Unravelling the Paradoxical Seasonal Food Scarcity in a Peasant Microregion of Mexico

Abstract

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”.

Agricultural intensification increases farmers' income but reduces food self‐sufficiency and bee diversity: Evidence from southeast Mexico

“…Seasonal food scarcity has multiple contributing factors as described by Bacon et al (2014), including the rise of basic food prices during the lean months, climatic phenomena affecting yields and harvest and long periods without harvesting cash crops like coffee or honey in our study area. Seasonal food scarcity in low intensification agriculture is a common problem in rural populations in other regions of Mexico (Rivera‐Núñez et al, 2022). This phenomenon has been called the ‘hungry farmer paradox’ (Bacon et al, 2014).…”

“…It is not necessarily a state of permanent famine, but of temporary food insecurity, often a period in the annual cycle in which farmers cannot guarantee food security in their homes (Bacon et al, 2014). Seasonal food scarcity occurs in different regions of south Mexico, like Oaxaca (Novotny et al, 2021) or Chiapas (Rivera-Núñez et al, 2022) and Yucatan (Gurri et al, 2021).…”

A transdisciplinary approach to address the exclusion processes of the food regime for Mexico’s small-scale fishers and farmers

“…nonparametric techniques (Ramsey and Schafer 2002). Likewise, we propose to consider a third conglomerate of heterodox methodological and epistemic tools typical of complexity sciences (Rivera-Núñez et al 2021) that seek to move from analysis to synthesis and to the integration and multi-actor discussion of results. The methodological approaches include the companion modeling, agent-based computational simulations and serious socio-ecological board games (García- Barrios et al 2016;De La Cruz et al 2023).…”

Edible plants as a complement to the diet of peasant farmers: a case study of the Totonacapan region of Puebla, Mexico

“…Therefore, there is a need for more studies that evaluate the extent to which local agrobiodiversity on smallholdings complements peasant diets, given that a high richness of edible species on farm plots does not necessarily imply that they are being consumed frequently (Soto-Pinto et al, 2022). Many wild or fostered edible plant species are generally considered as emergency food sources, consumed in times of scarcity or when there is a chronic shortage of staple foods such as maize (Mapes and Basurto, 2016;Rivera-Núñez et al, 2022); however, their consumption when staple foods (mainly cereals) are sufficient is not known. Furthermore, several studies report that in some rural regions, the consumption of fruits and vegetables is limited as the vast majority are sold to supplement household income; therefore, they are no longer an integral component of household self-subsistence (Miller et al, 2016;Mehraban and Ickowitz, 2021).…”