [29], and roughly a quarter of all households rent land. Community members who do not hold enough or own no land still need to grow food.…”

Section: Nicaragua: Working To Stay On the Land Through Subsistence Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Slow Displacement of Smallholder Farming Families: Land, Hunger, and Labor Migration in Nicaragua and Guatemala

Carte

Schmook

Radel

et al. 2019

Land

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Smallholders worldwide continue to experience processes of displacement from their lands under neoliberal political-economic governance. This displacement is often experienced as "slow", driven by decades of agricultural policies and land governance regimes that favor input-intensive agricultural and natural resource extraction and export projects at the expense of traditional agrarian practices, markets, and producers. Smallholders struggle to remain viable in the face of these forces, yet they often experience hunger. To persist on the land, often on small parcels, families supplement and finance farm production with family members engaging in labor migration, a form of displacement. Outcomes, however, are uneven and reflect differences in migration processes as well as national and local political economic processes around land. To demonstrate "slow displacement", we assess the prolonged confluence of land access, hunger, and labor migration that undermine smallholder viability in two separate research sites in Nicaragua and Guatemala. We draw on evidence from in-depth interviews and focus groups carried out from 2013 to 2015, together with a survey of 317 households, to demonstrate how smallholders use international labor migration to address persistent hunger, with the two cases illuminating the centrality of underlying land distribution questions in labor migration from rural spaces of Central America. We argue that smallholder farming family migration has a dual nature: migration is at once evidence of displacement, as well as a strategy for families to prolong remaining on the land in order to produce food.

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Toward a Political Ecology of Migration: Land, Labor Migration, and Climate Change in Northwestern Nicaragua

Cited by 67 publications

References 43 publications

Migration, Remittances, and Forest Cover Change in Rural Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico

Migration, Remittances, and Forest Cover Change in Rural Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico

Flooding and Land Use Change in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia

The Slow Displacement of Smallholder Farming Families: Land, Hunger, and Labor Migration in Nicaragua and Guatemala

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