Local Food Networks and the Pursuit of Autonomy:

Examining Agricultural Risk Management in Jalisco, Mexico

by

Caroline Kamm

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts,

Graduate Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

© Copyright by Caroline Kamm, 2019

ii

Local Food Networks and the Pursuit of Autonomy: Examining Agricultural Risk Management in Jalisco, Mexico

by

Caroline Kamm

Master of Arts — 2019 Department of Geography and Planning

University of Toronto

Abstract The following thesis explores the impact that market structure may have on how small-

scale farmers experience and adapt to risk. Through qualitative research within five

local food initiatives in Jalisco, Mexico, I explore the particular risks that producers

perceive as being most serious, as well as the strategies used within these markets to

mitigate those risks. I argue that many of the adaptive choices that farmers use to

stabilize their own livelihoods are enabled by distinct features within direct-to-

consumer markets, suggesting that market structure plays a key role in determining the

production options available to farmers. In further exploring the politics and material

practices used within local food initiatives, I introduce the concept of ‘autonomous food

geographies’ to highlight those strategies used to develop institutional contexts within

which farmers are able to exert greater control over their own livelihoods.

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Acknowledgements This research would not have been possible without the support and

encouragement of a number of people. First and most significantly, my deepest thanks

go to each of the participants in this study, who were generous enough to share not only

their time and knowledge with me, but more often than not their tables. I feel greatly

indebted to each of them for making this research possible. I would also like to thank my

supervisor, Dr. Ryan Isakson, for his continued confidence in my abilities, thoughtful

input, and genuine enthusiasm in support of my work. I am also grateful to my

additional committee members, Dr. Katharine Rankin and Dr. Michael Ekers, both of

whom have left their mark on this research through their feedback on my previous work.

I would also like to acknowledge the additional funding that went toward this study —

provided by the Department of Geography and Planning Graduate Extension Fund and

the Conference of Latin American Geography — which helped make this research

possible.

I would also like to extend thanks to my family for always encouraging me to

pursue my passions, and for reminding me to enjoy the process just as much as the

outcome. And finally, I would like to thank my partner, Ricardo Martínez Herrera, for

his ongoing support of my pursuits, patience in teaching me Spanish, and for his unique

ability to keep me thinking deeply and critically about the world around me.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ........................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... iii

List of Acronyms.............................................................................................................. vi

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Research Overview .................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Research Questions and Objectives ......................................................................................................... 4 1.3 Structure .................................................................................................................................................... 6

2. Markets, Risk Perception, and the Pursuit of Autonomy ................................................ 8 2.1 The Production of Agricultural Markets ................................................................................................. 8 2.2 Risk Perception and Institutional Context ........................................................................................... 15 2.3 The Pursuit of Autonomy ....................................................................................................................... 23 2.4 Synthesis .................................................................................................................................................28

3. Legacies of Mexican Agrarianism and Resistance to “Neo-regulation”.......................... 30 3.1 Agrarian Reform: Origins of a Dual Agricultural Sector ................................................................... 31 3.2 Liberalization and the Bifurcation of Mexican Agriculture ................................................................ 35 3.3 Categorizing Risk in Contemporary Mexican Agriculture ................................................................. 41

4. Research Area and Methodology ................................................................................. 45 4.1 Agriculture in Jalisco and the Local Food Movement ......................................................................... 45 4.2 Research Questions and Methods ......................................................................................................... 52 4.3 Selection of Participants ........................................................................................................................ 55 4.4 Purpose of these methods and limitations ............................................................................................ 59

5. Findings...................................................................................................................... 62 5.1 Agricultural Markets .............................................................................................................................. 62 5.2 Livelihood Options .................................................................................................................................. 71 5.3 Environment ........................................................................................................................................... 79 5.4 Politics and Insecurity............................................................................................................................ 85 5.5 Social Relations....................................................................................................................................... 94 5.6 Attitudes toward Risk .......................................................................................................................... 102

6. Discussion and Conclusion ........................................................................................ 109 6.1 Diversification and Livelihood Stability ............................................................................................. 110

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6.2 Household Consumption and Market Exchange ................................................................................ 115 6.3 Autonomous Food Geographies .......................................................................................................... 120 6.4 Applications of this Research .............................................................................................................. 133

References ................................................................................................................... 140

Appendix A ................................................................................................................... 149

Appendix B .................................................................................................................... 154

Appendix C .................................................................................................................... 157

Appendix D................................................................................................................... 158

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List of Acronyms AoA — Agreement on Agriculture CEJ — Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco (Jalisco Environmentalist Collective) CJNG — Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (Jalisco New Generation Cartel) CSA — Community Supported Agriculture EZLN — Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) GNP — Gross National Product IMF — International Monetary Fund INEGI — Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (National Institute of Statistics and Geography)

ISI — Import-substitution industrialization ITESO — Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara (Jesuit University of Guadalajara) NAFTA — North American Free Trade Agreement NGO — Non-governmental organization PAN — Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party) PGS — Participatory Guarantee System PRI — Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) RDO — Risk reduction and development organization REDAC — Red Nacional de Tianguis y Mercados Orgánicos (Mexican Network of Organic Markets) SAGARPA — Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca y Alimentación (Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, and Fisheries)

SAP — Structural Adjustment Program WB — World Bank WTO — World Trade Organization

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ZMG — Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara (Guadalajara Metropolitan Area)

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1. Introduction

1.1 Research Overview

The architecture in Guadalajara speaks to an unrivaled climate, a true source of

pride for the city’s residents. Tall ceilings and street-level, open windows allow air to

flow off of the city’s many green spaces and circulate through colonial-style buildings.

But at this point in May, the air was stagnant, and it felt like the city’s infrastructure was

heaving under an unaccustomed heat. Summer had barely begun, and Guadalajara was

suffering through an exceptional heatwave.

Traveling around the city, I heard any number of explanations for the unusual

temperatures. One taxi driver told me that as the city grew wealthier, the roads were

becoming congested with more cars, and the heat was just one symptom of deteriorating

air quality. My roommate bemoaned the toll that urban sprawl was taking on parks and

public green spaces. Without Guadalajara’s iconic green spaces, the city was choking on

the toxic biproducts of new development. Some blamed a blast of hot air from more arid

regions of Mexico; still others feared these were just the first signs of a permanently

changing climate.

When arriving at one of the local food markets where I would be doing my

research, the small talk was similar, but it took a more urgent tone. For consumers in

the market the heat was inconvenient; but for the producers it had drastically changed

the way they did their work. A greenhouse grower told me about waking up at 4 a.m. to

harvest, because by the time the sun rose the greenhouse had become dangerously hot.

Several others told me about improvised solutions to help water reach fields with

limited irrigation, which at times meant manually watering individual rows of crops.

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They described the very sensory experiences of lying awake in the heat, exhausted but

unable to sleep. Or the mental toll that it takes to plan for the worst, should the heat

refuse to break.

This heat wave is not a singular experience — it represents one of the many ways

in which food producers live with uncertainty. Farming is dependent on the availability

of natural resources of a high enough quality to achieve a harvest year-after-year, which

makes the profession sensitive to environmental uncertainty (Eakin et al. 2016). But

uncertainty is not limited to the capriciousness of the natural world. Farmer livelihoods

are equally entwined within a network of institutions — including markets where they

exchange goods, relationships within a community, political structures, capital markets,

the list goes on — all of which can be deeply unpredictable. And to aggravate the

situation, these institutions increasingly influence the lives of farmers at greater scales

of operation, with a growing number of decisions that impact farmer livelihoods

occurring at the global scale (Clapp 2016). This context puts an incredible amount of

pressure on farmers, who must make fundamental decisions about their livelihoods

from positions of great uncertainty.

Recent approaches in rural development have taken the situation of uncertainty

as given. Rather than work to reduce the volatility that impacts farmer livelihoods,

international institutions and development practitioners have favored approaches that

bolster farmer resilience, making them more adaptable to inevitable change (Scoones

2009; FAO 2013; USDA 2015). This approach stops short of the reforms that might

improve the conditions within which farmers operate, opting instead to expand the set

of tools available for them to adapt (Walker and Cooper 2011). In approaching this

research with local food producers, I aimed to identify not only how farmers were

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adapting to change, but the practices used to stabilize the context within which farmers

make decisions.

This thesis research focuses on the experiences of small-scale producers engaged

in local food networks in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Distribution channels focused on

creating a direct relationship between producers and consumers appeared in Jalisco

beginning in the 1990s, mainly concentrated around the Guadalajara metropolitan area.

These networks take many different forms and spring from distinct motivations, groups

of actors, and local contexts. As with the broader local food movement in Mexico and

abroad, these initiatives share a common conviction that shortening the distance

between producers and consumers will allow food networks to overcome many of the

failures within the conventional food system (Hinrichs 2003; DeLind 2011). For

proponents of these local approaches, one important question would be whether scaled-

down food networks are able to reduce the level of uncertainty that is a prominent part

of the conventional food system

The local food initiatives that have developed in and around Guadalajara are

diverse. In addition to using localization as a key strategy, one of the main features of

each initiative is a commitment to comida sana (healthy food), a generic term used

within these networks to refer to foods grown or processed using traditional practices.

Individual initiatives often adopt more specific terminology, however the producers who

participate in these networks generally range from farmers in organic transition, to

certified organic producers and self-identified agroecological growers. As small-scale

farmers focused on human health and ecology, these producers have limited options

available for marketing the goods that they grow. These local food initiatives provide a

unique opportunity for a diverse group of producers to sell goods directly to consumers.

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My interest lies in the actual impact that participation has on the lives of small-scale

producers, particularly the way that distinct market arrangements impact the risk

context within which farmers operate.

1.2 Research Questions and Objectives

The purpose of this study is to better understand how the development of local

food networks in Jalisco, Mexico has impacted farmer livelihoods. To do this, I have

chosen to focus on a specific indicator of livelihood: risk perception. Throughout this

research, I will explore the risk contexts that are constructed within these networks, as

well as the practices that farmers use to manage distinct risk factors. As I will further

argue throughout this piece, one way of examining the risks associated with agriculture

is through individually held understandings, perceptions, and attitudes toward risk.

Rather than working to quantify the likelihood of a particular event coming to pass, an

approach based on perceived risk is more deeply concerned with the lived experience of

uncertainty (Cullen et al. 2018), as well as how this experience informs particular types

of decision-making (Takahashi et al. 2016).

My questions in this research are twofold. First, I ask how the scale and structure

of direct-to-consumer markets affect the ways in which small-scale farmers experience

and adapt to risk. Next, I explore the specific risk-management strategies employed by

farmers within local food networks, asking to what extent these strategies represent

individual adaptations, collective challenges to the conventional food system, or a

combination of the two. Through these research questions, I aim to better understand

the process of creating localized markets, the benefits and shortcomings of such market

arrangements, and the adaptive moves that farmers make within these networks.

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Finally, I seek to explore the extent to which these distribution channels represent a

viable substitute for the conventional food system, by looking at tendencies toward

individual empowerment and/or collectivization. As I will discuss in the following

chapter, this analysis of the transformational potential of local markets will be based on

what I have called the pursuit of ‘autonomous food geographies.’

One of my primary contributions of this research is in relating the bodies of work

on alterative food networks and rural development. Holloway et al. (2007) identify two

traditions within the study of alternative food networks, including local food: the

European and North American contingents. The European tradition is focused on rural

development possibilities for the industrialized countryside, through access to niche

markets of wealthy consumers. The North American tradition is more politically and

ideologically driven, highlighting the use of local food as a mechanism to contest

dominant structures within the conventional food system. Not only does this basic

categorization of the literature discount parallels between the two traditions, it quite

glaringly leaves out the majority of the agricultural world, in which 1.5 billion

smallholder and indigenous farmers manage small parcels of land, contributing to the

food security of their households, communities, and wider regional scales (Altieri and

Toledo 2011, 591). If food system localization represents a rural development strategy in

the European context, and a political project in the American one, how does the

majority world fit into this characterization?

I believe that not only are there further intersections between the bodies of work

on rural development and local food, but that this exchange would provide valuable

insights for an impactful research agenda. The ultimate objective in engaging with these

two bodies of work is to inform practices that more effectively meet the needs of small-

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scale farmers. Through an analysis of risk perception and strategies used within local

food initiatives, I will suggest several ways in which the practice of rural development

may more effectively draw upon direct-to-consumer distribution channels. The aim of

this analysis is to move beyond rural development paradigms that focus uncritically on

smallholder farmers’ access to expensive inputs and export-markets, and toward a more

critical engagement with alternative market arrangements.

1.3 Structure

This thesis consists of six chapters, including this introduction. In the following

chapter, I will engage with the current literature on risk perception and the production

of agricultural markets. This section will provide the theoretical context that I used to

conduct my research, including an in-depth outline of the distinctions that I draw

between conventional and localized food markets. This section will conclude with a

discussion of ‘autonomous food geographies’ as a political project aimed at developing

distinct institutional contexts for farmer decision-making.

Chapter Three will then connect this theoretical work to the Mexican context. In

this section I will outline the distinct historical and institutional context that has

transformed farming over the past several decades, particularly the impacts that

neoliberal reforms have had on the agricultural sector. Here I aim to provide a concrete

example of capitalist market production, the risk environment that develops within this

institutional context, and distinct forms of burgeoning resistance within the agricultural

sector.

Chapter Four provides an overview of my research area, including the

characteristics of both the conventional agricultural sector and recent developments in

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the alternative food sector in Jalisco. I will then outline the methodology used in this

research, as well as a detailed description of the participating local food initiatives and

producers. This methodology section will also engage with appropriate applications for

this type of work, as well as possible limitations.

In Chapter Five, I present my findings, organized around five main themes of

risk: market-based, livelihood options, environmental, political, and social risks. While I

acknowledge the interconnection of risk factors and the shortcomings of boundary-

setting, these themes provide a useful structure to discuss the most commonly voiced

concerns, as well as the practices that participants employ to mitigate risks. This chapter

will conclude with a final section on attitudes toward risk, in which I discuss the ways in

which producers view uncertainty as a part of their lives.

In the final section, I discuss these findings, particularly focused on the risk

context produced by local food networks and the types of adaptive changes enabled

within this framework. In this concluding section I will return to the concept of

‘autonomous food geographies,’ highlighting how various adaptive decisions promote

individual and/or collective autonomy within local food markets. Finally, I will conclude

with reflections on the application of this research within the field of development and

suggested avenues of future research.

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2. Markets, Risk Perception, and the Pursuit of Autonomy

2.1 The Production of Agricultural Markets

Mainstream rural development practitioners have framed access to markets as

the universal first step on the pathway out of poverty (Taylor, Zezza, and Gurkan 2009).

Though non-capitalist modes of food provisioning do persist, market exchange has

become the primary ordering mechanism for the production and distribution of food.

Moreover, that market exchange is increasingly structured by an intricate set of

international political and economic institutions, such that local or national systems of

food production and distribution come to be deeply influenced by the global agricultural

market (Clapp 2016). Given the ubiquity of markets within the modern food system, it is

worth stepping back to understand the process through which markets have been

historically produced and continually reproduced today. This section serves to unpack

the institutions and social relations that constitute conventional agricultural markets,

allowing for a more nuanced understanding of economic provisioning.

The classical political economic tradition understands markets for the exchange

of goods and services as an inevitable evolution of human nature. This naturalization of

markets is most famously encapsulated in Adam Smith’s (1759) assertion that markets

emerged from human’s innate “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing or

another” (117). Classical political economists further frame markets as the most efficient

way of distributing resources within a society, asserting that market exchange is not only

inevitable, but desirable. Interventions to control or regulate markets would invariably

lead to inefficiencies, as Friedrich Hayek (1944) argued in his critique of centrally-

planned economies. In other words, when markets are freed from the intervention of

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outside forces, most notably governments, they are able to produce the most efficient

outcomes for individuals and society as a whole.

Heterodox economists have contested the assertions that markets are both

efficient and natural. For the purposes of this chapter, one of the most important

contributions to this critique comes from Karl Polanyi’s (1944) seminal work, The Great

Transformation. In analyzing European industrialization, Polanyi argues that the

market did not evolve spontaneously from human nature; rather, it was “the outcome of

a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government which imposed the

market organization on society for noneconomic ends” (258). These violent

interventions take the form of deliberate political projects, which induce the

“institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere” (74).

Separating the institutions of the market from politics and society stands in stark

contrast to non-capitalist forms of economic provisioning, in which economic activities

are deeply embedded in social and political relations. Polanyi argues that one of the

most significant mechanisms through which these social relations are transformed is in

the commodification of three crucial inputs in the production process: land, labor, and

money. By creating markets for these ‘fictitious commodities,’ human beings and nature

are disembedded from pre-existing social relations, to be placed under the logic of the

so-called ‘self-regulating market.’ This radical restructuring of relations within

communities, and the relationship between producers and nature, “means no less than

the running of society as an adjunct to the market” (60).

Scholars working to explain the origins and functioning of neoliberalism, as well

as possible political alternatives, have revived this analysis of markets as a deliberate

process. Gareth Dale (2010) for instance, understands neoliberalization as a political

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project of reversing Keynesian economic policies, led by a coalition of influential free

market economists, prominent state leaders, and international governance institutions.

This perspective hinges on the actual agents of change, the so-called ‘command centers’

of neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell 2002), to highlight how self-regulating markets have

been produced and continually reproduced.

I follow Julie Guthman (2007) in her understanding of neoliberalization as a

process through which the ‘hollowed out’ state places human and environmental

relations under further control of the market mechanism, while shifting responsibility

for minor market interventions onto civil society. Guthman draws on Peck and Tickell’s

(2002) distinction between the earlier process of ‘roll-back’ and the later version of ‘roll-

out’ neoliberalism. The ‘roll-back’ of the 1980s was characterized by a reactionary,

destructive process of stripping away Keynesian social protections, privatizing public

resources and services, and gutting regulatory regimes. Following the economic

recession of the 1990s, the ‘roll-out’ version of neoliberalism sought to soften the impact

of deregulation, by introducing new governance structures, including a stronger

emphasis on the role of civil society and multilateral institutions in stabilizing markets,

or counteracting their negative tendencies. These ‘flanking mechanisms’ did little to

strengthen the role of national states in regulating markets, rather they produced “new

rules, new-rule making bodies, and new spheres of rule-making” (Guthman 2007, 465),

which further influence the scales at which local or national bodies are able to control

the functioning of markets. In both versions of neoliberalism, the Polanyian ‘self-

regulating market’ requires not only deliberate constitution, but careful and creative

reproduction, particularly in moments of economic crisis.

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One of the key implications of markets as a process, is that this process can never

be fully completed. Even as markets become the most prominent feature of the modern

economy, a diversity of non-market activities continues to sustain economic life. J.K.

Gibson-Graham famously argues that adopting a feminist perspective reveals the depth

of non-capitalist relations within modern economies, which continue to support and

sustain our households and communities. Gibson-Graham uses the term ‘community

economy’ to refer to the deeply interdependent nature of economic relationships that

are not mediated by markets at all, rather they are processes of economic production

and exchange based in social connection and mutual benefit (Gibson-Graham 2006).

Situating social reproduction within capitalist economies is similarly sticky, as the

activities necessary for sustaining a workforce, and subsequently sustaining a market

economy, have themselves been imperfectly translated into market-based, waged work

(McGrath and DeFilippis 2009).

From the perspectives above, capitalist markets can be understood as a politically

constructed mechanism for organizing economic activities, which must be supported by

a complimentary social structure. While the discussion above has dealt with markets as

a broad category, the topic of agricultural markets deserves its own distinct analysis.

Just as Polanyi sought to unpack the social upheaval involved in the transition to

capitalism, theorists writing on the ‘agrarian question’ have sought to understand how

the expansion of capitalism into the countryside transforms peasant farming. The

agrarian question is fundamentally a political issue, which seeks to situate peasant

agriculture and agrarian politics within a critique of capitalism. Kautsky (1899) most

concisely frames this issue as questioning “whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of

agriculture, revolutionizing it, making old forms of production and property untenable

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and creating the necessity for new ones” (12). Using this framework, theorists sought to

understand what drove peasants’ seemingly irrational attachment to farming (Marx

1850), and to what extent they would be able to withstand the commodification of land

and labor (Chayanov 1986; Kautsky 1899).

The contemporary agrarian question and potential for continued peasant viability

are now set within the context of a global food system (Akram-Lodhi 2013). In 1990-91,

the total value of food traded on the global market was US$315 billion, and by 2014 that

value had shot up some fifteen-fold to nearly US$1.5 trillion (Clapp 2016, 61). What’s

more, the expansion of global agricultural markets has put particularly arduous pressure

on farmers in the Global South, as these nations converted from net exporters of

agricultural products in the 1970s, to net importers by the beginning of the 2000s (Holt

Giménez and Shattuck 2011, 112). This agricultural trade deficit signals that not only are

producers in Global South countries compelled to compete against prices and quality

standards of food imports, but that these nations are becoming progressively more

dependent on the global food market to meet their consumption needs (Clapp 2016).

While global trade in agricultural products was a cornerstone of the consolidated

European colonial system (Friedmann and McMichael 1989), the modern global food

market is the distinct institutional product of a series of political and economic

interventions. The global agricultural market relies first on the ideological position that

industrial growing practices and national specialization are necessary foundations for an

efficient system of feeding the world (Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright 2009; Tsing

2015). This perspective is rooted in the technology transfers of the Green Revolution,

through which organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations prescribed the

technology packages of industrial agriculture as a universal foundation for development

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in the Global South, and established a lasting commitment to classical economic ideas

like the theory of comparative advantage (Patel 2007; Clapp 2016). Then in 1995, the

nations that joined the newly created World Trade Organization (WTO) signed onto the

Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), a treaty designed to harmonize national trade

regulations and agricultural supports to better facilitate global market exchange. While

the stated objective of the AoA was to remove ‘market distorting’ practices like price

supports and export-subsidies, in practice Global North nations have been able to hold

onto a good deal of farm supports, allowing the more competitive of these farmers to

sustain themselves even when commodity prices hover dangerously near the cost of

production (Akram-Lodhi 2013, 113–18).

The political entrenchment of this market logic — both within society as a whole

and in the agricultural sector in particular — has certainly encountered resistance.

Polanyi uses the term ‘double movement’ to refer to the spontaneous reaction in defense

of society against encroachment by the ‘self-regulating market.’ Scholars have similarly

highlighted the ways in which society organizes to protect the food system against

further marketization, most notably Holt Giménez and Shattuck (2011), who draw a

parallel between alternative food movements and the Polanyian double movement.

Bacon (2004) argues that fair trade labels represent one way of stabilizing farmer

livelihoods against the capricious and exclusionary nature of neoliberal markets. A

number of scholars writing on food system localization have similarly highlighted this

movement as a reaction to market failures within the conventional food system, which

usese a more local scale of production and consumption to re-embed the food system

within distinct values and social relations (Sonnino and Marsden 2006; Wittman,

Beckie, and Hergesheimer 2012; Connelly, Markey, and Roseland 2011).

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The coherence of a ‘double movement’ is contested however, as is the extent to

which alternative food movements represent a challenge to the market versus an

addendum to it. Nancy Fraser (2013) argues that modern social movements have not

coalesced into a coherent critique of neoliberalism because of what she calls the ‘triple

movement.’ Fraser argues that past struggles against the market on behalf of ‘society’

typically created distinct forms of social exclusion, thereby producing further harm as

certain groups were denied access to state protections against market forces. While

Keynesian moves to protect society from the market relied on government intervention,

emancipatory movements are often built on deep distrust of the state, based on histories

of marginalization and state violence. These new social movements highlight divisions

in past access to state protections and social supports, subsequently producing a tension

between three forces: market expansion, social protections, and emancipation from

systems of oppression. Similarly, scholars have criticized the tendencies toward social

exclusion within local food movements, which complicate the coherence of a potential

‘double movement’ (DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Hinrichs 2003); the challenges of

‘scaling-up’ these initiatives to address broader inequities in the food system (Johnston

and Baker 2005); the over-emphasis of ethical consumption to the detriment of non-

market alternatives (DeLind 2011); and the dangers of treating localization as an end in

itself, rather than a means to achieve further objectives (Born and Purcell 2006).

This analysis of market production will serve as a foundation to distinguish

between particular market arrangements. As I have argued, the production of capitalist

markets as the primary ordering mechanism for economic provisioning is a deliberate

and contested construction, one with deeply political, social, and environmental

foundations. That being said, the use of markets as a mechanism of exchange is not

15

specific to capitalism, nor do all economic activities within capitalism occur within

markets. Thus, for the purposes of this thesis, I will be using the terms ‘conventional

markets’ and ‘alternative markets’ as a way to distinguish between the general

characteristics and objectives of two distinct sets of arrangements arrangements within

agriculture. ‘Conventional markets’ refer here to those agricultural markets that are

most closely aligned with the principles of free market fundamentalism, including

minimal intervention in the functioning of the market mechanism; dependence on

markets for the provisioning of inputs like land, labor, and other productive resources;

and emphasis on profit-maximization through competition as the central objective of

economic activity. ‘Alternative markets’ on the other hand, are those forms of economic

exchange that are rooted in a variety of capitalist and non-capitalist relations, for

instance through social-mediation of the market mechanism, non-market provisioning

of productive inputs, and economic objectives beyond profit-maximization. The extent

to which these alternative market arrangements represent viable alternatives to the

conventional food system will depend on a variety of factors, which I will explore further

in the third section of this chapter. In the coming section, I aim to connect agricultural

markets to the question of risk, in particular how the entrenchment of market relations

has impacted smallholder farmer perceptions of risk.

2.2 Risk Perception and Institutional Context

In The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James Scott (1976) argues that when

peasant households make decisions about their farms, they do not fit the classical

economic model of rational, profit-seeking actors. Rather, they aim to minimize risks

and guarantee that their subsistence needs will be met. Scott writes that “this strategy

16

generally rules out choices which, while they promise a higher net return on the average,

carry with them any substantial risk of losses that would jeopardize subsistence” (18),

arguing that in the long-term peasants will prefer a stable livelihood over one that is

more profitable, but exceptionally volatile. Scott calls this model of economic decision-

making the ‘safety first’ principle, a term he borrows from James Roumasset’s work on

peasant farmers’ reluctance to adopt Green Revolution technology packages. I would

argue that Scott’s argument about peasants’ economic motivations holds increasing

relevance today, as smallholder farmers experience intensifying pressures from the

global marketplace, neoliberal policymakers, and the emerging impacts of

anthropogenic climate change (van der Ploeg 2010; Holt Giménez and Shattuck 2011;

McMichael 2010), all of which jeopardize the economic stability of these farmers.

To understand why peasants might choose a risk reduction strategy over profit-

maximization, it helps to highlight the functional purpose of the peasant farm. One

distinct feature of peasants as economic actors is that they exist simultaneously as units

of production and consumption (Scott 1976; Chayanov 1986). In the modern context,

this may not mean that peasant farmers are always purely subsistence growers — much

of their production may be oriented toward the market — however, the household itself

serves both as a consumer and as labor within the productive unit (van der Ploeg 2008).

In the case of farming households whose subsistence needs are not entirely provisioned

on the market, but by their own agricultural production, adopting a profit-seeking

approach through experimental techniques or specialization would present too great a

risk to the household’s subsistence needs (Scott 1976, 15–20).

Since Scott’s initial analysis of colonial Southeast Asia, the risks associated with

peasant farming have only become more complex. The modern food system is facing

17

what Philip McMichael (2010) has deemed a ‘triple crisis’ of food insecurity, unstable

capital markets, and environment deterioration. For policymakers and development

organizations, managing and adapting to uncertainty has become a crucial objective for

maintaining the viability of the agricultural sector (FAO 2013; USDA 2015). Within rural

development, managing environmental risks in particular has been incorporated into an

overall framework to bolster farmer ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptive capacity.’ Resilience is

used in the literature to refer to the amount of change that an individual or community

can withstand (Walker and Cooper 2011), and is generally understood as being linked to

livelihood strategies, including access to material and social assets, and diversity of

economic activities (Scoones 2009). This approach takes volatility, sudden economic

‘shocks,’ and environmental hazards to be inevitable features of the farming context,

which has subsequently informed rural development tools and policies that help

individuals manage and adapt to risk, rather than working to mitigate or eliminate the

existence of these hazards (Walker and Cooper 2011).

I take up two issues with the use of resilience and risk in both literature and

practice. First, as Walker and Cooper (2011) have argued, the language surrounding

ecological resilience has found its corollary in the neoliberal ideology of individual

responsibility. This has had the effect of shifting the burden of adaptation onto the

individual, without sufficiently engaging with the context that might make a farmer’s

livelihood particularly vulnerable. When the literature consideres resilience at the scale

of the individual farmer, it also neglects the types of collective action that could improve

the conditions within which farmers operate (Stock et al. 2014).

Second, much of the literature on risk has dealt with the idea of ‘real risk,’ or the

statistical probability that an undesirable event will come to pass (Sullivan-Wiley and

18

Gianotti 2017, 139). While understanding the likelihood of an event occurring is

certainly useful, say for allocating limited government funding toward disaster relief

programs, this analysis of risk is not necessarily helpful when understanding how

individuals with imperfect information make decisions. One practical issue with a

probabilistic analysis of risk is how one might understand a decision-making context

that is made up of both quantifiable risks and uncertainty, the so-called ‘unmeasurable

risks’ that cannot be understood through probabilistic analysis. In economic analysis,

‘subjective probability’ has been used to link both risk and uncertainty, by suggesting

that economic actors always make decisions using the information at their disposal. In

the case of subjective decision-making, the actor summarizes their knowledge into a

single ‘probability estimate,’ effectively collapsing risk and uncertainty in the process.

From this perspective, even if an expert were capable of quantifying certain risks and

not others, it would have little effect on the subjective experience of making a decision in

the context of limited information (Cancian 1984).

An issue that is perhaps more significant is the questionable link between the

probability of an event occurring and the decisions that famers make surrounding that

risk. If a rural development policy aims at changing a farmer’s behavior for example, it

would be more effective to understand how farmers experience risks at the personal

level and subsequently make choices, rather than solely studying the likelihood that an

event will occur. This method parallels Scott’s phenomenological analysis of

exploitation, which roots exploitation not in the materiality of how much is extracted

from the peasant, but in the peasant’s own feelings of justice related to the extractive

process. He argues: “beginning as it does with the values of real actors, it offers a more

reliable guide to behavior than abstract standards which offer no conceptual link

19

between the theory of exploitation and the feelings of the exploited” (Scott 1976, 32,

emphasis added). So too does ‘perceived risk’ provide a more robust explanation of the

link between expert understandings of risk and the experience of living in a state of

uncertainty.

Some of the earliest work on risk perception began in the 1960s, sparked by the

public nuclear debate (Sjöberg 2000). Early research attempted to understand why

public resistance to certain policies seemed to be almost unresponsive to expert

opinions or quantitative data, for instance resistance to building new nuclear power

plants. From the beginning, the study of risk and decision-making has been fairly

multidisciplinary, with notable research coming out of behavioral economics,

organizational psychology, anthropology, and political science (Wildavsky and Dake

1990; Loewenstein et al. 2001). What this research has in common is an emphasis on

the cognitive and phenomenological aspects of risk and decision-making, in other words

the internal experience of risk rather the external phenomenon (Sjöberg 2000).

Scholars have focused on divergent factors in predicting risk perception. The

‘psychometric paradigm’ was one of the first theories of risk perception, which was used

to explain the way that individuals take in information and form mental models

surrounding risk. Scholars working within this paradigm see certain people as being

more prone toward worrying overall, based on the way that they retain and prioritize

information about hazards (Sjöberg 2000). Later studies drawing on the psychometric

paradigm have also factored in the impact that social and economic factors such as

income, employment status, level of education, race, and gender play in the

development of individual models of risk (Boholm 1998). Scholars working in sociology

and political science have critiqued the individual focus of this paradigm, advancing in

20

its place the ‘cultural theory’ of risk perception. This perspective suggests that dominant

ideologies and perceptions of risk form outside of the individual, with individuals

ultimately viewing risk through the lens of distinct cultural traits (Wildavsky and Dake

1990) Others have emphasized the importance of personal experience, for instance a

firsthand encounter with a hazard, as well as trust in expert findings about the

likelihood of an undesirable event occurring (Wachinger et al. 2013; Sullivan-Wiley and

Gianotti 2017).

The research on risk perception has also addressed how the experience of risk

influences decision-making and adaptive capacity. Loewenstein et al. (2001) put

forward the ‘risk as feelings hypothesis,’ arguing that under situations of risk, emotions

like anxiety, fear, and personal attachments can greatly influence an individual’s

behavior. This stands in contrast to purely ‘cognitive decisions,’ or the traditional

representation of decision-making as a careful assessment of options and their possible

consequences. Wachinger et al. (2013) argue that those who experience a higher degree

of risk may be less likely to take protective actions, what they call the ‘risk perception

paradox.’ The authors hypothesize that this may stem from multiple motivations,

including doubt in one’s ability to change the situation, misgivings surrounding expert

opinions on how to mitigate risk, or lack of resources to take protective actions.

Recent research in development and environmental management has similarly

emphasized the importance of perceived risk and decision-making to the study of

farming. In their study on climate change adaptation in New York state, Takahashi et al.

(2016) found that farmers who perceived greater risk from sudden weather events than

they did from long-term climate change were less likely to make adaptive changes in

their farming practices. They also found that economic considerations would often bar

21

climate adaption, for instance concerns about entering a new commodity market or the

costs associated with adaptive measures. Similarly, Eakin et al. (2016) found in their

study of perceived drought risk in Arizona that farmers saw policy changes, new limits

set on infrastructure use, and regulation associated with climate change as a greater risk

to their farm than the actual impacts of environmental volatility. In both studies, though

the risks being studied were environmental, some of the greatest predictors of farmer

behavior came from non-environmental factors, including political and economic

concerns.

Further research has worked within multi-risk environments to identify

individual and group factors that may help predict risk perception. Cullen et al. (2018)

analyze whether gender can be used to predict the degree of risk perceived by

smallholder farmers in Mali, with the goal of informing rural development extension

that is better tailored to specific groups. Legesse and Drake (2005) take a broader

approach, looking at a number of possible determinants of risk perception, including

social status, family size, and on-farm assets. They ultimately conclude that a farmer’s

resource endowment is one of the greatest predictors of their overall degree of perceived

risk, suggesting that effective poverty-reduction should prioritize farmers’ access to

productive resources. Sullivan-Wiley and Gianotti (2017) explore the risks prioritized by

practitioners within risk reduction and development organizations (RDOs), as well as

among farmers taking part in these programs. They find that not only is there a great

deal of variation between the risks emphasized by development practitioners and

farmers, but that participating in an RDO program was actually correlated with a higher

overall level of perceived risk for farmers.

22

This initial review of the literature reveals ample space for further research. First,

results from the two studies focused on climate change adaptation (Takahashi et al.

2016; Eakin et al. 2016) found that for many participants, the risks associated with

climate change were understood not only in environmental terms, but as economic or

political risks. This is significant given how much of the literature on adaptive capacity

focuses almost myopically on environmental factors, and it suggests that space exists for

research that highlights the interdependence of various risks, particularly those

informed by a farmer’s institutional context. While I am cautious here in drawing too

stark of a division between categories like the economic and the environmental, I argue

that there is space for a more critical engagement with the interconnected nature of

various risks, particularly those associated with distinct economic contexts.

A second gap within the research is the general framing of farmer experiences

and adaptations to risk as occurring within predetermined contexts. That is to say, this

body of research gives very little attention to the processes that produce the context

within which farmers operate, as well as the role that farmers play in producing or

reproducing these contexts. For instance, rather than naturalizing a farmer’s

engagement with global commodity markets as inhibiting climate change adaptation,

further research might explore how alternative economic arrangements might better

enable certain forms of decision-making. Going back to my analysis of the shortcomings

within resilience studies, it would be worth exploring how risk perception might vary

within distinct institutional contexts, rather than naturalizing or depoliticizing these

environments. In the following section, I will further probe this process of creating

distinct institutional contexts through the pursuit of ‘autonomous food geographies.’

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2.3 The Pursuit of Autonomy

Numerous scholars have highlighted the divergent ways that ‘autonomy’ has

been used as an ideological frame and political strategy. In this section, I aim to clarify

the distinction (oftentimes intentionally obscured) between radical and neoliberal

usages of the term autonomy. I will do this by drawing on work from political economy,

geography, and peasant studies, to tease out the political unruliness within the concept.

In particular, I will highlight the ways in which autonomy has been framed within

farming communities and alternative food networks, both as a strategy of individual

empowerment and/or collective action. Finally, drawing on the concept of ‘autonomous

geographies’ and the framing of collective autonomy within peasant studies, I will put

forward the concept of ‘autonomous food geographies,’ to describe the collective work of

constructing distinctly separate institutions, aimed at supporting unique production-

consumption relationships within a particular local context.

Autonomy has been used generally to refer to a state of freedom that allows for

independence and self-determination. The way that autonomy has been pursued

however, and the implications of using autonomy as a political objective, are rooted in

very different understandings of that freedom. Authors have drawn the distinction

between positive freedoms and negative freedoms as they relate to autonomy, arguing

that simply removing interference or regulatory burdens from the individual (negative

freedom) cannot achieve autonomy for all. It is only through the pursuit of positive

freedoms — or the collective development of opportunities, assets, and social supports

— that individuals will be enabled to take control over their own lives (Stock et al. 2014).

This definition of freedoms as either removing interference or actively enabling self-

determination is built into Amartya Sen’s (2000) ‘entitlements’ approach to

24

development, in which access to social, political, and economic freedoms is seen as a

precondition for full human development.

This leads to one major divergence in the ways that autonomy has been politically

employed: the scale of analysis. Pickerill and Chatterton (2006) highlight the individual-

collective dichotomy as a key tension that has determined the trajectory of various

political autonomies. The current of autonomy that begins with the individual as the

scale of analysis is most easily recognized in classical liberalism, characterized by a

preoccupation with untethering the ‘egoistic’ individual from outside interference,

particularly as it relates to economic markets. Based on this framing, “unrestrained

capitalism, then, is itself a quest for autonomy” (Pickerill and Chatterton 2006, 733).

This is the type of autonomy that has found a comfortable fit within neoliberal ideology,

which proposes that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual

entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by strong

private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005, 2).

A more collective approach to autonomy takes the community or society as the

scale of analysis, and has been used across ideological traditions, including anarchism,

autonomist Marxism, national socialism, and various contemporary, anti-capitalist

movements. Using collective approaches to autonomy implies that no individual can

enjoy self-determination without guaranteeing the wellbeing of the collective. This has

subsequently informed a broad set of politics based in economic and political

cooperation, which tend to view individual actions as insufficient to exact largescale

change. From this perspective, autonomy is an ongoing and participatory project, not an

end state (Pickerill and Chatterton 2006).

25

Research within peasant studies and alternative food networks has similarly

explored how farmers and alternative markets have employed individual and/or

collective approaches to autonomy toward divergent political ends. Writing on the

strategies used by family farmers in Brazil, Schneider and Niederle (2010) argue that

farmer autonomy takes the form of strategic diversification, both in terms of on-farm

assets and “heterogenous forms of interaction between farmers and the external

context” (386). For the authors, control over a diverse set of assets is key for farmers

who seek to internalize the resources used in each production cycle, as a strategy to

materially and culturally reproduce family farming into the future. Similar strategies

have been used across the agroecology movement, which Altieri and Toledo (2011)

define as a technological and social system that aims to eliminate farmer dependence on

external inputs. The authors argue that agroecology is a mechanism for the pursuit of

sovereignty in terms of food, energy, and technology production, as a method of

mitigating dependence and fostering farmer self-determination. Copeland (2018) on the

other hand, argues that proponents of the agroecology movement have over-emphasized

decisions at the individual level and the importance of farmer empowerment, which has

made the movement inaccessible to farmers without the current resources to adopt

these practices, potentially even aligning the movement with a more neoliberal

interpretation of autonomy.

In their review of several agricultural initiatives, Stock et al. (2014) use

‘neoliberal autonomy’ and ‘actual autonomy’ as a categorical rubric to analyze the

transformative potential of each of their case studies. While they argue that autonomy is

easily coopted by the neoliberal project, particularly as an ideology used to justify

encroachment by the market into further aspects of farming, they do find potential in

26

those initiatives that pursue autonomy through distinct forms of regional cooperation,

rural governance, and knowledge production. They argue that this form of ‘actual

autonomy’ — or collective autonomy — provides the non-market tools needed to address

failures within the conventional food system, including environmental destruction and

the volatility of farmer livelihoods. Similarly, Moragues-Faus (2017) explores what they

call the ‘politics of collectivity’ in consumer cooperatives, to argue that by acting

collectively, consumers are able to construct alternative food channels without

defaulting to neoliberal consumer subjectivities.

One of the most prominent themes across the literature on autonomy in

agriculture is the internalization of farm processes and resources, so that farmers may

exert a greater degree of control over their livelihoods and relationship to external

institutions. van der Ploeg (2008) views this aspect of autonomy as a crucial part of

what he calls the ‘peasant condition.’ The crux of the peasant condition is, “the struggle

for autonomy that takes place in a context characterized by dependency relations,

marginalization and deprivation” (23, emphasis original). This pursuit of autonomy is

further articulated through three distinct processes: (1) the management of a self-

controlled resource base; (2) co-production of humans and nature; and (3) cooperation

as a strategy to promote autonomy at greater scales. Autonomy within the peasant

condition is not the pursuit of isolation; rather, it is a process of continuously building

the resources necessary to assert self-determination in relation to the market and

broader governance structures.

Self-determination is a key component of what Pickerill and Chatterton (2006)

have called ‘autonomous geographies,’ understood as “those spaces where people desire

to constitute non-capitalist, egalitarian and solidaristic forms of political, social, and

27

economic organization through a combination of resistance and creation” (730). The

authors center resistance through the production of viable alternatives and emphasize

the ‘sociospatial’ strategies through which territorially-bound, local projects can connect

to broader movements. Drawing on anarchist and anti-capitalist traditions, autonomous

geographies engage in struggle against a range of oppressive institutions, including

capitalist markets, global governance structures, the resource extractive economy, and

the state. This resistance that begins within the cracks of capitalism is engaged in a

politics of alterity; rather than engage with existing governance structures, autonomous

geographies pursue a strategy that John Holloway describes as “changing the world

without taking power” (as cited in Pickerill and Chatterton 2006, 738).

As Wilson (2013) highlights, the concept of autonomy has been used far more

widely in peasant studies than it has in the research on alternative food networks.

Drawing on the concept of autonomous geographies, she proposes an approach that

goes beyond alternative food as a simple reaction to the conventional food system, by

highlighting the non-capitalist relationships that sustain autonomous forms of food

provisioning. These are not alternatives that propose to change existing capitalist food

markets; rather, they are spatially-bound, non-capitalist relations in pursuit of “self-

reliance and self-sufficiency outside of the market” (730). She calls these ‘autonomous

food spaces,’ in which “food is both the site and the means for building worlds beyond

capitalism” (734). Much of the critical scholarship on local food networks has similarly

called for theory and practice that is rooted in participatory democracy (DeLind 2011); a

spatial understanding of social and environmental relations (Hinrichs 2003); and a

reflexive politics that critically engages with power dynamics at various scales within the

food system (DuPuis and Goodman 2005).

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As I have discussed in previous sections, farmers make decisions within a

complicated institutional context. Whereas much of the literature on resilience has

considered how farmers adapt to conditions that are not of their own making, I am

interested here in how farmers actively coproduce their own decision-making

environments. The concept of autonomy becomes crucial here, as it provides one path

forward in the development of alternative institutional contexts. I think of these

institutional contexts as ‘autonomous food geographies,’ which are political and

material struggles to coproduce institutional arrangements that enable farmers to

reduce external dependencies and increase control over their own livelihoods. I have

chosen to pursue autonomous ‘geographies’ here, as I believe it provides the breadth to

engage with the nested scales of interaction and the extended spatial relationships that

are involved in food production, exchange, and consumption. Finally, as I have laid out

in the distinction between neoliberal and collectivist framings of autonomy, this analysis

is intended to highlight both the collective and individual tendencies within the pursuit

of autonomous food geographies.

2.4 Synthesis

Throughout this chapter, I have worked to develop a theoretical framework to

inform my research on local food networks in Jalisco, Mexico. My objective has been to

demonstrate the social and political process of producing distinct agricultural markets,

and subsequently the unique institutional environments within which farmers pursue

their livelihoods. The iteration of this institutional context that I refer to as the

‘conventional market’ — an increasingly globalized, neoliberal agricultural system — is

volatile and unpredictable, exposing farmers to increasing degrees of risk. As I have

29

argued, that risk has a material impact on farmer livelihoods, but it also has a distinctly

phenomenological dimension. The decisions that farmers make in response to their

institutional environment come in part, from how they perceive these varied and

interdependent risks, and from a general tendency to pursue a risk reduction model of

agricultural decision-making.

Finally, as I have discussed in the previous section, there are political strategies

through which farmers may influence or subvert their institutional environment, and

subsequently the set of risks that influence their decisions. I have referred to one such

strategy as the pursuit of ‘autonomous food geographies,’ in which farmers co-produce

environments that give them a greater degree of control over their own livelihoods.

While this discussion has largely been theoretical, in the coming chapter I aim to tie this

theoretical work into the historical context of Mexican agrarianism and rural

development. Though I believe this theoretical section could be fairly generalizable, I

aim to use this particular research case to further clarify the connections between

market production, risk perception, and autonomous food geographies. In the coming

chapter, I turn to the trajectory of agrarian change in Mexico, to foreground my research

on food system localization in Jalisco.

30

3. Legacies of Mexican Agrarianism and Resistance to “Neo-regulation”

Returning to Kautsky’s agrarian question, the history of Mexican agriculture can

be understood as deeply connected to the trajectory of capitalist development in the

countryside. The contemporary Mexican context is built on a series of complex historical

layers: thousands of years of diverse, pre-Columbian civilization; the violent and

transformative process of colonization; budding global exchange and political

transformations under the first and second Republics; rapid industrialization and

dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz; social and political Revolution, followed by

Constitutional reform; and in the past several decades, the coercive expansion of

neoliberal globalization. While a detailed account of Mexican historical development is

beyond the scope of this chapter, my objective here is to outline the key role that the

peasantry has held in modern Mexican history, particularly as they relate to the

nationally-specific expansion of capitalism. This historical context will focus particularly

on the transformations that have impacted the institutional environment within which

Mexican farmers operate.

The coming section begins with the periods of time surrounding the Mexican

Revolution, highlighting how peasants politically mobilized to demand an institutional

context that could better sustain the viability of their livelihoods. Next, I will outline the

period of agricultural modernization and economic liberalization beginning in the 1960s

and 70s. This section will focus on political mechanisms of institutional change, the

impact that liberalization has had on the agricultural sector, and resistance in the form

of agrarian and alternative food movements. The final section will build on this

historical context to highlight the resulting risk environment for small-scale Mexican

farmers, with particular emphasis on the interrelated nature of distinct forms of risk.

31

This final section aims to provide an overview of risks associated with this specific

context, to better inform the methodology discussed in the coming chapter.

3.1 Agrarian Reform: Origins of a Dual Agricultural Sector

The roots of the Mexican Revolution were planted during Spanish colonial rule,

long before the dictator Porfirio Díaz took control of the country. One of the key

mechanisms of control exerted over the rural population was the extraction of their

labor as agricultural workers on large landed estates, called haciendas. The hacienda

system concentrated land ownership — and subsequently economic and political power

over the nascent Mexican state — into the hands of very few, large landholders. Though

this system originated in Spanish rule, it would be further consolidated following

Mexican independence, which was inspired in great part by classical liberal notions of

economic freedom and private property (Wolf 1999). In the subsequent republican

periods, landholdings from the Catholic church were expropriated and converted into

private property. This was followed by the privatization of indigenous lands, which

served the dual role of increasing the size of large landholdings and fueling the

population of landless laborers (Otero 1989). This meant that prior to Mexico’s initial

industrial push under Díaz, 80 percent of the population lived in a highly unequal

countryside, most often as dependents within the hacienda system, sharecroppers, or

poor farmers on marginal parcels of land (Eakin 2006, 23).

At the onset of Díaz’ rule, known as the Porfiriarto (1884-1911), continued land

accumulation served as a key asset in the process of urbanization and industrialization.

During the Porfiriarto, the Mexican economy became a key site of foreign investment,

first in massive railroad and mineral projects, and later in the manufacturing sector

32

(Wolf 1999). While this period saw rapid economic growth in the economy as a whole, it

was at the expense of political and economic freedoms. As President, Díaz surrounded

himself with a loyal circle of landowners, industrialists, and experts (the so-called

Científicos), while violently repressing political opponents and economically stifling

landless farmers, indigenous communities, and the urban poor. During the period of the

Revolution, these social rifts between the Mexican economic elite and the majority of the

population — as well as frustrations within the growing middleclass and those

landowners who were being outcompeted by foreign investors — would materialize in

the form of armed rebellion (Otero 1989).

The Mexican Revolution (1910-20) was a complex period of regionalized

uprising, based in large part on stark geographic and socio-economic divisions. Despite

differences in the northern and southern revolutionary armies, one key issue driving

discontent was the uneven commodification of land and resources. Just as Polanyi

argued that British Enclosures served as a violent turning point in social and economic

relations, so too did the massive project of privatization and dispossession in the

Mexican countryside set the scene for a wave of political mobilization (Otero 1989). The

Revolution subsequently had both a material and political component, best captured in

Emiliano Zapata’s call for tierra y libertad (land and freedom). This revolutionary

ideology ties together political struggle for democracy and political representation with

the very material needs of landless peasants. When collectives of southern farmers

began seizing land from haciendas for instance, they were making a statement that

addressed a legacy predating the Díaz presidency: these tactics denied the validity of

enclosures by ensuring that peasants could meet their subsistence needs on land that

would otherwise be drawn further into the capitalist agricultural system (Wolf 1999).

33

In the period following constitutional reform, the newly assembled and largely

reformist Mexican government needed to find a way to incorporate the most radical

elements of the peasantry into the Republic, without undermining the ability of

capitalist farms to maintain control of their properties. The compromise was Article 27

of the Constitution, which established the ejido system of land tenure. Article 27

declared that all land belonged to the nation, which had the right to confer two separate

forms of rights: private property and ejido (Otero 1989). Ejido farmers did not hold

titles to the land, however they gained usufruct rights to a piece of land and common

resources, either as an individual or as part of a collective (Perramond 2008). The size

of individual ejido plots was determined primarily using assumptions about household

consumption, typically capped at 10 hectares of irrigated land or 20 hectares of rainfed

land per household, though in reality most landholdings were much smaller (Eakin et al.

2014, 135–36). Though land redistribution through this mechanism was slow at first,

the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) saw the most genuine wave of reform, with

nearly 18 million hectares of land distributed to over 800,000 peasants by the end of his

term (Otero 1989, 283–84). In addition to land access, the state created new forms of

farmer support, including access to credit through the Banco Ejidal, increased technical

assistance, and technology transfers, particularly focused on irrigation (ibid, 284-5).

While Mexican land redistribution is generally heralded as one of the most

extensive agrarian reforms in Latin America, it was not the system that Zapata’s peasant

army had envisioned. On the purely technical side, ejido plots were more likely to be

marginal, rainfed land that made securing a living, particularly on a smaller individual

plot, a significant challenge (Otero 1989, 290). But perhaps more damaging, was the

separation of agriculture into two distinct sectors, leaving the ejido sector vulnerable to

34

political change and withdrawn support. As Perramond (2008) argues, in the early

period of adequate support for the ejido sector, it proved capable of competing with

capitalist agriculture. It wasn’t until economic crisis prompted the withdrawal of the

state from the countryside that the ejido stalled as a productive economic unit. What’s

more, by separating the two sectors of the rural economy, the Mexican state essentially

permitted the continuation of large, landed estates as the centerpiece of a competitive,

capitalist agricultural sector (Otero 1989). Finally, though the ejido sector created space

for collective action and political voice in the countryside, it also enabled political

clientelism, ultimately weakening more radical peasant demands. Campesinos became a

major pillar of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the political party that

held uninterrupted power in Mexico from 1929 until 2000, in part by employing a

corporatist method of bureaucratic control over the countryside that drastically

inhibited political decision-making within the ejido sector (de Vries and Zendejas 1995).

The above limitations notwithstanding, the institutional context produced by

agrarian reform was still one in which peasant farmers had access to resources, a

structure for collective action, and some level of political representation. Though large

landholders continued to dominate the capitalist agriculture sector, in the decades

following the Revolution the state did at least recognize the legitimacy of agrarian

demands. Moreover, in this period peasant farmers were still understood to be a viable

economic unit that made a valuable contribution to national food security, as evidenced

by early technical supports in the ejido sector. As I will underscore in the coming

section, later processes of liberalization reversed this stance, subsequently viewing

peasants through a poverty-reduction framework, rather than as productive assets in

their own right. This shift not only changes the way that peasant farmers relate to one

35

another collectively, but it constructs campesinos as a problematic barrier to the full

entrenchment of capitalist market relations in the countryside.

3.2 Liberalization and the Bifurcation of Mexican Agriculture

The system of institutional support for peasant farming has been severely

damaged by the political project of liberalizing agricultural markets, sparked in large

part by economic crisis, national debt, and structural adjustment. In the post-war

period, the Mexican state pursued a process of import-substitution industrialization

(ISI), which involved massive state investments to spur on domestic industrial

production. One complementary arm of ISI was state-led modernization of the

agricultural sector, used as a strategy to provide cheap food to the new swell of urban

workers. Largely through the application of Green Revolution technologies and

irrigation systems, agricultural production increased at a rate of 4.5 percent per year

from 1940 to 1965. Throughout this period, support for peasant agriculture continued as

part of a political pact to maintain social stability in the countryside, however the most

significant investments were made in the private agricultural sector, reinforcing the

separation between the two sides of the rural economy (Tetreault 2011, 282–83).

By the late 1960s, agricultural gains had begun to falter, and peasant farmers

were struggling to compete with highly capitalized farms. This economic strain in the

countryside ultimately pushed the Mexican government to introduce a number of rural

development programs targeted at poverty reduction through the modernization of

peasant agriculture. Throughout the 1970s under President Echeverría, the state

developed programs designed to increase the productivity and profitability of surplus-

producing peasant farms, through access to credit, inputs, technical assistance, and

36

price-controlled national markets (Eakin et al. 2014, 136). Though this system of

supports did increase the profitability of peasant farmers in the short-term, by doubling

down on a dual funding system for largescale and peasant agriculture, the state had

created an inefficient and expensive rural development strategy. By the early 1980s, the

Mexican ISI project, including the level of state investment in the agricultural sector,

had become unwieldy and economically unsustainable (Barkin 2002, 77–79).

The 1982 Mexican debt crisis sparked a cycle of devaluation and international

intervention that has largely shaped the trajectory of market liberalization. When

Mexico declared that it would no longer service its foreign debts, multilateral

organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IFM) and the World Bank (WB)

jumped to contain the default through additional loans and a systematic overhaul of the

Mexican economy. This structural adjustment program (SAP) insisted that as a

precondition for further financial support from multilateral funders, Mexico would have

to make its economy more attractive to foreign investors, while stripping away key social

supports (Barry 1995, 42–44). The SAP reforms, enacted by Mexican bureaucrats

trained in the infamous Chicago School of neoliberal economic thought, systematically

reduced barriers to international trade and investment, privatized state agencies, and

slashed overall public spending (Hewitt de Alcántara 2007, 91–92). This restructuring

signaled a fundamental shift in the agricultural system away from a state-led strategy of

national self-sufficiency toward an approach that favored foreign investment and

export-oriented agriculture. In the period between 1982 and 2000, state spending in the

agricultural sector fell by 70 percent and dozens of public rural agencies were

dismantled, severely limiting the resources available to peasant farmers (Tetreault 2011,

283–84).

37

The liberalization process that began with structural adjustment would be further

entrenched in the implementation period for the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA). As a precondition for this landmark free trade agreement, Article 27 of the

Mexican Constitution was reformed to allow for the titling and sale of ejido land.

Though it stopped short of outright eliminating land reform, this change did initiate a

process that brought further agricultural lands under the logic of the market, enabling

the renewed consolidation of farmland, or even the removal of ejido land from active

agricultural production (Perramond 2008). The passage of NAFTA also removed farm

supports and market protections that had survived the SAP period, including the

government purchasing agency that had set price minimums for basic crops like corn

and beans. Perhaps just as damaging to the competitiveness of small-scale producers

however, was the removal of restrictions on private investment that had been set in

place by the previous agrarian reform law, subsequently legalizing the ownership of

agricultural land by private businesses (Appendini 1996, 2).

This period that opened up the Mexican farm sector to foreign investment,

privatization, and further international trade was not a simple stripping away of existing

support structures, it also involved the active production of new forms of economic

governance and rural development. In line with what Pechlenar and Otero (2010) call

‘neo-regulation,’ this process was not so much a retreat of the state, as much as it was

the active redirection of state supports away from peasant agriculture and toward the

pursuit of foreign capital. From a Polanyian perspective, these neoliberal economic

transformations are based on political projects to further entrench the market as the

primary ordering mechanism of society, though the functioning of that market still

requires constant input from the neoliberal state. One such form of input within the

38

rural economy, comes in the form of new and fragmented rural development programs,

aimed at poverty reduction and social stabilization through direct cash transfers

(Appendini 1996; Dapuez 2016).

Whereas agrarian reform created a mechanism for peasants to collectively

interact with the state — both in the claims that they make on the state and as active

participants in the political process — the neoliberal model treats farmers as individual

recipients of state support. Dapuez (2016) identifies the ideological shift during this

period, in which the development narrative replaced the peasantry as a productive unit

with projects that more closely aligned poverty, rurality, and indigeneity. As Dapuez

argues, “by replacing the peasant with terms such as the poor, the indigenous, or the

‘indigenous poor,’ the state prescribes a different fate to them—one that does not involve

working in the fields or being the state’s main subject” (565). Subsequent rural

development programs, oftentimes funded by multilateral development organizations,

targeted peasant incomes through direct cash-transfers, rather than investments in their

productive capacity. The result is further bifurcation within the farm sector, largely

based on the original fissures between social and private land tenure. As the agricultural

market opens up to further international trade, the Mexican government has channeled

its support first toward the productive capabilities of competitive, large-scale farms, and

second toward social support through poverty reduction in the peasant sector. In the

first case, the state is actively encouraging participation in the liberalized markets, and

in the latter, it is clumsily attempting to blunt the harmful effects that market

integration has had on small-scale farmers (Tetreault 2011, 293–94).

These liberal reforms and the subsequent entrenchment of a divided agricultural

sector have met significant resistance from food and agriculture movements across the

39

nation. Since the passage of NAFTA in particular, a number of social movements —

including the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Movimiento El Campo No

Aguanta Más, Sin Maíz no Hay Paíz, and most recently the Moviemiento Campesino

Plan de Ayala Siglo XXI — have held large demonstrations demanding a variety of state

protections for the agricultural sector (Tetreault 2011, 292–96). As a result of earlier

mobilizations, President Vicente Fox signed the Acuerdo Nacional con el Campo

(National Agreement with the Countryside) in 2003, which among other reforms,

required that representatives from these movements be included within national

decision-making bodies (McAfee and Shapiro 2010, 591). In addition to national

resistance, a diversity of local and regional approaches to alternative production-

consumption networks have cropped up around Mexico, including cooperative

marketing boards (Baker 2013, 75–84); niche markets for fair trade and/or organic

products (Wohlgemuth 2014); localized food networks and participatory systems of

organic certification (Bellante 2017; Nelson et al. 2016; Kaufmann and Vogl 2018); and

renewed dedication to substance-oriented, traditional growing practices (Eakin et al.

2014). Many of these diverse approaches to alterative agriculture have also connected to

international movements that are contesting the neoliberalization of agriculture,

including the food sovereignty movement as articulated by the peasant group Via

Campesina (Tetreault 2011), and the agroecology movement focused on developing self-

reliance within peasant growing systems (Altieri and Toledo 2011).

Alongside the liberalization of the Mexican economy and opposing social

movements, another major defining feature of the past several decades has been the

recurrent crisis of Mexican democracy, and growing insecurity under the war on drugs.

As Tetreault (2011) argues, one commonality that runs through past and present rural

40

development models is political opacity, bureaucratic rigidity, and corruption.

Fundamental failures within Mexican democracy have been well-documented, with

nearly 80 years of uninterrupted rule by the PRI hinging on the violent repression of

dissent, political clientelism, and outright voter fraud. The legacy of corruption is also

deeply linked to the ongoing war on drugs. When the PRI was ousted by Vicente Fox of

the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in 2000, decades of agreements between corrupt

political officials, police officers, military members, and drug cartels were suddenly

uprooted (Mercille 2011, 1641). This began the escalation of violent conflict between the

state and narco-trafficking organizations, which was further stoked in 2008, when the

United States provided $1.5 billion of support for the war on drugs under the Mérida

Initiative (ibid, 1645). This hyper-militarized confrontation between the state and drug

trafficking organizations has flooded into the everyday fabric of Mexican communities,

and since 2006 a staggering estimate of 150,000 people have lost their lives as a result

of the drug violence, and a further 34,000 are still considered disappeared or missing

(Beittel 2018, 2). Ultimately, both violence and corruption have continued to impede the

full political participation of Mexican citizens, both in formal state mechanisms and the

full development of civil society (Tetreault 2011; Mercille 2011).

Finally, this legacy of neoliberal reform, corruption, and violence has led to a

distinct historical juncture in Mexican politics. Though the PRI was re-elected in 2012,

widespread discontent with business-as-usual — including further privatization of the

state-owned petroleum company Pemex, frustrations surrounding the falling value of

the peso, and recurrent corruption scandals — has culminated in a sweep of the

electorate by the leftist coalition Juntos Haremos Historia (Together We Will Make

History). The newly sworn in President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, ran on a

41

populist campaign against what he called the ‘mafia of power,’ or the rigid coalition of

economic and political elites that has ruled Mexico for nearly a century. As critics have

pointed out however, López Obrador ran a reactionary campaign with a serious dearth

of policy proposals. While the contemporary political moment is one of hope for many

Mexicans — the formal democratic mechanisms have actually worked — it also remains

to be seen just what type of change López Obrador will bring to the country as president.

3.3 Categorizing Risk in Contemporary Mexican Agriculture

In her research on the agricultural risks associated with climate change in

Tlaxcala, Mexico, Hallie Eakin (2006) argues that the neoliberal institutional context

has largely conditioned the adaptive choices and risk management resources available to

peasant farmers. Through separate case studies, she demonstrates that the ways in

which farmers experience environmental risk is linked to a number of factors that are

typically understood as existing outside of ‘the environment.’ Access to communal lands,

state supports for household food purchases, remittances from a family member

overseas, and non-agricultural employment opportunities were among some of the

factors that influenced the ways that households adapted to environmental risk. In other

words, she found that peasant farmers were living in a complicated institutional context,

which makes distinguishing between individual risk factors a significant challenge.

For the purposes of this research, I have identified various categories or themes

of risk at play in the Mexican agricultural context. While there are issues here with

boundary setting — and there is certainly a good deal of blurring and interrelation

between particular risks — I do find it useful to use these categories as a way of working

through the distinct institutional context as it relates to agriculture. These themes are

42

based on the literature review on risk perception in Chapter Two, as well as the

characteristics of the multi-dimensional crisis of Mexican agriculture. Tetreault (2011)

identifies the rural crisis as a culmination of stagnation in agricultural production;

economic contraction in the countryside; lack of institutional support for peasant

agriculture; environmental degradation and the emerging impacts of climate change; as

well as political and social marginalization of the peasantry (284-7). Based on this crisis

and the neoliberal institutional framework in Mexico, I have chosen to focus on the risk

context as being made of up of five themes: agricultural markets, livelihood options,

environmental, political, and social risks.

The first two risk categories — agricultural markets and livelihood options — are

a disaggregation of what could otherwise be called ‘economic risk.’ I have chosen to

disaggregate these risks in this way, to highlight first, the market and non-market

nature of peasant economies and second, the economic factors that influence peasant

livelihoods from outside of the agricultural sector. From this perspective, risks

associated with agricultural markets are those that would traditionally be associated

with market-based farming incomes, including changing market prices, barriers to

market entry, and the divergent effects of market liberalization. Livelihood options on

the other hand, encompasses those economic risks associated with the ability to

diversify one’s livelihood or sources of income, including access to non-farm

employment, shifting government supports, and the ability to pursue subsistence

growing practices. This is far from an exhaustive list, rather it is intended to draw the

distinction between these two categories of ‘economic’ risk. And as discussed in the

previous sections, these risk categories can be understood as constituted by the unique

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context of Mexican neoliberalism, which has drastically altered the types of economic

opportunities and resources available to peasant farmers.

The environmental risks associated with agriculture are perhaps the most

thoroughly explored within the literature. Roughly 85% of maize farmers for instance,

Mexico’ most significant crop, are small-scale producers using predominantly rainfed

and diversified growing methods. This means that their ability to continue farming

maize is dependent on environmental viability, particularly appropriate quantities and

timing of precipitation (Ureta et al. 2012, 1074). Producers using traditional farming

methods — which is to say low external-input methods — are limited in their options to

overcome environmental change, including shifting rain patterns, soil degradation, the

emergence of new weeds and pests, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather

events (Eakin et al. 2014). While risks from environmental harm have always existed in

agriculture, the regionally-specific impact of anthropogenic climate change will only

exacerbate the situation of uncertainty.

The risks that I have deemed ‘political’ are those most closely related to the

impacts of political marginalization, failures of democracy, and resultant forms of

insecurity. As previously discussed, violence and political insecurity have been recurrent

issues in Mexico, all of which severely inhibit full civic participation and collective action

on the part of the peasantry. Moreover, as Hewitt de Alcantara (2007) argues, racial

marginalization and anti-indigenous sentiments within the Mexican state have long

been an obstacle to viable rural development for much of the Mexican peasantry. In the

modern institutional context, these political risks have become even more complex, as

increasing scales of governance have been imposed on the Mexican agricultural sector,

44

for instance through the regionalization of agriculture under NAFTA, and the

involvement of the IMF and WB in Mexican politics.

Finally, I understand ‘social’ risks as based in those forms of interpersonal

support that are fundamental to the viability of small-scale agriculture. Though

modernization has been the key development objective over the past several decades,

peasant agriculture as an economic activity continues to rely on strong social

connections within families and communities, including practices such as labor

exchanges, seed sharing, cooperative marketing of goods, food redistribution to meet

community subsistence needs, and collective management of common resources

(Barkin 2002). Perhaps ironically, the social connections that may be best positioned to

combat the negative effects of neoliberalism, are just those forms of collectivism that are

most often undermined by the neoliberal focus on individualism. Within the

contemporary context, farmers bear the risk of changes within social arrangements, or

even the degradation of social supports crucial to peasant agriculture.

This cursory overview is meant to outline the types of risks that may impact

Mexican farmers under the contemporary, neoliberal institutional context. In the

coming chapter, I will explore the methodology that I have used to hone in on the most

significant risks within one particular context: local food networks in Jalisco, Mexico.

Using these categories of risk as a guide, I will first provide a description of the research

area, particularly the agricultural makeup of Jalisco and a brief history of the local food

movement in that state. This will be followed by a description of my research subjects,

including each of the unique local food initiatives featured in this study. Finally, the

coming chapter will conclude with a discussion of the methodology used in this research

and how this study on perceived risk within local agriculture could best be applied.

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4. Research Area and Methodology

The previous theoretical component of this thesis — which explored the process

of market formation, risk perception within agriculture, and introduced the concept of

‘autonomous food geographies’ — is meant to open up the literature on rural

development and alternative food networks to new areas of research. While I believe this

theoretical component could provide a valuable contribution in its own right to more

generalized understandings of agricultural risk and alternative market models, I am

particularly interested in how this theoretical background will inform and advance new

research. The following section outlines the research model that I have developed to

employ this theoretical background, beginning with my selection of a distinct local

context. This chapter proceeds in four parts: first, I will provide some background on

the state of Jalisco, particularly the features of that state’s agricultural development that

make it a suitable research area. Next, I will review the research questions and

methodology that I have used to explore risk perception in the context of local food

networks. This will be followed by an overview of the participants who were sampled,

beginning with the unique local food networks included in this study and followed by

the selection process for individual research participants. Finally, I will conclude with a

discussion of the intended applications for this research, as well as possible limitations

within this methodology.

4.1 Agriculture in Jalisco and the Local Food Movement

The farmers included in this study all live in the region surrounding Guadalajara,

the capital of the central western Mexican state of Jalisco. Jalisco is the fourth highest

populated state in Mexico, with a 2015 population of nearly 7.85 million people

46

(Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía 2016). Throughout the second half of the

20th century, the population has become increasingly concentrated in urban centers,

with nearly 73% of residents living in towns of 15,000 or more. The vast majority of

these urban residents live in the central Guadalajara Metropolitan Area (ZMG, Zona

Metropolitana de Guadalajara), though in recent years the actual municipality of

Guadalajara has seen slight population losses to the surrounding municipalities, as

urban sprawl drives the population into new developments toward the edges the city

(Gutiérrez Pulido and González Romero 2011, 16–22). In fact, some of the fastest

growing municipalities in the state are those directly surrounding Guadalajara, with the

neighboring city of Zapopan recently entering the top ten list of most populated

municipalities in the nation (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía 2016).

Figure 1: State of Jalisco, Mexico

Map by author, data source: Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco, 2014

The ongoing process of urbanization parallels the state’s economic transition

away from the primary sectors of the economy. From 1990 to 2010, the percentage of

the economically active population engaged in the service sector grew from just over

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33% to nearly 41%, and during the same period, trade surpassed resource extraction as

the second largest sector in the state’s economy. Agriculture on the other hand,

represents a small, yet relatively stable, source of employment in the state. While official

data most likely underestimates informal labor, it remains that the percentage of the

population actively engaged in agriculture has shrunk from just over 15% in 1990 to

roughly 9% in 2010. While the absolute number of people employed in agriculture has

remained more or less constant, contraction in the relative significance of agriculture as

a source of employment comes from the rapid growth in tertiary sectors of the economy

(Gutiérrez Pulido and González Romero 2011, 169). This geographic shift away from

rural areas, and sectoral shift toward the tertiary sector, is not unique to Jalisco. Rather,

it mirrors an overall trend in Mexico, with 62% of the Mexican population now living in

cities of 15,000 people or greater, and roughly 65% of the nation’s Gross National

Product (GNP) in 2016 coming from tertiary activities (Secretaría de Economía 2017).

Figure 2: Employment of Economically Active Population by Sector of the Economy, Jalisco 1990 – 2010

Source: Pulido and González Romero, “Jalisco En Cifras: Una Visión Desde Los Resultados Del Censo de Población 2010 y Desde Los Programas Públicos,” 2011.

48

That being said, Jalisco remains a major producer of agricultural goods destined

for both national and international markets. Jalisco is by far the largest producer of

agave (primarily for tequila) in the nation; one of the largest producers of maize (both

for human and livestock consumption); it is the second-largest grower of avocados; and

recently, the state has seen a boom in berry production. Raspberry production for

instance, of which Jalisco is by far the number one producer in Mexico, now covers over

4,000 hectares of the state and has created an estimated 70,000 agricultural jobs in just

the past few years (SAGARPA 2017; Gallegos 2018). Almost all of this production is

done through contract agriculture destined for international markets, and in less than a

decade these massive international investments have made raspberries the sixth most

significant crop in the state by market value (SAGARPA 2018).

The agricultural sector in Jalisco is in many ways representative of agriculture

across Mexico: on the one hand, you have highly capitalized farms that generate a great

deal of value through niche production for export markets, while by far the majority of

agricultural land is still planted in staple crops like corn and beans. The state overall

produces much wealth, as evidenced by growing investment in profitable sectors like

information technology in the core of Guadalajara. But this wealth co-exists with

marginalization, including the more than 30% of the population living in situations of

overcrowding, oftentimes on the urban periphery, and much of the roughly 23% of the

population living in remote or rural areas (Gutiérrez Pulido and González Romero 2011,

22–27). Moreover, with economic development has come increasing environmental

degradation and the risks to human health that come with it. Lake Chapala for instance,

a river-fed lake just 50 kilometers south of Guadalajara and a major source of water for

the region, has been found to contain dangerous levels of heavy metals and agricultural

49

runoff, stemming from industrial contamination upstream in the Santiago River

(Tetreault, McCulligh, and Lucio 2018, 21; Carrera-Hernandez 2018). While the state

pushes forward with the process of urbanization and industrialization, its residents

begin to face new forms of environmental and social pressures.

The environmental pressures stemming from largescale agriculture, industrial

development, and ongoing resource extraction were a major driver of the early local

food movement in and around Guadalajara. In 1996, an environmental organization

called the Jalisco Environmentalist Collective (CEJ, Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco)

established the first local food market, expressly aimed at developing local production

that would better support ecological and human health. In the initial years, this market

— Círculo de Producción y Consumo Responsable (Circle of Responsible Production

and Consumption) — aimed to support producers in adopting organic growing methods,

rather than serving only those producers already using organic practices (Interview 3).

This first market would also become a founding member of one of the most

prominent local, organic food organizations in Mexico: the Mexican Network of Organic

Markets (REDAC, la Red Nacional de Tianguis y Mercados Orgánicos). REDAC began in

2004 as a national organizing body for local markets, with the objective of supporting

the establishment of these markets, and in particular the development of Participatory

Guarantee Systems (PGS) for the certification of organic producers (Nelson et al. 2016).

While REDAC is not currently in operation, as of 2013 they cited having 37 local

markets in total operating nationwide, and they are largely considered to be the driving

force behind the localization of organic distribution channels in Mexico (Interview 5).1

1 For a more detailed description and analysis of REDAC and PGS in Mexico see Nelson et al. (2016) and Schwentesius de Rindermann (2015). While the influences of REDAC remain noteworthy within the

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The growth of the local food movement surrounding the ZMG has been driven by

the participation of a variety of different actors, both locally and internationally. In

addition to non-profit organizations like CEJ and REDAC, the Universidad Jesuita de

Guadalajara (ITESO) has provided technical support to a number of local food

initiatives in the region, including access to space, distribution of organic seeds,

volunteer placements, and a series of applied research projects. In 2004, ITESO formed

its own organization to support food self-sufficiency at the household and community

level in rural Jalisco, including the development of direct links between organic

producers and rural households. There has also been some degree of involvement by

international civil society organizations, which have provided direct funding for several

local markets in the ZMG, as well as REDAC in its earlier years of operation.

A number of distinct consumer groups have also played a key role in the

development and character of the local food movement in Jalisco. Within food networks

that were predominantly founded by consumers, participants are more often women

who use local food as a way of improving health within their households and

communities. Many of these consumers choose to participate in local food initiatives as

a reaction to the opacity of the conventional food system, particularly fears surrounding

the human health risks of agrochemicals and genetically modified seeds. This consumer

base has subsequently pushed the idea of local food as a more accountable model of food

provisioning, as well as a method of directly supporting a low-input model of

agriculture. Another key group of consumers has been the growing number of

organic movement in Mexico, much of the scholarly work on local food initiatives has tended to lean quite heavily on this organization as essential to the functioning of a national movement. I believe this background to be useful, however I would argue that the persistence of these markets even during REDAC’s hiatus is a testament to the strength of local articulations within this movement.

51

international residents around the ZMG, particularly in communities along the banks of

Lake Chapala. For these consumers, seeking out specific spaces for consumption is a

way of connecting to familiar notions of quality or healthy food, and for many it is also a

political expression of support for a specific form of production. As I will explore in

Chapters Five and Six, while these international consumers provide further support for

local producers, they also introduce demands that may not reflect existing production

systems, often expecting that supply will seamlessly adapt to their expectations.

Finally, groups of producers have been instrumental in the expansion of the local

food movement in Jalisco, particularly in encouraging organic and/or low-input

transitions by a greater number of farmers. As several participants in this study will

reference, there is very little state support for organic transition, particularly not for

small-scale farms oriented toward more local consumption. For that reason, much of the

knowledge surrounding organic production comes from other farmers, rather than

official extension through rural development agencies. In addition to technical support,

producers have been crucial in the governance of local food initiatives in the ZMG. As I

will discuss in comparing particular initiatives, the degree of producer control over local

food networks has significant implications for the character of those networks, including

the extent to which they give producers additional control over their own livelihoods.

From its origins in the environmental movement in Guadalajara, and through the

participation of a variety of actors, the local food movement in Jalisco has grown to

encompass a number of different models and production-consumption relationships.

According to GDL Verde, an organization that engages in education campaigns to

encourage local consumption, there are currently 18 local markets in Guadalajara, as

well as a handful of fixed points of sale that specialize in local and artisanal products.

52

Outside of Guadalajara, there are also several local markets in smaller towns, as well as

a number of direct links between cooperatives in rural areas and points of sale in and

around the ZMG. While a detailed description of the aims and structures of each

initiative is beyond the scope of this chapter, it would be fair to say that in keeping with

the origins of the local food movement in Jalisco, the majority of these initiatives aim to

encourage ecologically sound growing practices, the consumption of comida sana, or

‘healthy food,’ and for some there is an additional social or political objective of

supporting the livelihoods of small-scale producers. While I cannot claim to capture the

full spectrum of these objectives within this one study, the individual initiatives included

within this research represent a variety of normative perspectives and network

structures. In the coming section, I will outline the methods used to explore these

networks, followed by an overview of the individual initiatives included in this study.

4.2 Research Questions and Methods

Given the growing presence of local food networks in Jalisco over the past two

decades, it is worth exploring not only the methods of developing these networks, but

the impact that they are having on local growers. Particularly in the context of continued

official support of industrialized production for niche markets — perhaps best typified

by the recent swell in berry production — it seems an important juncture in the

progression of the state’s agriculture sector to assess alternatives to the export-oriented

model of rural development. As detailed in Chapter Two, I argue that one method of

assessing producer livelihoods is through their perceptions of risk, and the sets of

adaptive choices that are available to them. As stated in the introduction to this thesis, I

will explore risk perception and farmer adaptation using two research questions. First, I

53

ask how the scale and structure of direct-to-consumer markets affect the ways in which

small-scale farmers experience and adapt to risk. Next, I explore the specific risk-

management strategies employed by farmers within local food networks, asking to what

extent these strategies represent individual adaptations, collective challenges to the

conventional food system, or a combination of the two.

To explore this pair of research questions, I use a mixture of primarily qualitative

research methods. This study draws on primary data collected between May and July

2018 using participant observation, an administered survey, and semi-structured

interviews. Data collection typically began with a loosely-structured visit to the research

site, most often a point of distribution within the local food network. During this first

visit, I would engage in participant recruitment and informal conversations with

vendors, organizers, and consumers in each market. In the following weeks, I

administered surveys to producers, almost always during market operation. For select

producers, these surveys would be followed by a semi-structured interview at a later

date. Outside of producer interviews, I also used key informant interviews to develop a

better understanding of the agricultural sector in Jalisco, as well as the strategies and

objectives used within local food networks. Finally, throughout my research this primary

data has been supplemented and contextualized using data made publicly available

through the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) and the Secretariat

of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, and Fisheries (SAGARPA).

The survey administered to primary producers was the main tool used to gain an

overarching understanding of the prioritization and perception of risk within local food

networks. The survey consists of four sections. First, producers are asked a variety of

socio-demographic questions, surrounding farm structure, production methods, and

54

external farm supports. The second section includes a list of risk factors that could affect

a small-scale farmer, asking participants to rate the degree of ‘worry’ that they feel for

each factor on a scale of one (not at all worried) to five (extremely worried). Section

three consists of a looser grouping of these risks, asking farmers to rank the order in

which they prioritize each factor during on-farm decision-making. Finally, section four

consists of a series of phrases about attitudes toward risk, asking participants to rank

the degree to which they agree with each phrase. Surveys generally took between 20 and

30 minutes to administer. The full survey can be found in Appendix A.

Semi-structured interviews were designed to contextualize this survey data. The

list of questions used in each interview was developed for the individual participant,

based on their responses to the survey. Generally, interviews focused on the choice to

participate in local marketing channels; the motivation behind using organic or low-

input growing practices; the way that local marketing channels differ from other

marketing options; and specific examples of experiences with risks cited in each

participant’s survey. Interviews with key informants were similarly used to provide

context for each local food initiative, and the agricultural sector in Jalisco more

generally. These interviews were generally grouped around four themes: a description of

the specific marketing model; an overview of the agricultural sector in Jalisco; the risk

environment for small-scale producers in the region; and strategies used to mitigate

risk. Semi-structured interviews typically lasted between 20 and 60 minutes.

The survey data was predominantly used to provide descriptive statistics for the

participants in this study. The objective of these surveys was not to provide a model that

might predict risk perception in further geographic areas or groups of producers; rather,

my aim was to provide a uniform way of assessing the risks that most impact this set of

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local farmers, to provide a descriptive overview of risk perception. Interview materials

were transcribed and then coded using NVivo software. This coding process began with

the five risk themes discussed in the previous chapter, and from there additional themes

were added as they emerged from the interview data. My analysis of the data is based on

the most frequently cited worries in the survey data (using groupings of responses in the

4-5 and 3-5 range) and the ways that these factors were discussed during interviews. I

am also using observational data from visits to local markets, distribution points for

consumer cooperatives, packaging sites for producer cooperatives, farms, wholesale

markets, and government agencies to further contextualize this data.

4.3 Selection of Participants

I began recruiting participants by contacting a number of local food initiatives in

and around the ZMG. The criteria that I used in this recruitment was that each initiative

should be currently in operation, with actively participating primary producers, and a

self-described ‘local’ focus. In total, five initiatives agreed to participate, including three

local markets, one consumer cooperative, and one producer cooperative. The five

initiatives are located in the ZMG, the town of Ajijic 50 kilometers to the south, and

Atotonilco el Alto 100km to the east, as seen in the map of Jalisco in Figure 3. In the

ZMG, I worked with two farmers markets (Círculo de Producción and Feria de

Productores) and one consumer cooperative (La Milpa). In Ajijic, I worked with the

Lake Chapala Farmers Market, and in Atotonilco el Alto with a producer’s cooperative

called Suelo Feliz.

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Figure 3: Map of Jalisco

Source: MapaInteractivo.net. 2014. “Mapa de Jalisco”. https://www.mapainteractivo.net/fotos/mapa-de-jalisco.html.

The first market, Círculo de Producción, is the original market established in

1996, though it has undergone several changes in the past two decades. The market

currently operates weekly in the space just outside of the Ecotienda, a permanent point

of sale for health and specialty products near the center of Guadalajara. The market has

10-12 weekly participating vendors, roughly half of which are primary producers and the

other half sell either processed goods or out-of-state products like chocolate or coffee.

The market coordinator is also a vendor of processed goods, who has been involved in

the market since it was established. Outreach materials used to promote the market

describe its products as “ecological from small, local, and organic producers,” though a

third-party organic certification is not required to participate in the market.

Feria de Productores is a market in Zapopan, a municipality just to the west of

Guadalajara. Feria began in 2014, in space donated by the Lions Club of Mexico, where

it continues to operate today. Because of the size of the space available, Feria houses a

greater number of producers each week, and in addition to regular markets they are able

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to hold frequent special events, which draw a wider variety of vendors and consumers.

The first week of this research for instance, they hosted an agave festival alongside the

normal weekly market, which drew at least a dozen mezcal and tequila producers and

hundreds of attendees over the course of the day. Similar to Círculo de Producción, over

half of the vendors in this market sell processed goods, while roughly 6-7 producers sell

primary products. In contrast to many of the other networks sampled here, the

coordinator of this market is not a producer or a vendor, working full-time to support

the market and associated events or initiatives.

The Lake Chapala Farmers Market is located in the town of Ajijic, along the

northern edge of Lake Chapala. This is by far the largest market, with 72 registered

vendors, though only 30 or so attend each week. The majority of the vendors in the

market sell processed goods and artisanal products, with between six and eight primary

producers attending each week. The town of Ajijic is one of the most popular retirement

destinations for expatriates from the United States and Canada coming to Mexico, so the

market largely caters to the demands of these consumers for a space that is similar to a

North American farmers market. While all of the primary producers are Mexican, many

of the vendors of processed goods are also expatriates who have started businesses in

the area. The coordinator of this market is a vendor of processed goods, who also has a

background in government work related to organic agricultural extension.

The consumer’s cooperative — Cooperativa de Consumo Consciente y

Responsable MILPA, or La Milpa for short — is a group of households based in

Guadalajara, who organize a basket of produce from local growers every 15 days. This is

one of the youngest initiatives, with only four years in operation, but at present the

cooperative is made up of 37 families who purchase directly from seven producers. The

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cooperative is predominantly run by volunteers, with producers delivering bulk goods at

the beginning of the pickup days, and volunteers weighing and assembling baskets for

each family. Producers are given a six-month contract with the cooperative, though they

are encouraged to stay for longer, and products are paid for every two weeks upon

delivery. In many ways, this structure resembles a Community Supported Agriculture

(CSA) model, with the major difference being that the consumer group does not invest

in production at the beginning of the season. The coordinator of the cooperative is also a

consumer member and volunteer, who works part time organizing the cooperative, and

fulltime as a graduate student in a local university.

Finally, the producer’s cooperative Suelo Feliz (happy soil) is based in Atotonilco

el Alto, a small town 100 km to the east of Guadalajara. The cooperative was founded

five years ago by an organic producer who had spent nearly thirty years giving courses in

organic agriculture around Mexico. After establishing himself in Atotonilco and

beginning courses with local growers, he recognized that producers using organic

methods were typically selling into conventional markets at unfavorable prices. Working

with five producers in Atotonilco, he established a cooperative to allow groups of

consumers at various ‘nodes’ or distribution points throughout Guadalajara to place

orders every 15 days directly with producers. As compared to la Milpa, in which

individual producers make deliveries to the distribution point in Guadalajara, the

products in Suelo Feliz are aggregated in Atotonilco and brought to Guadalajara in a

single trip. Currently there are 8-10 producers involved in Suelo Feliz, and the founder

continues to hold courses in organic agriculture as a major component of the

cooperative.

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From within these initiatives, I recruited individual producers to participate in

this study. The criteria that I used were that the producer should be an active participant

in a local distribution channel, operating on less than 20 hectares of land, and growing

at least 50 percent of what they sell. This final criterion was used particularly for

vendors of processed goods, who were only included in this study in the case that 50

percent of the raw goods used in their final products came from land that they or a

family member farmed directly. There were 20 producers included in this study, almost

all of whom grow diverse crops on very small parcels of land. In Figure 4, participants

are broken down by farm-size, land tenure type, and number of first-generation farmers.

Finally, key informants were recruited by either email, telephone, or in person, based on

their involvement in a local food network or key position within the agricultural sector

in Jalisco. There were 10 key informants that participated in this study, including the 5

coordinators (one for each initiative), one local researcher, a former producer and

current vendor, the head of a cooperative of wholesale vendors, an exporter within the

wholesale market, and a founding consumer within a cooperative.

Figure 4: Participant distribution and land tenure

Total (n) Ejido (n) Private (n) Ejido + Private (n)

Rented First-generation farm (n)

Under 1 hectare

8 — 6 — 2 5

1-2 hectares 5 1 2 1 1 2 Over 2 hectares 7 1 4 1 1 1 Total 20 2 12 2 4 8

4.4 Purpose of these methods and limitations

I designed these methods to analyze the unique risk environment within several

local food networks in Jalisco, Mexico. Given my research focus on risk perception, I

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believe that it is most useful to take an approach like this one, based on several tools for

qualitative analysis. The strength of using a survey is that it provides uniformity in

comparing between participants. This is a useful starting point, as it provides an initial

indication of the pressure points across the farmers sampled here, based on a single list

of risk factors. The interviews on the other hand, outline the processes and experiences

that inform the perceptions indicated throughout each survey. I believe that the two

work well together, in order to build a contextually-specific understanding of individual

and group experiences within this particular risk environment.

I believe that there are a number of applications for this type of research, as well

as certain limitations to this study. Through this qualitative focus on the risk

environment, I will highlight some of the practices and market structures that have been

used successfully to reduce perceived risk within small-scale farming. While a distinct

local food initiative may not be completely replicable in another context, I would argue

that the practices highlighted here represent useful interventions for rural development

practitioners, non-profits, and even private sector businesses engaged in risk

management work within agriculture. This qualitative approach is intended to highlight

successes and challenges to suggest pathways forward, however given the size of this

initial study it is not intended to provide a predictive model for risk perception in

different contexts. This is in part due to the scope of this project — in which research

time and resources were both constraining factors — but the size of this sample and

methods used would not provide enough data to anticipate the way farmers might

perceive risk in a distinct context or based on specific socio-demographic traits. This has

often been the focus of past quantitative studies on risk perception, however it is beyond

the scope of this study.

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In the next chapter, I will outline the key findings from this study, grouped

around the five categories of risk introduced in Chapter Three. Throughout Chapter

Five, I will be working with survey and interview data together, rather than analyzing

the two separately. This is done primarily to highlight the ways in which different

categories of risk are discussed across the research data. The findings will be followed by

the final chapter, discussing the results and connecting them back to the theoretical

framework laid out in Chapter Two. In particular, I will be discussing how the practices

described in the findings chapter relate back to the idea of autonomy as a strategy for

reducing risk. Finally, in this concluding chapter I will return to the possible

applications of this research, to further explore how my findings might inform rural

development and agricultural risk management strategies.

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5. Findings

In the following chapter, I will outline the main findings of this research. The

chapter will proceed in six parts. The first five sections focus on the broad categories of

risk introduced in Chapter Three, namely agricultural markets, income diversification,

environmental, political, and social risks. In each section I will discuss how these risks

were ranked by participants within the survey, the ways that farmers discussed these

risks as related to the decision-making process, and the practices used to mitigate each

category of risk. As stated in Chapter Three, there are certainly issues with boundary

setting here — in fact, in specific cases risk factors have been included in multiple

categories — but I do believe that these broad categories provide a useful structure for

discussing distinct risks in relation to one another. For that reason, I have chosen to

focus on categories of risk in this chapter, while working to break those categories down

within the Discussion chapter, to highlight the rich interdependence between various

risk factors. Finally, section six of this chapter will discuss general attitudes toward risk,

based predominantly on the final two sections of the survey, as well as interview

materials. This section highlights individually held beliefs surrounding risk in general,

and the extent to which it is a necessary or avoidable component of agriculture.

5.1 Agricultural Markets

The first broad category of risks I explore are those factors associated with the

entrenchment of market relations within agricultural production. Within the survey, I

examined five factors as related to this category: ability to find an appropriate buyer,

long-term access to existing marketing channels, changes to final product prices,

changes to input prices, and losses due to quality standards. As I will discuss throughout

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this section, while many of these factors may exert a stronger influence within

conventional markets, participants would often discuss how they are able to circumvent

or mediate the market mechanism through their participation in local distribution

channels. Throughout this section, I will explore how participants exert some control

over the risks associated with agricultural markets, oftentimes by using direct social

relations to mediate market exchange.

Highlights of the results from the survey can be found in Figure 5, which

illustrates the number of participants who ranked each factor as a high worry (4-5) or

moderate-to-high worry (3-5), as well as the average and median response for a better

idea of the general spread. From the surveys, the most cited risk was sudden changes in

input prices, with half of all participants ranking input pricing in the 3-5 range. Most

participants referencing the cost of water, electricity, and transportation as their main

concerns. These input prices in particular are largely outside of producers’ control, as

they are provisioned on oligopolistic markets in which either a single provider or very

few major sellers are able to set market prices. Based on the uneven market structure

that puts input buyers at a significant disadvantage, one of the most important

strategies used to control these risks is to reduce dependence on the market for

provisioning inputs. In this way, the focus on organic or agroecological growing

practices within local markets aligns quite well with strategies for reducing dependence

on input markets.

Figure 5: Perceived Risks from Agricultural Markets

4-5 ranking (n) 4-5 ranking (%) 3-5 ranking (n) 3-5 ranking (%) Average Median Finding a buyer 4 20 5 25 1.9 1 Long-term market access

2 10 5 25 1.8 1

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Product price change

3 15 5 25 2.05 2

Input price change

6 30 10 50 2.65 2.5

Losses to quality standards

3 15 4 20 1.8 1

Producers use a number of different strategies to reduce their dependence on the

market for agricultural inputs, including composting, seed saving, seed exchange,

planting perennials rather than annuals, and integrated pest management. Margarita2, a

multi-generational farmer who sells a variety of mainly fruit-based products with her

son and sister, focuses on fruit production because it simplifies her planning year-to-

year. She explained that with fruit production her family is able to rely on their own

ecological resources, rather than the market:

Since they are fruit trees, which produce every year, each season we have what they give. The large producers do change the genetics of the trees so that they can produce in certain seasons when there are better sales, when there is scarcity, so they do make changes. But we leave the product, the tree, everything is natural the way it [the tree] wants to give. Whether it is a little or a lot, and when it is able, we don’t force it (Interview 13).

When further asked if they buy any seeds, for instance for the plot of land used for

family consumption, her son Andrés told me, “we never really do it because it’s so much

pressure with the seeds. We have compañeros with their own farmland and hortalizas

[vegetable production], and we have been able to get seeds from them, and we share the

final crops that we produce as well.” For Margarita and Andrés their choices of what to

produce are based not only on a financial decision to reduce dependence on input

2 All names used throughout this thesis are pseudonyms, used to protect the privacy of participants.

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markets, but also on personal beliefs surrounding the relationship between humans and

nature, and access to a community of farmers that can support seed and food exchanges.

Similarly, Emiliano spoke about his decision to transition toward organic

growing practices nearly ten years ago, prompted in large part by his daughter who

helps him manage the farm. When discussing this process, he said it was:

In order to eat healthy and produce a healthy product. The chemicals are causing many illnesses and we don’t even know what’s to come. On top of that, because of the extreme cost that comes with them [the agrochemicals]. With organic, you can work with composts, and you have a lot to work with because we’re in the middle, in the campo, and out there we have manure from horses, chickens, sheep, from everything. You compost that, in addition to grass and everything, and you can get a lot of material out of everything there (Interview 6, emphasis added).

For several of the farmers I spoke with, there are several motivations for transitioning

toward a low-input model of agriculture, including a conviction that agrochemicals are a

major cause of recent health crises in Mexico, that they are linked to overall

environmental degradation, and financial choices to reduce market dependence.

For Vicente, the founder of Suelo Feliz, dependency is one of the main objectives

of the state’s modernization project. His objective in starting the producer cooperative

and encouraging farmers to transition to organic production methods was to foster

resilient growing systems that eased or eliminated dependence on input markets. When

talking about financial supports run through SAGARPA, in this case one directed at

ranchers who adopt certain phytosanitary practices, Vicente argued:

Everything is under the flag of health… well, one side is the support, but the other side is to make sure that the zone [Atotonilco el Alto] is free from certain diseases, quarantines… in other words questions that if you investigate a little bit you realize they aren’t true. That they are flags used in the end to sell inputs. And who sells them? Well obviously, they are these large transnational companies. So, you begin to understand clearly that these programs and the way that they are managed is only used to take a census and then require them [producers] to methodically

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consume inputs. It’s not even if you want, it’s that now you are obligated to do it. If you don’t complete it, they will punish you (Interview 14).

Vicente went on to explain that for many producers practicing low-input agriculture,

adopting these phytosanitary standards triggers a cycle of degrading environmental

conditions, vulnerability to pests, and further dependence on external inputs. When

discussing a producer of limes in his network, Vicente explained:

He started growing organically, so he has his orchard like mine, enyerbado [filled with weeds]. But he pastures sheep on it. Then the people from plant health came — that is to say from CESAVEJAL — and they required him to use herbicides. And he said wait a minute, I don’t want to use herbicides, why would I have to use herbicides? And then they invent things, that because of the nutrition of the trees, that because of certain pests… And it was precisely these weeds that created a habitat for beneficial insects that could then control pests.

In other words, Vicente argued that by shifting to low-input growing systems and

integrated pest management strategies, producers are not only able to reduce their

dependence on external markets or state bodies, but they are also able to create more

resilient growing systems in the long-term.

Significantly fewer participants cited changing market prices for their final

products as a large risk, with only 25 percent of participants ranking market prices in

the 3-5 range. As many participants discussed, this is in part because of the control that

direct-to-consumer markets give to producers in setting prices, as well as certain price

premiums that producers gain by using organic or agroecological growing practices.

Rather than setting the price through supply-and-demand alone, these initiatives draw

on various pieces of information to set market prices, including collectively-held values

surrounding organic and local production. By removing the intermediary, farmers are

also able to retain a greater share of the final consumer price for each good. Moreover,

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by engaging in a social process of setting prices, producers are able to more accurately

account for the cost of production when setting their own prices.

Agustín, a market participant growing on his family’s ejido land, preferred selling

directly to consumers who recognized the value in his product. When discussing his

decision to sell in local markets he said, “first of all, I don’t have enough product to go to

the wholesale markets. Here, I can sell directly to the consumer at a more just price, and

the people here understand the process [local consumption] a bit more. And it’s more

refined, the movements for this type of process” (Interview 16). Agustín spoke often

about making a decent living, about being able to survive doing what he enjoyed, and

one theme that came up was his own sense of pride in his work. When the conversation

returned to the difference between wholesale markets and the local distribution

channels, he laughed cynically and told me, “I have sold at the wholesale markets and

with the coyotes [intermediary buyers], I’ve already traveled all over, all over… So now I

would prefer not to sell, I would even prefer to lose my harvest than to take it to the

wholesale markets. It’s better.” For Agustín, not only is the standard market price too

low for a small-scale producer to make a living, but the actual process of having to

engage with the open market deprives him of the dignity and important social

connections he builds through face-to-face exchanges with consumers.

Another advantage frequently cited by farmers is that direct-to-consumer

distribution channels remove the intermediary within market transactions. In

conventional market structures like the wholesale market, a smaller number of buyers

typically exert significant control over the purchasing process, with small-scale farmers

in particular acting as price-takers within the market. Removing these intermediary

buyers has the effect of increasing the price that farmers receive, and it may also create

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greater certainty for the seller in the transaction. Joaquin for example, the head of a

grower’s collective that sells in several local markets, explained the difference between

direct sale and working with an intermediary. He grows several niche crops, and has

even been approached by exporters of organic products, however he says that price and

control by the intermediary are major barriers. As Joaquin explained:

I prefer to sell in a direct way. Because otherwise, over there [in the wholesale market] what they tell me is… well, my price here in the market is this, and I tell them, this is my price. “Oh no, it’s really expensive.” Because they tell me, “Give me the best price because I have to sell it after.” And I can’t, because then I wouldn’t only be lowering my earnings, I have to sacrifice for everyone [producers in the collective] so that you can sell. No, that doesn’t work. I don’t have the hectares or the monocrop to make that work (Interview 12).

Cutting out the intermediary is not just a question of removing one link in the chain to

keep costs down, for several producers it is a way of eliminating what they see as unjust

or manipulative business practices in the agricultural sector. Vicente for example,

argued that the process buyers use to set prices ignores on-farm realities like cost of

production. When speaking about one of the producers in his network, he said:

Here for example, the lady who sells limes had a season where limes were 60 pesos [US $3 per kilo] in Guadalajara. Then people [wholesale buyers] started coming here to buy limes at 5 pesos. And the people in Guadalajara think that they are paying 60 pesos because a farmer received 50, 55. It’s not true. Walmart receives 50, the farmer receives 10 if they’re lucky. Or in the case of Iris, 5. So the intermediary is the one who gains, who speculates. And it’s never real, these increases aren’t real, they don’t have any justification. The justification would be if Iris received 50 pesos. Because, I don’t know, because she had to spend more this season, for whatever reason. But that doesn’t exist, it’s just a game of speculation (Interview 14).

Direct-to-consumer distribution channels are seen here as combatting one of the major

issues in the agricultural sector, that of unfair trade relations that disadvantage

producers in the price-setting process. In part, one of the reasons that participants felt

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less worried about the final price of their product was that they did have some degree of

control over the prices they charge in direct-to-consumer markets, and they felt that

these prices were a more equitable valuation of their work.

Finding a sufficient buyer for their goods was another factor cited by 25 percent

of participants as a mid-to-high-range worry. While forms of alternative consumption

have been growing in the ZMG, participants did note that barriers to entry and

continued unequal power relations did exist even within these alternative spaces. In

most cases, participants used multiple marketing channels as a way of diversifying their

income streams, something that I will return to in the coming section on livelihood

options. That being said, while several farmers did cite the ability to find a sufficient

buyer as a risk, others saw this issue as easily overcome through additional work by the

producer, and collaboration between groups of producers and consumers.

When discussing access to alternative markets, one critique that I heard is that

some of these alternative consumption spaces continue to use unfair practices that are

common within the conventional food system. Roberto, the coordinator of the consumer

cooperative La Milpa, was particularly critical of the way that certain alternative

consumption spaces — for instance, stores focused on organic produce — treated their

suppliers. Talking about these alternative stores, he said:

Sometimes these places have the same logic as the big stores, no? They also buy from you on consignment [paying the producer after the good is sold], they will also ask that you have certain discounts, etcetera. But with us no, what we do is we agree on a price at the beginning of the six months [minimum partnership length] and we maintain this price throughout that time (Interview 11).

The practice of purchasing on consignment in particular was something that multiple

producers brought up as a barrier to participating in some niche markets, and an

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advantage of direct-to-consumer marketing arrangements. As Sofia, a fulltime grower

with several employees described her decision to sell direct-to-consumer:

Because you know what, I receive money immediately. When distributors sell it, they want to pay me two or three weeks after. But I need the money quickly because I need to take it to the farm to pay the boys who help me, to pay the lights and the pump water. That is to say, I need the money fast and I can’t give credit, so I prefer to sell my products directly (Interview 7).

Rather than alternative food markets that focus on specific properties of the final

product, an advantage of both cooperatives and direct-to-consumer markets is that

farmers have an immediate source of income through a direct exchange relationship.

Finally, two factors that participants were generally less worried about were the

long-term viability of their current marketing channels and suffering losses due to

quality standards. For one of the few participants who felt ‘extremely worried’ about her

marketing channel, it was because she participated in several more marginal markets,

and her concern was that as they were lesser-known, they may not survive long-term.

Most participants however, seemed confident that they had enough loyal customers and

that their marketing channel were sufficiently strong to last into the future. As I will

discuss further in the social relations section, this is in part due to the relationships

within these initiatives, which are a key component of their long-term success. In terms

of quality standards, many participants did discuss the educational work that goes on

within direct-to-consumer initiatives, as a way to encourage consumers to buy

blemished or irregular products. But perhaps even more common was an assertion of

the high-quality of their products, almost brushing off the need to worry about

standards. Oftentimes, when asked this question producers would lift up products from

their table to tell me about the properties that they value most in their goods, explaining

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why consumers choose to buy from them. Moreover, participants used various practices

to absorb losses from crops that they might not choose to bring to the market,

particularly conversion to compost and as feed for on-farm animals. While several

farmers did still cite quality standards and long-term market viability as factors that

worry them, within the group of agricultural market-based risks they are much less

significant than were perceived risks from potential changes in input prices.

5.2 Livelihood Options

I understand livelihood options as being the variety of economic activities and

income sources that farmers have at their disposal to support their livelihoods,

including non-agricultural economic activities, the variety of possible uses for

agricultural outputs, and external income streams. To explore the livelihood options

available to participants, the initial section of the survey asked participants a number of

questions about how they make their livings, summarized in Figure 6. This was followed

by three risk factors in the ranking section directly focused on the availability of

alternative income streams: ability to find off-farm employment, ability to access

government supports, and ability to access private credit. The results from this section

are summarized in Figure 6. Finally, as with the past category, open-ended interviews

were crucial for highlighting the reasons that participants may or may not experience

access to diverse livelihood options as a risk, as well as some of the practices used to

mitigate these risks. The following section will focus on what I consider to be the dual

nature of the diversification of livelihood options as a strategy for spreading out incomes

to mitigate risk, as well as a process that creates additional demands on farmers’ time

and/or resources.

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Figure 6: Income and Activity Diversification

Total (n) Multiple distribution channels (n)

Household consumption (n)

Outside employment, primary operator (n)

Outside employment, family (n)

Government supports (n)

Private credit (n)

Under 1 hectare

8 6 (75%) 7 (87.5%) 5 (62.5%) 4 (50%) 1 (12.5%) —

1-2 hectares 5 4 (80%) 5 (100%) 3 (60%) 1 (20%) — — Over 2 hectares

7 7 (100%) 6 (85.7%) 5 (71.4%) 5 (71.4%) 2 (28.6%) 1 (14.3%)

Total 20 17 (85%) 18 (90%) 13 (65%) 10 (50%) 3 (15%) 1 (5%)

Beginning with the makeup of farmer livelihoods, the majority of participants

engaged in activities outside of growing for local food markets. Almost all of the sampled

producers engaged in agriculture specifically for their household’s consumption, either

on a separate plot of land or by dedicating part of the overall yield to the household. The

strategies used by farmers to differentiate between market production and household

consumption will be further discussed later in this section, as well as in the final chapter

of this thesis. In addition to growing for household consumption, 85 percent of

participants diversified their distribution channels, with the most common forms of

distribution being local farmers markets, producer or consumer cooperatives, direct

orders by customers, and to a lesser extent third-party distributors and direct-sale to

restaurants. The prevalence of distribution channel diversification is largely a feature of

this sample, which worked exclusively with those producers currently engaged in local

food networks, however it does indicate that distribution through alternative markets

requires that farmers use a variety of channels to fully sustain their livelihoods. The

majority of participants also seek out off-farm employment (n=13), typically during the

off-season, as few producers were equipped with greenhouses to enable year-round

growing. Finally, the method of income diversification that was by far the least common

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was outside supports through either government agencies or private banks. As I will

discuss later in this section, this method of income diversification was typically seen as a

greater risk in itself than it was a strategy for augmenting income on the farm.

Participants growing for household consumption cited a number of reasons that

they chose to self-provision, including the ability meet their household’s consumptive

needs with high-quality and nutritious food; a preference for certain crops; as a method

for reducing dependence on the market and cash-based income; as well as a mechanism

for absorbing unsold products from the markets. As Andrés explained for instance,

when asked whether he thought farming was a particularly risky profession:

In reality yes and no. No because everything that you produce you are also producing for yourself. So, it could be that the majority of what you produce is for you, and whatever you don’t need or what you are producing in surplus is what you can sell or exchange with someone else. So, in that way it is more secure. For the part that is risky, there is the risk that you could be stuck with everything, and you wouldn’t know what to do with it. That is why we started to do the processed goods (Interview 13).

As Andrés suggests here, his household builds their production and marketing methods

around a number of different uses for their crops, to diversify outlets and minimize

waste. Their strategy is to first prioritize household consumption and then once those

needs have been met they make decisions about what to bring to market. Making

processed goods like preserves, candies, and tamales has also been an effective way of

absorbing surplus crops, and often they are able to add value to their products this way.

Joaquin similarly focuses on a combination of alternative distribution channels

and household consumption to absorb any unsold produce in the market. When

describing his process for planning what he will plant each season, Joaquin says there

are three important considerations: “what can be grown according to nature, what

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people will buy in the market, and what you like to eat for yourself” (Interview 12). For

the most part, there is little distinction between what is grown for household

consumption and the market, though he did give the example of beets, which never sell

very well in markets, but he continues growing because they are one of his favorite

vegetables. This way of thinking about what consumers will buy and what his household

can consume extends to each weekly market, when he carefully plans out how much to

harvest to avoid waste. Joaquin explained that his weekly harvest plan involves careful

documentation of how much produce he brings each week and how much is left over. He

then works to diversify what to do with the left-over produce, explaining:

There are times when I sell everything in the first hour, and there are times when I am left with a lot, so then I won’t bring as much the next week. But if I continue to have extra then I use it, or sell it in other places, or I keep it for myself. I have clients who will call me at the end of the day to see what I have left. Or I will give it away to someone, I have given produce to my family. There are times when I will say to clients, you know what, it’s a gift, or pay me some other time.

Diversifying the possible uses for produce — as well as creating fluid interactions

between household consumption and market exchange — is an important way for

Joaquin to absorb losses. Within these possible distribution channels, he may be able to

find a final buyer who will pay for the product, however oftentimes he ends up

exchanging these surplus goods based on other agreements, like sustained loyalty from a

customer or support for friends and family.

The majority of participants do engage in outside employment, however as seen

in Figure 7, the ability to find outside employment was not ranked as a particularly high

worry. Overall, participants had relatively low rankings of perceived risk for the three

factors associated with livelihood diversification. In fact, of the groups of risk factors

discussed here, the perceived risks associated with the ability to access diverse

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livelihood options are among some of the lowest ranked risks overall. Based on

discussions I had with participants while filling out the survey, and subsequent

interviews, there are several possible explanations for this. For outside employment in

particular, many participants expressed the idea that even if employment is scarce,

those who are willing to work hard will always be able to find something. When asked

during the survey if there was ample employment in the region, one farmer responded,

“Claro, para quien se mueve” — of course, for those who hustle. Beyond outside

employment, this idea of growers who are willing to work hard and seek out

opportunities was a common one throughout interviews. As I will further discuss in the

final chapter, individual farmers’ tendency to emphasize entrepreneurialism and grit in

those who choose to participate in local agriculture can at times stand in tension with

the more collective language or approaches used within certain local food initiatives.

Figure 7: Perceived Risks and Livelihood Diversification

The ability to access credit and government supports on the other hand, was

generally not seen as a significant risk, largely due to the fact that few farmers saw these

sources of income as a valuable asset for their households. Many participants

emphasized the additional risk that they would take on by engaging with private banks

or government agencies, preferring to maintain their distance from external funders.

When I asked Sofia if she received any government supports or had a line of credit she

4-5 ranking (n) 4-5 ranking (%) 3-5 ranking (n) 3-5 ranking (%) Average

ranking Median ranking

Additional work

3 15 4 20 1.85 1

Credit access 2 10 3 15 1.5 1 Government supports

3 15 3 15 1.7 1

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laughed, squeezed her bicep and declared, “Nada, pura fuerza propia” — nothing, just

my own strength. For Sofia, the choice not to seek out supports is in part a personal

preference for independence, and it is certainly a source of pride. For some however, it

is less of a choice. Alejandro, a greenhouse grower of a very niche crop, did spend time

worrying about possible access to government supports. He hoped to expand his

growing space with another greenhouse, however he worried about the additional time

it would take to apply for government grants. As he explained, “It is about making a

choice between neglecting my current business to try and grow in the future, or just

taking care of what I have now” (Interview 18). He also worried about having to pay

back part of the government funds, a common requirement of funds designated for

productive investments like new greenhouses. For the moment, Alejandro felt that his

business had stagnated, but he was unsure how to access the additional investments

needed to expand.

Alejandro’s experience highlights the tension within the diversification of income

sources, which could be understood as a strategy for protecting livelihoods against

sudden shocks, as well as a symptom of precarity or insufficient income from any one

agricultural distribution channel. As Alejandro indicated, he could improve his

household’s income by seeking out additional funding sources through government

agencies, however this would cut into the limited amount of time he has available,

potentially even jeopardizing his ability to fulfil all of his on-farm activities. While many

participants enjoyed the flexibility afforded to them by diversifying their distribution

channels, crop uses, and income streams, for others it could become a source of strain

on time and energy. Agustín for example, who takes part in multiple local markets,

noted what a large commitment it was. As he put it:

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To be here is an opportunity, if anything we are missing opportunities like this in our community, at the local level. This isn’t local, for me this isn’t local sale anymore. […] My farm is one hour from here. So, if I were to have opportunities to sell products in my community, that would be better for me. I wouldn’t have to travel so far, and I wouldn’t have this cost (Interview 16).

It is noteworthy that for Agustín, the opportunities available in his community versus

those in the city have shaped the way he defines local food. While he embraces the

opportunity to sell into multiple alternative markets, his need to do so is largely the

result of reduced options for small-scale farmers in his own community. In his case, his

diversification of income sources through multiple distribution channels is not entirely a

personal choice, it is also an adaptation to failures within the local agricultural sector.

As I will discuss further in the section on political risks, many participants did not

see income diversification through government supports as a viable option because they

viewed these programs as corrupt or ineffective. This perspective was fairly common

across producers and key informants, including those key informants from outside of

the local food sector. When speaking about the agricultural system in Jalisco with Uriel,

a fruit exporter in the Guadalajara wholesale market, he was immediately dismissive of

the government supports available to small-scale farmers. He told me about his uncle

who was a sugarcane grower, explaining:

One day I was with him and he told me, “hey mijo, I can’t stay tomorrow, I need to go pick up my check for PROCAMPO.” And I asked how much they give him. No well five, five-ten thousand pesos [$250-500 USD] two times per year. You’re kidding? Who would even go for that? I told him no, no, what for? With all of the procedures and everything, no… (Interview 10).

For Uriel, the amount of work required for a farmer to access government funds simply

was not proportionate to the type of support they received. It should also be noted that

PROCAMPO is a cash transfer program that was developed in the leadup to the passage

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of NAFTA, designed to buffer the incomes of predominantly small-scale farmers affected

by the free-trade agreement. At present, it is one of the few agricultural supports that

small-scale growers can access, yet only one of the participants in this study received

PROCAMPO funds each year.

Overall, it would appear that producers in local food initiatives do not perceive

the ability to access alternative economic activities or income streams as one of their

more significant risks. As discussed here, there are a number of possible explanations

for this. First, given that this study samples producers engaged in local food initiatives,

it should come as no surprise that many of them have already made the choice to

diversify their distribution channels. In this way, these participants are in some ways

self-selecting, because they are engaged in markets that are oftentimes predicated on

piecing together a livelihood through many different points of exchange and distribution

methods. Moreover, the structure of local food initiatives is particularly well-suited to a

flexible arrangement between household consumption and market exchange, which

further enables producers to diversify their livelihoods through self-provisioning.

Another possible explanation for the low degree of worry for these factors is the

idea that livelihood options are easily accessed through individual hard work. Unlike

other factors — such as input pricing, which was discussed in the previous section —

participants did seem to feel that they had a good deal of control over the diversification

of their own livelihoods, for instance through off-farm employment. While certain

options for livelihood diversification are made available through the market structures

of these local food networks, these options are often predicated on individual

entrepreneurialism, or the expectation that individual farmers will take the initiative to

access the distribution channels and income sources needed to adequately support their

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livelihoods. Finally, while livelihood diversification is often understood as a way for

small-scale producers to spread their risks across various income streams, there was

also a sense from several participants that the need to diversify stems from certain

economic pressures, and it does create further demands on producers’ time and

resources. Applying for government funding for instance, takes a great deal of time

filling out paperwork, and participating in multiple distribution channels requires extra

transportation, coordination, and harvests throughout the week. In other words, while

participants seemed to feel they were able to diversify their livelihoods when necessary,

there was also a sense among some that this was a requirement to survive unfavorable

economic conditions, rather than an actual personal preference.

5.3 Environment

To explore perceptions of environmental risk, I first started with a limited list of

environmental factors in the survey: damage from sudden weather events, long-term

climate change, and the emergence of new pests. The results of this section of the survey

are available in Figure 8, however as I will explain throughout, these broad factors were

used mainly as a guide throughout discussions surrounding environmental risks. During

each survey, I would ask about the particular climate and environmental pressures in

the region, prompting participants to provide specific examples of common risks within

this geographic area. Finally, qualitative interviews were used to build on these

responses, particularly when exploring the practices used by participants to mitigate

environmental risk. As I will highlight throughout this section, participants largely made

it clear that while environmental factors were strong and oftentimes unpredictable risks

in their own right, other forms of risk had the tendency to compound environmental

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pressures. That being said, participants often cited the style of diverse production that is

best suited to direct-to-consumer markets as one of the most effective practices for

protecting against environmental harm, suggesting that access to particular market

structures may enable production decisions that effectively mitigate perceived

environmental risks.

Figure 8: Perceived Risks from Environmental Factors

4-5 ranking (n) 4-5 ranking (%) 3-5 ranking (n) 3-5 ranking (%) Average ranking

Median ranking

Extreme weather event

12 60 15 75 3.55 4

Long-term climate change

11 55 14 70 3.5 4

Pests 8 40 8 40 2.6 2

All three environmental risks are among the highest ranked factors across the

survey, with 60 percent of participants rating extreme weather events within the 4-5

range, and nearly as many (55 percent) gave the long-term impact of climate change the

same rating. The negative effects of pests on the farm were slightly less worrisome than

the other two environmental factors, which is likely due to the degree of control that

producers are able to exert over pests, however within the general context of the survey

they do still represent one of the higher perceived risks. When prompted to explain

some of the specific environmental pressures that they worry about, roughly half of

participants noted access to water as one of their greatest concerns, followed by extreme

heat, changes in the timing of the seasons, hail, frost, and occasional mentions of

hurricanes. Overall, when discussing the changing climate in the region, participants

were concerned that seasons were becoming less predictable, with seasonal rains or

temperature changes coming at unexpected times during the year. As I will discuss

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further in this section, the response to this instability has typically been to diversify the

crops planted each year, which can reduce the risk of a total crop failure.

For many participants, extreme weather events were seen as an inevitable risk of

farming. When Agustín told me about his decision-making process on the farm for

instance, he said that “with the natural risks you never know when [it will happen] or for

how long. So, you can’t be afraid and say, ‘do I do it, or no?’ You just have to do it [plant]

because otherwise you’re really in a tough spot” (Interview 16). As Emiliano told me

when speaking about the factors that influence his annual crop plan, “none of those

things [risk factors on the list] really matter that much. Every year is different, but every

year we have to eat” (Interview 6). In both cases, while environmental factors like an

unexpected weather event were things that Agustín and Emiliano worried about, they

both expressed some sense of fatalism to accept environmental pressures as they may

come. However, in neither case did this present as pessimism, rather they both

expressed a feeling that the possibility of weather events, while certainly undesirable,

should not hold them back in making necessary on-farm decisions.

In addition to the unpredictable nature of environmental risk, several

participants noted how these factors interrelate with other types of risk. When Sofia told

me about the recent climate changes in the region, and her fears should they continue,

she highlighted the additional pressures that climate change puts on farmer resources.

As she put it:

Before it wasn’t so hot, the highest that it would reach was 28, 29, you would say it was really hot if it reached 30 degrees. And right now, it’s almost 40, really hot. So, climate change really is affecting us because before we didn’t need to water so much, and now we need to water two, three times per day. And that means water and electricity for the pump, all of that (Interview 7).

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For Sofia, the increasingly visible effects of climate change put additional pressures on

her input usage, a factor that was already one of her greatest concerns. Similarly,

Vicente noted that environmental and market fluctuations may not always line up. This

means that in moments of high demand you may not have the conditions for peak

production, and vice versa. That being said, there are methods that he uses to overcome

these mismatches, for instance:

Right now, I am in a period with lots of rain, so everything on the farm has a strong energy, like an explosion. Since I am dedicated to growing hortalizas right now, I have to work very hard, because I have to fight against the weeds and grasses. So, finally I said no, I can’t do it. On top of that, the women [consumer group] leave on vacation and like this time, our orders go down. So, I said okay, why I am I producing so much? And finally, I decided it would be better to use it [the extra production] as fertilizer for the soil, as a method to improve the quality of the soil. So, then I create biomass, carbon, I capture it, and increase the organic material in the soil (Interview 14).

In this case, though Vicente was unable to keep up with the rains, and the level of

production reached a point that could not be fully absorbed by the market, he was still

able to use these environmental circumstances to improve future growing conditions. In

this way, though he had to plow under part of this production and thus lost out on a

potential source of income, he was able to generate valuable inputs for use on the farm.

Overall, when speaking about environmental risks, one of the most commonly

discussed strategies was on-farm diversification. In addition to various forms of

livelihood diversification discussed in the previous section, producers frequently

brought up the resilience of diverse growing systems against various types of

environmental pressures, including weather events and pests. Joaquin for instance,

used the example of a strong rainstorm that had come recently, to explain why he

diversifies his farm. He told me:

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The tomatoes are done, no tomatoes left, the cucumbers are done, a lot of things have been destroyed. So, alright no problem, they’re done, okay but we had other things. Little by little you learn about what is left. Today we can still harvest this one, but not the other. So yes, it is risky, but you also have to learn how to read your land, so that you can plant in a more stable way (Interview 12).

While he did sustain significant losses from the storm, Joaquin also felt that it could

have been much worse if he hadn’t diversified his farm. And connecting this one

example to the longer viability of his farm, he spoke about how you can learn from each

event, to determine which combinations of crops may be most resilient to

environmental pressures.

The coordinator of Feria de Productores, Miguel, saw diversity as a key strategy

for reducing environmental risks, as well as a prominent objective within their local food

market. When telling me about the environmental risks associated with farming, and

the extent to which he thought farming was a risky profession, he told me:

Yes, there are situations that present greater vulnerability, I don’t know, say there is a forest fire that could burn some hectares of crops, drought, pests, contaminated water entering your land, or mixing of seeds from neighboring plots with low-quality or transgenic seeds. That is to say, yes there are various risks, but you can also prevent certain things in some ways, no? The thing is you have to always work to make the space more resilient, and that is… well, the more diverse the more resilient (Interview 5, emphasis added).

For Miguel, one of the successes of the market is its ability to support producers in their

adoption of more resilient growing practices. And as he told me early on, one of the key

advantages of the market is that it works on a smaller scale so that farmers are able to

try out new products, without worrying about having a sufficient yield. In other words,

the structure of the market is such that a highly diversified producer can sell small yields

of various crops, potentially stabilizing their income while creating a more resilient

growing system.

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This approach to mitigating environmental pressure through diversification is

not unique to these local food initiatives, it is a central component of various alternative

agriculture practices, including permaculture, agroecology, and traditional

intercropping systems. However, it is still noteworthy that the structure of these local

food initiatives encourages on-farm diversity, because that certainly is not the norm

within prevailing modernization approaches to rural development. For example, when

speaking with Fernando, the institutional director of a coordinating body for buyers in

the wholesale market of Guadalajara, I received a very different perspective on how to

bolster producer livelihoods in the face of environmental uncertainty. When speaking

about the greatest risks in the agricultural sector, he right away offered up

environmental pressures. However, he saw one of the main sources of vulnerability as

coming from the low level of capitalization on many farms, saying:

In an open field, you are right up against the conditions, that is to say the climate. But they have started to take care of that part with greenhouses. With those you are producing practically all year without waiting until you have, well until it rains, to see if it will freeze and frost your plants, those things. So, it [the agricultural sector] is adopting the greenhouses to have a more secure production, a more controlled product (Interview 9).

When asked what changes he would like to see in the agricultural sector as a whole,

Fernando said that he wished there could be, “a change overall in the mentality of

producers, that he can also put in a bit more from his end, that he might want to

tecnificarse (increase his technology use) a little bit or change his practice.” Particularly

from the perspective of wholesale buyers, Fernando’s view is a common way of thinking

about increasing aggregate output within the agricultural sector through the

intensification of technology and input use.

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It is quite notable then, that the participants in this study are generally pursuing

an entirely different approach of decreasing external inputs and diversifying their crop

plans to reduce environmental risks. Though the methods used by the producers in

these local markets in many ways reflect what Fernando considered to be old-fashioned

or unreliable, it is through the adoption of these techniques that local producers seek to

mitigate certain forms of environmental risk. This in some ways reflects what is unique

about direct-to-consumer distribution channels: whereas wholesale markets actively

dissuade practices like intercropping in favor of specialization, participants in local

markets are encouraged to diversify the crops that they grow by varied consumer

demands and small-scale purchasing. In this way, access to alternative market

structures in which the diversity of production is more valued than the quantity, enables

environmental adaptations that may be discouraged by participation in conventional

markets.

5.4 Politics and Insecurity

This was a particularly timely period to be studying the group of risks associated

with political change, as my study coincided with the 2018 elections at the national,

state, and local levels of government. It had become abundantly clear by the time my

research began in May that Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the leftist coalition

Juntos Haremos Historia were going to sweep the election, and in anticipation the

country was effectively steeped in discussions surrounding the state of Mexican

representative democracy. Though conversations with participants focused on political

risks more generally, it is clear that the context of my research played a large role in how

prevalent political concerns came to be. First, in the survey section I explored four risk

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factors, illustrated in Figure 9: political change, violence/insecurity, access to

government supports, and changing free trade agreements. In the case of access to

government supports, I chose to include this factor in both livelihood options and

political risks, as I believe it is relevant to the conversations surrounding income sources

available to farmers as well as broader political conversations. As in previous sections,

this survey data will be contextualized using qualitative interviews. Throughout this

section, I will highlight common feelings of mistrust toward government agencies,

which often lead to an individual and collective set of politics based on disengagement

from the state.

Figure 9: Perceived Political Risks

4-5 ranking (n) 4-5 ranking (%) 3-5 ranking (n) 3-5 ranking (%) Average ranking

Median ranking

Political change 9 45 11 55 2.9 3 Violence / insecurity

9 45 12 60 2.85 3

Government supports

3 15 3 15 1.7 1

Free trade 5 25 8 40 2.25 1

Overall, the factors in the category of political risks were again among some of the

highest ranked in the survey. Nearly half of all participants ranked the risks that

political change and violence/insecurity might negatively impact their livelihood in the

4-5 range. This makes these risk factors two of the most common major concerns, after

the risk of extreme weather events and long-term climate change. The risk of negative

livelihood impacts from changes to the Mexican free trade framework was also a

relatively significant preoccupation for participants, with 25 percent of participants

ranking it in the 4-5 range. The ability to access government supports on the other hand,

was not of particular concern to the majority of participants, as discussed in the section

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on access to diverse livelihood options. As I will explore throughout this section, in

many ways this stems from a sense of mistrust toward government interventions, which

causes participants to view political change as a potential risk, and government supports

as a limited or even adverse option.

When rating the extent to which participants worry about the livelihood impacts

of political change, one of the most common sentiments was that of powerlessness to

affect real political advancements. In many ways, it is this sense of uncertainty that

leads many producers to worry about the impacts that political change might have on

the countryside. Hernán for instance, the coordinator of Círculo de Producción, was

quite cynical about the intentions of the political system toward small-scale, organic

producers. Speaking about the current moment of political change in Mexico, he said:

I don’t see a single benefit coming to the producer. […] I’ll tell you, if a politician came with an ecological consciousness, with a consciousness of compromise toward the environment, toward humanity, well it would be fabulous because then they might have the good sense to support this project of organic production. But right now, in this moment of political movements, I don’t think that it will benefit because… well just look at the rubbish we have right now as politicians. I don’t see a single one that wants to support organic producers or ecological projects. None of them… I’ll tell you, they talk to us about their political project, but more than anything it’s personal, no? I don’t see them as really fighting for the country or for the people, no, no (Interview 3).

I think it is worth noting that Hernán is the coordinator for the longest standing local

market in Guadalajara, which has been involved with various civil society groups for

decades. Even so, from his perspective party politics is practically a lost cause, one in

which citizens have very little capacity to hold their elected officials accountable. It is

perhaps for this reason that groups like Círculo de Producción choose to support farmer

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livelihoods and the organic movement through civil society organizing, rather than

political campaigns for more institutionalized reform.

Fernando from the wholesale markets was equally pessimistic about the ability of

incoming politicians to improve the agricultural sector. When we spoke about the role

that the state-level government played in the countryside, he told me that “Jalisco has

done a lot in the past few years, put in a lot of support on this question of production in

the countryside. But really only for the largescale, the small producers are the ones who

really miss out on it, on this support from the government” (Interview 9). His main

concern was that the government wasn’t doing enough to support producers and to

stabilize the sector. He was particularly worried about what would come out of the

elections, saying:

Right now, with the political campaigns, I don’t see a single one mentioning anything about agricultural production. So, we decided to have a forum [within the sector], we shared it with Andres Manuel, to ask if he had something in mind for the countryside. And they contacted us to say no, that they didn’t have anything ready. So, the sector is somewhat forgotten, they don’t give it the importance the way that it could have (Interview 9).

Though López Obrador is typically seen as a more progressive or leftist politician than

the previous PRI administration, Hérnan worried that the agricultural sector simply

wasn’t a political priority.

Others felt that the political system didn’t just ignore the countryside, but it was a

source of outright harm to producers. When speaking with Matías, a researcher of

sustainable agriculture at ITESO, he told me that, “government supports, or programs,

are not an opportunity for them [small-scale producers], they are the ones that do the

damage” (Interview 2). His argument was that the government had not forgotten about

small-scale producers, they had actively chosen to prioritize modernization projects that

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supplant peasant populations. According to Matías, the 4 million small-scale farmers in

Mexico receive at most 10 percent of the budget for agricultural support, and of that

only 1 peso in every 10 actually reaches the farmer’s pocket. Vicente similarly felt that

the political project of displacing the peasantry was one that would not be rectified

through electoral change alone. As he put it:

It doesn’t matter what they call it, it doesn’t matter what color they paint it, it doesn’t matter how they call the program today. Each sexenio (six-year presidential term) in Mexico, since the government part changes, then the industrial or scientific part, academic, economic, they also paint them. That is to say, suddenly the word ‘sustainable’ is fashionable, then it will be another one that is in style, and they go on changing like this, but nothing really changes (Interview 14).

Vicente expressed a common sentiment about the performative nature of Mexican

democracy. Though voting citizens elect a new president every six years, behind the

public process very little in the structure or objectives of government actually changes.

As he noted, though new rural development programs may be introduced under each

presidency, in some cases with sustainability as a stated objective, these reforms are

mainly superficial. As Vicente sees it, the substance of the government project aimed at

modernization and large-scale agriculture effectively stays the same.

This jadedness that stems from failures in Mexican democracy was particularly

acute when speaking about access to government supports. Not only did participants

express that support was insufficient for small-scale and/or organic farmers, but many

felt that corruption within government agencies kept existing funds from being properly

distributed. Miguel from Feria de Productores for instance, saw the unequal distribution

in funding as stemming in large part from systemic barriers, saying:

There are certain obstacles that are implicit in the convocatorias [call for funding applications]. Often, they do convocatorias with a weeklong window when it is

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open to receive applications. So then naturally, there are very few producers that are there, attentive, no? Ready to respond. So oftentimes when this happens the same secretary [who is responsible for the funding] has contacts for largescale producers and they let them know personally (Interview 5).

As Miguel explained, it is not necessarily that the funds themselves are earmarked for

particular farm structures or growing types, however the bureaucracy of the funding

process effectively excludes small-scale farmers. Similarly, Vicente told me about

practices within government agencies that employees use to take cuts out of each

convocatoria. He explained that because the paperwork and auditing was quite

strenuous, the employees of each agency would oftentimes require funding recipients to

use professional services to properly complete the administrative portions. These

professional services would be done by contacts of the government employees, who

would then receive a portion of the fees from each funding recipient.

The extent to which participants viewed government programs as being corrupt

or unreliable was also evident in the level of mistrust toward these agencies. In one

interview, when speaking about the availability of government funding, I was asked by

the participant to turn off my recording device so that they could speak more freely.

When speaking with Roberto from La Milpa, he told me about the ongoing conversation

they had within the cooperative about whether or not they should seek out government

funding. They were aware that various grants may be available to them, however so far,

the cooperative did not feel comfortable being subjected to additional oversight should

they formalizing the consumer group. While the group called itself a cooperative, they

were not legally incorporated as such, mainly because the members hoped to avoid the

extra costs and regulations that might come with formal incorporation (Interview 11).

Matías similarly told me that one reason many small-scale producers choose not to seek

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out government funding is that it would require them to formally register their farms,

and they fear this would open them up to additional expenses and further oversight

(Interview 2). This mirrors what Vicente told me, as discussed in section 5.2 on

livelihood options, about the strenuous requirements that may be attached to

participation in government programs (Interview 14). This preference for informality at

the level of individual producers and local food initiatives can be understood as a

deliberate disengagement from the state, in part as a response to the risks that

participants attribute to failures within the political system.

As discussed in Chapter Three, the legacy of violence in Mexico is in many ways

tied to the state-led war on drugs. For that reason, it is difficult to disassociate public

fears and discontent surrounding insecurity from the political system that is at least

partially responsible for producing it. While in the early years of the drug war Jalisco

was known as a relatively stable state, in the past year it has seen an uncharacteristic

uptick in cartel-related violence, which most attribute to the Jalisco New Generation

Cartel (CJNG, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación). Again, related to the public mistrust

of state pageantry, several people mentioned during the early weeks of my research that

the election period was one of the most dangerous times in Mexico, as politicians work

to defend ‘tough on crime’ images by making public arrests and drug busts. In fact, my

first week of interviews was in part disrupted by a militarized municipal alert following

the highly-publicized arrest of the wife of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oceguera, the leader of

CJNG. So just as conversations surrounding political change took place in the context of

an unusual election year, when asking participants about how they perceive the risks of

violence and insecurity, it is also worth noting recent developments in Jalisco.

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The fear that violence might negatively impact a participant’s livelihood was

alongside political change as being one of the highest ranked risks in this survey. In

some cases, this fear came from specific experience with insecurity, but oftentimes it

was a more generalized fear over the impact that violence might have on one’s family,

community, and business. Sofia for instance, told me the story of a neighbor who woke

up one morning to find that a body had been dumped at the entrance to his greenhouse.

When he called the police, they blocked off the entrance to the greenhouse to do their

investigation, which ended up lasting a week. As she told me, “he couldn’t enter, he

couldn’t water his tomatoes because the police had the entire zone blocked off. He told

them that he needed to work, that it was his land, but the authorities don’t listen to that

kind of reasoning” (Interview 7). Even more damaging, Agustín told me about losing a

portion of his ejido land to a group of neighbors who came one night with weapons and

demanded use of his land. Agustín, who himself had a rifle and fired into the air to clear

them off his land the first night, tried to take the problem to the police. When Agustín

told a local officer what had happened, he responded that perhaps Agustín should have

simply shot the men to avoid the conflict. At the time of the interview, Agustín was still

growing on only a portion of his ejido land and felt reluctant to take the matter up with

law enforcement again.

Miguel saw violence and insecurity as one of the major threats to the long-term

viability of small-scale farming, particularly in the way that rural insecurity jeopardizes

generational turnover. As he said:

I think what is really important right now is to have a generation of young people in the countryside. Because one of the major risks is there are few people who want to work in the countryside here in Mexico […], normally people want to

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leave. And of course, you have the situation with the narcos, things like that that have an effect on a core group of producers (Interview 5).

In addition to concentration of agricultural land, the Mexican countryside faces a

serious problem with the aging population of primary operators. In fact, related to the

out-migration that Miguel notes here, rural municipalities are some of the fastest aging

groups across Jalisco. Both due to increased mortality rates of young men, and their

tendency to migrate away from drug related violence, rural areas are becoming

predominantly female and have much higher median ages, which raises the question of

how the generational turnover will happen in the farm sector.

Finally, one quarter of participants ranked the risk of changes to free trade

negatively impacting their livelihoods as between 4-5 for their degree of worry, which is

fairly significant in the context of the survey as a whole. The reasons that participants

gave for worrying about free trade were fairly diverse, in some cases tied to a general

political stance on free trade, and in other cases participants worried that it could affect

the prices consumers were willing to pay for organic produce. As discussed in Chapter

Three, opposition to free trade agreements has been a prominent feature of Mexican

peasant movements in the past few decades. For a few of the participants who cited this

risk as a worry for them, they discussed the way that free trade agreements affect the

countryside and the viability of peasant farming. In other words, they were not

necessarily worried about the impact that free trade might have on their own livelihood,

but they still saw it as part of their political position in opposition to the conventional,

export-oriented food system. There were a few others who were concerned that

increased free trade might impact the prices they receive in markets. This is somewhat

inconsistent with the overall finding that market prices were less of a perceived risk to

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participants, due to greater control over pricing in direct-to-consumer distribution

channels. However, in some cases participants did worry that consumers might lose

interest in the markets if they had greater access to imported organic food, or that if the

price for organic produce went down in supermarkets they may have to follow suit. So,

while this was not the general sentiment of most participants, there was still some sense

that political preference for import-export economics could damage local producers.

For a good deal of participants, political risks were seen as some of the most

pressing after environmental conditions. In many ways, this stems from the lack of

control that many market participants feel they have over political conditions. This

diminished faith in the Mexican democratic system has generally meant that local food

producers and networks choose to disengage with the institutionalized political system,

opting instead for community-level initiatives to directly address producer and

consumer needs. This can be seen in resistance to formal incorporation of local food

networks, the paucity of formal political activism within the local food community, and

reluctance to seek out government supports. As I will discuss further in the coming

chapter, this strategy of disengaging from the state structure aligns in a number of ways

with the concept of ‘autonomous food geographies’ introduced in Chapter Two. Though

many participants feel that political change presents a significant risk to their

livelihoods, they choose not to engage with that political system, and instead involve

themselves in projects outside of institutionalized politics.

5.5 Social Relations

The final category of risk that I explore in this study are those factors associated

with the social relations underpinning local food networks. In addition to a geographic

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focus on localized production, direct-to-consumer distribution channels are often

presented as market structure in which goods are exchanged based on deeper relations

of economic codependency, rather than alienated exchanged mediated by the market

mechanism. While this social-mediation is viewed by proponents as a strategy for

shielding producers from the damaging effects of capitalist markets, it also means that

interpersonal conflicts have greater potential to interrupt the smooth functioning of

these markets. To explore the extent to which social relations were perceived as a risk by

participants, I first looked at three factors within the survey: the strength of

interpersonal relationships, long-term access to existing marketing channels, and losses

due to quality standards. The results from this section of the survey are available in

Figure 10 below. In the supporting qualitative interviews, I asked a number of questions

surrounding the objective of each initiative, personal motivations for participation, the

logistics of each distribution channel, and the relationships between producers and

consumers within the market. Overall, I found that participants were quite confident in

the strength of their personal relationships, which they felt were a primary motivation

for their participation in local food networks. While at times differences in objectives

and expectations between producers and consumers could create unrealistic market

demands, the ability to communicate directly with customers was a useful way of

overcoming these issues while giving producers greater control over their livelihoods.

Figure 10: Perceived Social Risks

4-5 ranking (n) 4-5 ranking (%) 3-5 ranking (n) 3-5 ranking (%) Average ranking

Median ranking

Personal relationships

3 15 5 25 1.9 1

Long-term market access

2 10 5 25 1.8 1

Quality standards

3 15 4 20 1.8 1

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Overall, the factors associated with social relations were among some of the

lowest ranked perceived risks in the survey, suggesting a general confidence in market

activities based on direct personal contact between producers and consumers. All three

factors had very similar rankings, with only two or three participants ranking each in the

4-5 range. As I will explore throughout the qualitative interviews, interpersonal conflicts

or differing opinions are not unusual within these initiatives. Nevertheless, based on the

survey responses it appears as though these conflicts are not something that

participants feel worried about in the long-term. It should be noted however, that there

are social barriers to entry for many of these direct-to-consumer distribution channels,

which oftentimes require participants apply with the board of directors based on pre-

established criteria. Given that this study only sampled current participants, who would

have already met any requirements in place, there is some degree of bias based on

proven coherence to the social norms and standards established within each initiative.

One of the most common answers when producers were asked why they

participate in local food networks is that they enjoy having some form of connection

with the end consumer. Emiliano told me that the price benefits were important, but for

him one of the features of the markets that keeps him involved is that, “it is a direct sale,

with the satisfaction that I can see the face of the client, the client is happy with what

they buy, and that is something I really value” (Interview 6). Similarly, when I was

speaking with Margarita and Andrés, he told me that “because it is a direct deal with the

consumer, you get a particular awareness of what you are buying. So, you begin to value

the product more, what you buy and what you consume. That is the principal advantage

of these markets” (Interview 13). For both Emiliano and Andrés, participation in local

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markets provides an opportunity to build stronger relationships within their food

networks, and also encourages consumers to value products based on where they come

from and how they were produced. Unlike in wholesale markets, where products are

exchanged under the assumption that they are homogenous commodities, in these local

networks, producers are able to express the unique value of what they grow.

Participation in these networks is subsequently one way of demonstrating the

value of the work that growers do. Miguel, the coordinator of Feria de Productores, told

me about the relationships that consumers develop with producers outside of market

exchange. As they learn about growers’ work, some consumers have chosen to become

more involved in the productive process. Miguel told me:

It [the market] is a way to have a connection with people. I think this really helps people [producers] who are in the stage of building their work, the support of people really helps. All of a sudden, they have collaborative relationships with consumers who provide some supports for their parcelas [plots of productive land], who donate certain materials, canvases, or in a few instances, consumers have provided small loans to producers to finish work on their parcela. So yes, there are these relationships that give them… more than anything confidence I think. That they can have a point of sale and people who value their product, I think that is the valuable thing in these spaces (Interview 5).

Miguel highlighted many forms of interaction and support that happened outside of

market exchange. In addition to those mentioned here, he told me about the educational

work that they do in the market to help consumers better understand the production

process, and cultural events or workshops on Mexican food and agriculture.

For several participants, the ability to establish the additional value of their

products comes through a sense of accountability or trust that is cultivated within local

food networks. While very few of the producers interviewed had third-party organic

certifications, each initiative had some standards they looked for in producers and a

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verification process, typically carried out by the board of directors. Octavio, the

coordinator of the Lake Chapala Farmers Market and member of their board of

directors, told me that having strong criteria for admission to the market was crucial for

maintaining consumer confidence. 3 He said that it is vital that they are honest with

consumers because “a happy customer will bring you another one, and an unhappy

customer will take away eleven” (Interview 1). According to several producers, the Lake

Chapala Farmers Market was known for being particularly difficult to enter, with

applicants often waiting months before receiving approval. Juan Sebastián, one of the

original growers in this market, felt that the standards are a necessary way of creating

trust between producers and consumers. He said of the process that:

First you pass through the committee […] the rules are strong so that we don’t deceive the people. Because if I wanted to cheat people I could earn some money right now, but tomorrow it will all be over. […] There have been times when people have come to sell here but they weren’t able to because they were lying about their products (Interview 8).

In addition to gaining the trust of consumers, Juan Sebastián was concerned that

without strong standards, producers in the market may be harmed by the participation

of fraudulent organic growers. From his perspective, strong criteria for entry to the

markets is an important part of their long-term viability.

This process of deciding the principles that are most important to market

members is a valuable way of creating trust within existing members, but as a form of

3 The standards for entry to the Lake Chapala Farmers Market are understood as being organic growing standards as set out by third-party certifiers, though uncertified producers and those in organic transition are still eligible for entry. Producers must first approach the board of directors with a formal application, including a description of their products and growing practices. A representative of the board of directors will schedule a visit to the applicant’s farm to verify what is stated in the application, and subsequently report back to the board. The board of directors then makes a final decision about the applicant, based on adherence to organic growing practices and whether the applicant is able to fill current gaps in the market. Participants stated that the application process can take 2-3 months from start to finish.

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barrier setting it is also inherently exclusionary. With the Lake Chapala Farmers Market

for instance, the existing participants I spoke with all felt satisfied with the current

standards, however it wasn’t until I spoke with a former participant that I heard about

some of the conflict involved in standard setting. As it turned out, Agustín was one of

the founding members of the Lake Chapala Farmers Market, though he had not sold

there for many years. He told me that when the market first began, “the objective was to

support small producers who were using ecological growing processes, organic

practices, so they could have the opportunity to commercialize the products in a more

just way” (Interview 16). In the early stages he had taken on a strong role in organizing

the market, alongside a Canadian woman who had her own plot of land, and a handful

of other producers. As the market grew however, the organization’s structure began to

change, and as Agustín explained:

Well in every way people will demand things, they demand different products, new things. So that’s really where things began to get out of control because we [the producers] gave up control of the market. […] The gringos (foreigners) in some way told us, “we will handle the organization so that you don’t have to worry, we’ll handle this, no?” And okay, to me it seemed good because it would take a lot of work off me. So, they started managing the market and started giving spaces to people who didn’t comply [with the growing standards], they just saw that the market was missing products, but the new producers didn’t comply with what we had wanted, or what we looked for, or what we had decided the market should be.

Agustín grew frustrated with the new management of the market, which he viewed as

valuing consumer demands for niche products over producer livelihoods or genuine

commitments to organic growing practices. Though he stayed involved for a few more

years, when the market expanded to a new space six years ago, Agustín cut ties with the

Lake Chapala Farmers Market.

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While this is the most direct account of outright conflict I heard about from a

participant, others did share stories about divergent expectations or motivations

between consumers and producers. Vicente for instance, told me about his earlier

attempts at a producer’s cooperative before Suelo Feliz. He had spent time touring

Italian cooperatives and hoped to replicate the model in Mexico. But when he first began

the cooperative, he had trouble getting consumers to commit their time to produce

pickups or volunteer hours. He told me, “Italians are one thing and Mexicans are

another. Over there they are more socialist, they participate. Mexicans no […], they are

busy with their lives and don’t want anything to distract from it. They prefer to pay for

something and have things worked out for them” (Interview 14). In this case, Vicente

ended up changing his model to have less consumer participation, instead increasing

prices and doing all of the aggregation, packaging, and transportation on the producer

side. Hernán similarly told me that Círculo de Producción initially needed to do a good

deal of education and outreach work, because there were very few consumers who were

interested in buying organic produce. He told me that in the early years, producers

would go home with most of the products they brought to market, which was incredibly

discouraging for early participants. While some more recent distribution channels are

driven by consumer demands, Hernán noted that early initiatives were really driven by

producers who hoped to change mainstream growing methods (Interview 3).

Roberto, the coordinator of La Milpa, argued that though farmers markets may

place a stronger emphasis on social connection, they still shift a good deal of the

economic burden or risk onto producers. What he felt was most unique about

cooperative buying is that it gave producers a degree of certainty that they wouldn’t be

able to find in farmers markets. As he put it:

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[The farmers market] is different because there is no commitment and the risk that the producer runs may also be high. And that’s something we explain. The cooperative is not the same as a producer who arrives at a market with 40 or 50 kilos of products, say 50 kilos of tortillas, puts them there to sell, and waits the 5 or 6 hours that the space [market] lasts. And they run the risk of not selling them all. Here, they arrive with the same amount of tortillas, deliver them, receive their money and return home to continue on their work (Interview 11).

For Roberto, it is important that the relationship between the cooperative and producers

provides growers with a more secure source of income, both in terms of sales each week

and by encouraging long-term relationships with each producer. Ximena, one of the

main consumers in the Suelo Feliz cooperative, similarly saw it as her responsibility to

help spread production risks across producers and consumers. She explained that, “the

consciousness I try to create here in the node [cooperative distribution point] is that the

countryside should be for all of us. If the harvest is lost, it is lost for everyone. If the

harvest is successful, it is successful for everyone” (Interview 17). She shared examples

with me of producers who had lost part of their crop and the cooperative had organized

to either increase prices for the remainder of their products or arranged small donations

to support the producer. While these supports from the cooperative are likely small in

comparison to a producer’s expected seasonal income, they do still demonstrate that

social relations in these networks go beyond how products are valued in the market, to

include diverse forms of support and codependency between producers and consumers.

In the coming chapter, I will further explore the differences in social relations

between the local food networks included in this study, as this initial overview has only

lightly touched on some key points of divergence. Despite these differences, the survey

results and interviews indicate that overall, most participants feel confident in the

strength of the social foundations of these direct-to-consumer distribution channels.

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This confidence comes from a variety of features. First, given that most of these

networks engage in some form of application process, producers were only included in

this study if they have already met the standards laid out within a specific initiative. In

this way, there is a degree of social exclusion, or at least self-selection, that goes on

within the formation of these markets. Another source of confidence for many

participants is the structure of direct sale, which allows growers to form trust-based

relationships with consumers, oftentimes leading to additional values being ascribed to

products based on who grew them, where, and by what methods. Finally, though most

producers ranked the factors associated with social relations as a low risk, there is some

indication throughout the interviews that divergent understandings of food within

producer and consumer groups can lead to conflict within markets or additional

pressure for growers. As I will discuss in the coming chapter, producers and consumers

hold very different responsibilities depending on the market structure, and this can

greatly impact the way that specific initiatives are socially constructed. While each

initiative presented here represents some level of socially-mediated market, the extent

to which that truly changes the market model or helps mitigate producer risks may in

some part be linked to the degree of control that producers and/or consumers are given

over the functioning of the local food network.

5.6 Attitudes toward Risk

Throughout this research I explored common beliefs about the risks associated

with agriculture, to gain a better understanding of how participants view generalized

risk as a component of their lives. The final section of the survey was used to highlight

personal attitudes toward risk, as summarized in Figure 11 below. Throughout

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qualitative interviews, I also asked a series of questions about farming as a profession,

and the extent to which risk influences producer livelihoods. Though there are certainly

exceptions, participants generally viewed risk as an unavoidable aspect of farming,

though most felt it was something that they had control over to some degree. While very

few participants appeared to be entirely risk averse, there was a general preference

toward income stabilization rather than profit maximization, which I will further discuss

throughout this section.

Figure 11: Attitudes toward Risk

Safety First (n) Experiment (n) Risk is necessary (n)

Information to control risk (n)

Control over profitability (n)

Agree 18 17 16 14 18 Neutral 1 1 2 3 1 Disagree 1 2 2 3 1 Total 20 20 20 20 20

The survey section on attitudes toward risk started with a question modeled after

James Scott’s ‘safety first’ principle introduced in Chapter Two. It asked producers what

type of income they would prefer, one that is generally higher but could end at any time,

or one that is lower but stable into the future. Almost all of the participants (n=18)

selected the lower but more stable income, what I have referred to as ‘Agree’ within the

‘safety first’ category in Figure 11. One participant even laughed at the question and

responded with, “Sí, pan duro pero seguro,” — a Mexican adage that literally translates

to “hard bread, but certain,” and is used to describe a similar concept of income

stability. It should also be noted that the only participant to completely disagree with

this statement was also one of the very few vendors for whom farming is not their

primary profession. In his case, it would also make sense that taking risks to seek out a

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higher profit might be a more feasible strategy, as his livelihood was not particularly

dependent on farming income.

While most participants expressed a preference for income stability, this did not

translate into outright risk aversion. As a metric of risk tolerance, participants were

asked to rank their agreement with the following statements: “I like to experiment with

new growing practices and methods of managing my farm” and “it is necessary for a

farmer to take risks for them to be successful.” Participants largely agreed with both

statements, with only two participants disagreeing entirely in each case. This suggests

that while the farmers in this sample are not necessarily taking risks to maximize their

profit, they do see some degree of risk taking as advantageous for the long-term viability

of their livelihoods. This would make sense in the context of this sample, which includes

farmers that have already voluntarily taken the steps to adopt organic or low-input

growing practices, and who are engaged in alternative markets for their products. In this

way, it is possible that those producers engaged in local food networks already have a

personal preference for experimentation, in other words they may be less risk averse

than your average small-scale farmer.

When discussing farming as a profession, most participants noted that it was

fairly risky by nature. As Joaquin put it for instance, “yes it [farming] is risky, but you

learn what you need to grow, how to grow, when you are going to plant. So yes, yes, it is

risky, but you have to work with this risk” (Interview 12). Others expressed similar

sentiments, that risk within farming may not be avoidable, but that doesn’t make it

insurmountable. As Emiliano put it:

There is risk because of [farming’s] nature, because of the climate and all of those things. But it’s not risky because… well, you have to dedicate time to it, that is

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true. If you leave it abandoned, the risk increases. But if you attend to the field, attend to everything, the risk decreases (Interview 6).

As discussed briefly in section 5.2 on livelihood options, several participants took a

stance that treats individual hard work and the ability to endure uncertainty as

prerequisites for success in farming. Similarly, in the survey, nearly all of the

participants (n=18) stated that they agreed with the statement “I feel that the decisions I

make give me sufficient control over the profitability of my farm.” This suggests that

while risk is something that each participant has incorporated into their everyday life,

most do feel that they have the individual capabilities and resources to succeed in the

face of situations of uncertainty.

While participants were generally optimistic about their ability to overcome or

endure risk, there was a degree of fatalism expressed by a few participants. While I have

laid out several of the risk management strategies used by participants, there are still

factors that producers feel are entirely outside of their control. Agustín for instance,

highlighted the unpredictable nature of farming, telling me:

There are many types of risks. First would be the natural [environmental] risks that we have, no? Second would be those risks that… well they are just risks, you could cut off your hand in the field, you could injure yourself with the machete, something like that. […] When you are selling, when you are buying, when you are producing, when you are working, there are risks. It is a type of work with high risks (Interview 16).

As Agustín indicates here, part of his overall perception of the risks associated with

agriculture has to do with the number of different steps in his production and

distribution process, with each step being associated with varying types of risk. He

highlights the conglomerate and unpredictable nature of agriculture, in which between

the field and the market he may encounter any manner of complication. However, as

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Agustín further indicated throughout his interview, this sense of fatalism does not

prevent him from continuing his work each year and making key decisions on the farm.

After the long list of risks he faces as a farmer, I asked if he ever considered switching

professions. Agustín shook his head, laughing as he told me:

No, I like my profession. I like watching what the earth is capable of producing, what one is capable of doing with the earth. […] I like watching the trees, listening to the birds, watching how the earth wakes up, how it dims in the evening, watching how the day unfolds. Every day looks the same, but no, each day is different (Interview 16).

Though Agustín felt that farming entailed a number of risks that were outside of his

control, they did not dissuade him from continuing in agriculture. He told me about

making difficult decisions even when you cannot know the outcome, because though

circumstances may change in the future, as a producer you simply have to act with

certainty to control those things within your power.

Overall, participants often felt that risk was an inevitable or unavoidable

component of agriculture, however this did not sour their outlooks in terms of the future

viability of their farms. The factor within attitudes toward risk that had the most mixed

responses was on access to information, in which participants were asked whether they

have sufficient information to effectively mitigate on-farm risks. When prompted to

speak further on the sources of information they used, most participants mentioned

other farmers in the market, neighbors, and family members with knowledge about

farming. I did not speak with anyone who had taken part in a formal government

extension program, though two farmers had received organic training through Suelo

Feliz, and another was part of the educational network supported by ITESO. In other

words, for most participants sources of information were limited to personal contacts.

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Oftentimes, when asked about the information needed to mitigate risks, participants

would comment on their self-sufficiency or ability to adapt on their own. Once again,

several participants placed great value on individual adaptability and fortitude.

As I have discussed through this chapter, individual producers take a number of

actions to protect themselves within a given risk environment, despite the fact that they

view risk as an unavoidable component of farming. Though there is a certain degree of

fatalism surrounding the uncertainty in agriculture, this has not translated into

pessimism or resignation. Producers still feel that the actions they take can help them

secure a viable livelihood, and that they can improve their production through

experimentation and on-farm risk taking. What is perhaps most interesting about this

outlook toward risk, is that it did not seem to translate into a profit-maximizing

mentality. As I will discuss in the coming chapter, this preference for livelihood stability

mirrors what a number of participants discussed throughout the livelihood

diversification section, particularly the strategies used to meet household consumption

needs while stabilizing incomes. Finally, though the participants in this study are all

engaged in local food networks based on collective action and cooperation, several of

them expressed a sense of individual responsibility in mitigating risk or overcoming

adversity. In the coming chapter, I will return to this tension between individual and

collective action, particularly as it relates to the concept of autonomous food

geographies.

In this chapter, I have laid out some of the key findings from this study. When

looking at the five categories of risk, overall those factors that were grouped as

environmental and political were among some of the highest ranked risks for

participants. In general, those factors that were ranked as a greater risk tended to be

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those over which participants felt they had little to no control, for instance unexpected

weather events, climate change, political reform, violence, and input pricing. That being

said, participants approached risk factors using a number of adaptive methods,

including increasing input self-sufficiency; livelihood diversification; fluid interactions

between household consumption and the market; intercropping and the diversification

of crop plans; disengagement from the formal political system; and the construction of

socially-mediated market relations. In the coming chapter, I will discuss the relationship

between risk management strategies and the unique market structures within these five

local food networks. While this chapter has used broad categories to discuss unique risk

factors, in Chapter Six I hope to break those categories down to highlight the

interdependence between various forms of risk. Finally, the coming chapter will relate

this discussion back to the concept of autonomous food geographies, to highlight the

ways in which these adaptive actions represent individual and/or collective responses to

a particular risk environment.

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6. Discussion and Conclusion

This final chapter builds on the data introduced in Chapter Five, to discuss the

various strategies used within local food initiatives to mitigate agricultural risk.

Throughout this chapter, I will work to directly answer my two research questions as

introduced in section 4.2: first, how do the scale and structure of direct-to-consumer

markets affect the ways that small-scale farmers experience and adapt to risk? And

second, what are the specific risk management strategies employed by farmers within

local food networks, and to what extent do these strategies represent individual

adaptations, collective challenges to the conventional food system, or a combination of

the two? Drawing upon the main findings of this study, I will answer these two

questions by looking at three strategies employed within local food networks. The first

section of this chapter looks at diversification strategies as they have been used to

mitigate various types of risk, with a particular focus on how direct-to-consumer

markets encourage the development of diverse agricultural systems. The following

section explores strategies for meeting the consumption needs of participating

households, including the fluid relationship between household consumption and

market exchange. The third section focuses on the pursuit of autonomy as a political

stance and adaptive measure, and in particular I seek to highlight differences between

each local food model discussed throughout this thesis. These three sections will be

followed by a discussion of the theoretical contribution of this work, possible

applications, and future avenues of research.

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6.1 Diversification and Livelihood Stability

When considering the factors most commonly ranked as a high risk by

participants — particularly weather events, climate change, pests, and changes to input

pricing — one of the main strategies cited by participants for mitigating these types of

risk was engagement in various forms of diversification. When discussing

diversification, I am referring to several strategies used throughout the production and

distribution process. The most basic of these practices, and one of the most commonly

employed, is on-farm crop diversification; however, I have also included strategies like

land-use rotation, sale of processed goods, participation in multiple distribution

channels, and engagement in non-farm employment as part of these ‘diversification’

strategies. Given the extent to which participants reported engaging in diversification

strategies, it is worth exploring the degree to which local food networks encourage these

practices, and how diversification fits into either individual adaptations or collective

organizing within local food networks.

As I will argue throughout this section, the structure of direct-to-consumer

distribution channels is such that diversification becomes a much more viable economic

option. In this way, the growing methods that are economically viable within local

markets also happen to coincide with practices that mitigate environmental risk and

reduce dependence on input markets. Though the emphasis on diversification within

local distribution channels may help buffer producer livelihoods against unexpected

shocks, the compulsion to diversify income sources may also make additional claims on

farmers’ time and resources. In this way, encouraging diversification may reinforce a

neoliberal model that shifts the responsibility for adaptation onto individual farmers,

subsequently viewing successful farmers as those with the acumen to adopt resilient

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growing practices. As I will argue, this presents a degree of tension between

diversification as an individual risk management strategy versus a collective form of

organizing.

Beginning with crop diversification, one key advantage of direct-to-consumer

markets, as cited by participants, is that consumers typically buy in smaller quantities

and shop for a variety of goods. This means that producers can focus on diversifying

their crops, rather than overall yield. This stands in contrast to conventional distribution

channels like the wholesale market, in which buyers seek out producers with higher

volume and specific quality standards, encouraging growers to specialize to meet these

requirements. As indicated throughout qualitative interviews, the expectations within

wholesale markets encourage producers to use growing practices that may make them

more vulnerable to environmental and economic shocks, whereas participation in local

markets provides an economic space that is better suited to more resilient production

methods. Several producers indicated that their farm was too small to sell into wholesale

markets or that they would need a monocrop to receive a sufficient price in conventional

markets, arguing that local distribution channels were more appropriate for producers

of their scale and overall yield. What I argue is that in addition to transforming the

exchange relation between producer and consumer, these local points of sale encourage

a very different type of decision-making earlier in the production process, one in which

crop diversification can be used as a strategy to reduce environmental risks and meet

broad consumer demands.

While the structure of direct-to-consumer markets certainly encourages diverse

production methods, there is fairly minimal support available for the adoption of these

methods. Rather, several participants expressed a sort of admiration for the personal

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grit and determination it takes to maintain a diversified livelihood, oftentimes through

participation in multiple distribution channels and even through off-farm employment.

This suggests that while local markets certainly work best for diversified farms, and the

consumers in these markets express a preference for these growing methods, the actual

burden of on-farm diversification typically falls on individual producers. That being

said, there were examples of local food networks supporting farmers as they adopt more

diversified farming practices, which suggests that a more collective approach is possible.

One farmer told me about receiving heirloom maize seeds from the agricultural

extension program at ITESO, and since then she has continued to collect and reuse her

seeds each year. Octavio, the coordinator for the Lake Chapala Farmers Market, also

told me about buying large batches of seeds to share among several producers,

oftentimes based on feedback that he receives from consumers about particular

products they hope to see in the market. Vicente works through Suelo Feliz to educate

producers on intercropping methods, and also facilitates some degree of seed sharing

within the cooperative whenever possible. These strategies allow local food networks to

support producers as they develop more diversified growing methods, and I would argue

that strengthening this type of work would go a long way toward bolstering the

livelihoods of participating farmers, and even making these networks more accessible to

incoming producers.

Similarly, most participants choose to diversify their distribution channels to

spread out their possible sources of income. While several participants cited this as a

strategy to stabilize their livelihoods, the need to diversify distribution channels can also

be understood as a symptom of the unpredictable nature of certain models of direct-to-

consumer markets, in which producers have little certainty in sales from one week to the

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next. Roberto, the coordinator for La Milpa cooperative, noted that producers still take

on all the economic risk when participating in farmers markets, where they face the

uncertainty of how much they will sell each week. That being said, though cooperatives

like La Milpa provide a greater degree of certainty to farmers, given that they purchase

relatively small quantities every 15 days, this income alone would be insufficient for

most producers. Roberto admits that most, if not all of the producers they source from

participate in additional distribution channels. Vicente similarly noted that while their

producer’s cooperative can offer some income stability to participants, the current size

of their consumer group means that it is generally one among many distribution

channels that participating producers utilize. While diversifying marketing channels

may have an element of personal preference, it remains that most of these initiatives are

too small to offer a sufficient income and consumer-base on their own.

There are examples however, of local food initiatives working to diversify income

streams within their own network, rather than expecting that individual producers will

diversify their distribution channels. Octavio spoke about how they facilitate purchasing

between producers and vendors of processed goods within the market, particularly as a

method for absorbing produce that was not sold during open market hours. He

explained that they have regular meetings within the market, where producers can let

other vendors know if they have a bumper crop that needs to be sold, or if they are

having trouble finding consumers for a particular product. According to Octavio,

oftentimes vendors of processed goods are able to figure out new products based on

these availabilities, so that growers do not have to travel elsewhere to find a possible

buyer. Miguel, from Feria de Productores, has invited other local food initiatives to use

their weekly markets as an aggregation point, so that producers don’t have to travel to

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multiple locations to sell their goods. They currently have two additional consumer

cooperatives who assemble baskets of goods from producers in the market, effectively

providing the stability of weekly orders without requiring extra transportation costs or

labor from the producer. In this way, Miguel makes it easier for producers to diversify

their distribution channels, by encouraging consumers and local food initiatives to meet

producers at their existing points of sale. These two examples suggest that the

facilitators of local food initiatives can play a crucial role in easing the burden of

livelihood diversification, by building space for multiple distribution channels into the

local food initiative, rather than expecting that individual producers will seek them out.

I would argue that while local markets provide an economic incentive to diversify

production methods, and numerous participants cited the environmental benefits of

growing in this way, the majority of the diversification strategies adopted by producers

happen at the individual level through personal choices and investments. That being

said, there are examples of collective actions that encourage diversification in growing

methods and income streams throughout particular local food initiatives. These include

various forms of seed sharing, collective purchasing, technical extension through the

local food network, purchasing relationships within markets, and internalizing diverse

distribution channels within the local food initiative. I believe that not only do these

collective actions ease the burden on individual producers engaged in these networks,

but they should also be considered as a way of incorporating producers into the market

who may not have the resources to adopt diversification practices on their own. In this

way, local food initiatives with a collective approach to diversification may represent a

more sustainable long-term model for transitioning to low-input growing methods, as

well as a more financially viable option for participating farmers.

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6.2 Household Consumption and Market Exchange

Another strategy for stabilizing livelihoods that was frequently cited by

participants was self-provisioning, particularly through fluid interactions between

household consumption and market exchange. In this section, I will explore these

practices by returning to James Scott’s ‘safety first’ principle, which was introduced in

Chapter Two. As I will argue throughout, the informal nature of most direct-to-

consumer markets and the diversity of products sold there, allows producers to

integrate household consumption needs into their marketing plan in novel and adaptive

ways. The practices of self-provisioning that will be described here are used to reduce

risk in two key ways. First, by meeting household consumption requirements, producers

are able to reduce their dependence on the market for cash income, instead meeting

those needs through non-market forms of provisioning. And second, the diversity of

products and flexibility of local markets allows producers to absorb unsold products

through household consumption and informal exchange, effectively utilizing what would

have otherwise been an economic loss. I argue that this type of relationship between

household consumption and market exchange would not be feasible in conventional

markets like those dominated by wholesale buyers, which expect a very different style of

production and exchange relation than do the local markets.

When speaking about his on-farm decision-making, Emiliano immediately

referenced household consumption as a key driver of his crop plan, telling me: “Every

year is different, but every year we have to eat.” For Emiliano’s family, the farm serves a

dual purpose, as both a way to generate income and the key source of household

provisioning. In fact, his decision to transition to organic production methods ten years

ago was driven predominantly by concern for the health of his family and the possible

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consequences of agrochemical use, which were initially more important than any price

premiums he may have accessed through organic markets. Moreover, in thinking

through his crop plan each year, Emiliano expressed the urgency of making decisions

under situations of uncertainty as linked to his obligation to feed his own family, not

because of the compulsion to earn an income each year. Though the income he

subsequently earns in the market is of course important, his own representation of the

farm is as an important source of self-provisioning.

In discussing the uses for their own crops, others referenced the importance of

having a flexible system for absorbing any possible surpluses in production. Margarita

and Andrés for instance, view their farm predominantly as a way of feeding the family,

and the goods that are sent to market are what they consider to be the surplus. Each

week their offerings were slightly different, with some constants like homemade tamales

and preserves. This fluctuation in variety and quantities of offerings would not

correspond with the expectations of conventional markets, or even niche organic stores,

which generally require consistency in production and conformity to quality standards.

The flexibility of local distribution channels on the other hand, means that Margarita

and Andrés can prioritize their household food needs, and then earn an income based

on what they have beyond those needs each week. Moreover, much of the surplus

beyond their household needs would be considered unacceptable in wholesale markets

— for instance, due to blemishes or size inconformity — but in local markets Margarita

and Andrés are still able to find an outlet for these goods, either due to the more flexible

standards in these spaces, or through processing into a prepared food product.

Vicente similarly spoke about his individual motivations for farming, particularly

the personal significance of being able to provide healthy food for his family. He thought

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of his own farm, which is also the aggregation point for Suelo Feliz, as a family project to

develop self-sufficiency and a deeper sense of community. In this way, self-provisioning

was not only an economic strategy to meet his family’s consumption requirements

without needing to engage with the market, but it is also a personal and political choice

to develop an alternative or even subversive style of life for his family.

When Joaquin discussed his strategy for developing a crop plan each season, he

noted the importance of three factors: natural forces, market demands, and personal

preferences. While household consumption is an important part of his considerations

each year, Joaquin plans to use the household as a way of absorbing produce that goes

unsold each week. In this way, he prioritizes sale in the markets — which makes sense

given that he is also coordinating a small group of growers who each need to be paid for

their produce — but self-provisioning is still a crucial component of his business plan.

Once again, absorbing unsold produce through household consumption is much more

feasible in a diversified growing and distribution system than it would be in a

conventional market that requires largescale production through specialization. It would

be almost inconceivable for a household to absorb several pallets of unsold tomatoes for

example, as compared to a variety of surplus goods from the market.

Beyond what his own household can absorb, Joaquin and several other

participants discussed practices used within markets to distribute unsold produce.

Joaquin discussed individual clients who would contact him about unsold produce each

week. Vicente also spoke about the exchanges that occur between producers during

aggregation within the cooperative. While each producer receives an order from the

cooperative for a pre-determined quantity of produce, if they have extra they will

typically bring that surplus produce to exchange with other growers. In this way,

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producers are not only able to find an end-consumer for products that may otherwise be

wasted, but they are able to diversify their own household consumption without needing

to make those purchases using cash income. Finally, as discussed in the past section,

Octavio also spoke about facilitating relationships between primary producers and

vendors of processed goods, so that growers can more easily distribute surpluses right

within the Lake Chapala Farmers Market.

There are several parallels that can be drawn between these practices of self-

provisioning within direct-to-consumer markets and James Scott’s ‘safety first’

principle. As discussed in Chapter Two, Scott argues that peasant farmers do not

necessarily follow the profit maximizing behavior described within classical economics,

preferring crop stability each year to guarantee that they meet their household’s

consumption needs. In this way, when farmers make decisions they will eschew options

that could potentially yield a greater profit in the long-term, if such an approach might

jeopardize their household’s provisioning in any particular season. I would argue that

this type of decision-making is certainly visible within the direct-to-consumer marketing

channels included here, as producers have generally avoided monocropping particularly

profitable goods, preferring instead to diversify their growing methods with an eye

toward household consumption and livelihood stability.

Take for instance Joaquin, who had the option to sell his more niche crops into

export markets, but only if he specialized in these goods to reach the yield required by

wholesalers. He turned this option down, noting that monocropping as a more

environmentally vulnerable growing method, preferring instead to diversify his crops in

pursuit of stability each year. There are key differences between Scott’s discussion of

peasant farming and the farmers included in this study — for instance, though self-

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provisioning is an important strategy for many households, their pursuit of livelihood

stability is often based on income security, not subsistence needs alone — however, the

general choice to eschew profit-seeking behavior in favor of a stable livelihood does at

least parallel Scott’s argument about peasant preferences for risk minimization.

Moreover, I believe that the flexibility of direct-to-consumer markets — which

typically don’t require that producers meet specific yield requirements or consistency in

their production — actually enables decision-making in which growers can prioritize

household consumption, or at least strike a comfortable balance between self-

provisioning and market exchange. As discussed in section 5.6, survey respondents also

overwhelming preferred the option of long-term income stability over a higher, but

unpredictable source of income. Overall, while participants engage in local markets for a

diversity of personal incentives, one common theme was that the flexibility within these

distribution channels allows growers to stabilize their livelihoods through continued

self-provisioning, strong relationships within each network, as well as price premiums

from selling directly to consumers. As several participants noted, this type of flexibility

between market exchange and household consumption, as well as the direct personal

relations that underpin these food networks, provide a mechanism to distribute produce

through a variety of different channels. Most producers cited these flexible exchanges as

a source of long-term resilience for their farm and the local food network overall, which

I suggest is better aligned with a ‘safety first’ model of economic decision-making than it

is with classical profit maximization.

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6.3 Autonomous Food Geographies

Finally, the third strategy frequently discussed by participants across this study is

the pursuit of autonomy as a method of increasing self-reliance and reducing certain

perceived risks associated with agriculture. In this section, I will return to the concept of

‘autonomous food geographies,’ which was introduced in Chapter Two as a political and

material struggle to coproduce institutional arrangements that increase self-reliance

within a given food system, typically by reducing dependence on the market mechanism

and/or the state. My aim here is to highlight the practices and objectives of each distinct

initiative discussed in this thesis, particularly how they might align with the idea of

autonomous food geographies. In expanding on this concept, I will also more fully

address my second research question, namely the extent to which each initiative

consists of individual producer adaptations, collective contestation of the conventional

food system, or a combination of the two. Throughout this section, I intend to

underscore those practices that hold the greatest potential for increasing collective self-

reliance within local food networks, such that they might inform a more generative

understanding of ‘autonomous food geographies.’

Beginning with the pursuit of autonomy from the market mechanism, one of

the strongest motivations cited for participating in local distribution channels was the

sense that direct relationships with consumers generate a greater degree of control over

product prices. Agustín for instance, discussed the higher value that consumers place on

goods when they meet the producer, and Margarita and Andrés spoke about how

consumers are willing to pay more when they learn about the production process.

Emiliano similarly felt that seeing the satisfied face of his customers was itself a valuable

part of the exchange, and Joaquin felt that building strong relationships helped

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guarantee his sales each week. Among the coordinators as well, the ability to set prices

according to a variety of factors is a crucial feature of local food networks. Vicente, for

instance, spoke about fully accounting for costs of production when setting prices for

consumers, and Roberto told me about the collective discussion they have among all of

the producers at the onset of the season to determine a fair price. In other words, one

advantage that a number of participants attribute to direct-to-consumer distribution

channels is the ability to socially determine prices for products, rather than relying on

the market mechanism of supply and demand to set the value of their goods.

Participants within these initiatives are also increasing self-sufficiency by

reducing dependence on input markets, as first introduced in section 5.1 on the risks

associated with agricultural markets. Emiliano, for instance, spoke about avoiding

agrochemicals out of concern for the health of his family, as well as the high cost of

buying inputs on the market. For Margarita and Andrés, the decision to focus on annual

fruit production was in part motivated by the cost of purchasing seeds on the market,

and when they did require additional seeds they preferred to exchange with neighbors

rather than purchase them. Vicente also believed that low-input production methods

were more resilient in the long-term, arguing that chemical inputs trigger a cycle of

dependence that requires intensifying application each year. Each of the five initiatives

in this study requires participants to engage in some form of low-input, agroecological,

or organic agriculture, largely out of concern for human health and environmental

sustainability. Whether reduced dependence on input markets is a secondary effect of

these motivations, or a producer’s economic decision to pursue input self-sufficiency

results in access to these alternative markets, it remains that participation in local

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distribution channels is highly compatible with strategies to reduce dependence on

agricultural input markets.

It was also common for participants to discuss non-market relationships of

exchange or support within local food networks. Miguel told me about consumers in

Feria de Productores who had lent producers money or provided donations to support

production during crucial points in the season. Octavio spoke about how the group of

vendors had pooled money together to help producers get through an acute crisis, for

instance a health issue in the family or broken equipment, and Roberto similarly

mentioned occasions when the consumers in La Milpa had provided additional income

supports to producers with unexpected expenses. Juan Sebastián discussed the

knowledge community within the Lake Chapala Farmers Market, in which producers

can exchange information about growing methods. And of course, Vicente holds

ongoing workshops as one component of Suelo Feliz, which are open to current

members of the cooperative as well as producers interested in adopting organic growing

practices. While the core work of these initiatives is the development of socially-

mediated markets, in which goods are exchanged for cash payments, there are also

elements of non-market economic activities that take place within each network, which

may reduce dependence on capitalist markets for the provisioning of further needs, such

as additional sources of capital or knowledge.

In addition to strategies used to reduce dependence on capitalist markets,

participants noted that they have actively sought autonomy from the state within these

local food networks. One of the main ways that individual farmers and local food

initiatives have disengaged from the state is through the choice not to seek out

government supports. Only three producers in total had received any kind of

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government support, with the vast majority avoiding these programs due to the burden

of applying, mistrust of government, or a personal preference for self-reliance.

Alejandro was one of the few producers who would have liked to receive some form of

government support to expand his greenhouse production, however he felt that the

process was inaccessible without knowledge of the application procedure and the

additional free time it would take to apply. For the most part, however, participants

framed their repudiation of government income supports as a personal choice.

At the local food network level, coordinators and governing bodies had made

similar choices to forgo government support. Roberto, the coordinator for La Milpa,

explained that the cooperative chose to remain informal, because they worried about the

additional level of oversight that would come with legal incorporation. In other words,

though he knew that there were certain funds available for civil society organizations,

the cooperative chose not to apply for them. Miguel also told me that he was aware of

certain funds that might pertain to local markets like Feria de Productores, but he chose

not to apply because in his mind, it was better not to engage with what was likely a

corrupt or inefficient system. Even Octavio, who had worked in the state-level

government before joining the Lake Chapala Farmers Market, said they chose not to

apply for government funding out of concern that the politics of these supports might do

more damage than the actual benefits from the source of income. As he put it, “we prefer

to go our own way […], sometimes [supports] are political things, and we prefer to keep

this market away from all that” (Interview 1). And Vicente was particularly critical of

government supports, which he viewed as enacting a modernization vision in the

countryside that is entirely opposed to his work in support of organic growing practices.

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In some cases, initiatives chose to seek out supports from outside the

government, including non-government organizations (NGOs), universities, and

consumers. Hernán told me about the various types of support that Círculo de

Producción had received, both from the local organization CEJ and from a Canadian

NGO that supported CEJ and other local initiatives. While Círculo de Producción was no

longer receiving support through these organizations at the time of this research,

Hernán spoke about the value of having some source of income in the early years. Both

Miguel and Roberto also reported that their networks received some funding from non-

profit organizations. And a few producers cited the network run through ITESO as an

important source of information and resources, including access to seed sharing and

crop exchanges. Finally, as discussed above, in certain instances groups of consumers

have also provided direct income supports that are not tied to market exchange,

typically to support farmers with unexpected expenses, say a health problem within the

family, equipment failure, or widespread crop loss.

While the above methods certainly play a role in reducing farmer dependence on

capitalist markets and the state, the adoption of these practices occurs through a

combination of individual and collective actions. Figure 12 summarizes the main

‘disengagement’ strategies discussed throughout this section, categorized as either

individual adaptations or collective approaches to reducing external dependencies. As I

highlight here, the five direct-to-consumer marketing channels in this study draw from a

variety of individual and collective approaches, with strong implications for the level of

responsibility placed on each producer. This is not to suggest that individual adaptations

are entirely ineffective or even unwelcome to producers; in fact, I will discuss instances

in which collective actions could potentially do further harm to producers. Rather, I do

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argue that relying on individual adaptations alone may shift an inordinate burden of

adoption onto producers within local food initiatives, making these networks less

accessible to producers who might be unable to take up the individual adaptations

required for their full participation.

Figure 12: Individual and Collective Approaches in the Pursuit of Autonomy

Beginning with Círculo de Producción, the majority of the practices used in this

initiative to increase autonomy from the market mechanism expect that participants will

take the individual initiative of adoption. This may be in part due to the fact that little

change has been made to the structure of the market since it was established in the

Rejection of market mechanism (social-

mediation)

Reduced dependence on input markets (self-

reliance)

Development of non-market activities

Disengagement from the state

Individual adaptions

• Individual price setting • Price adjustments

throughout the season • Distribution channel

diversification to avoid losses

• Driven by consumer demands for niche products

• Individual producers choose to grow non-standard goods

• Farm-level seed collection + reuse

• Farm-level composting

• Farm-level adoption of low-input methods

• Individuals meet strict growing standards for participation

• Household self-provisioning

• Differing levels of consumer engagement

• Face-to-face connections between producer and consumer

• Forgoing state farm supports

• Disengaging with formal politics

Collective pursuit

• Cooperative price setting

• Long-term price guarantees

• Long-term purchasing certainty

• Driven by collective understanding of good food

• Collective prioritizes production systems for non-standard goods

• Community seed sharing

• Sharing of composting

• Workshops and ongoing support for low-input transition

• Flexible requirements for participation

• Distribution costs are built into network model

• Food exchange between producers and/or vendors

• Mandatory volunteer hours

• Diverse uses for market space beyond economic exchange

• Alternative (non-state) forms of income support

• Informal / socially-supported initiatives

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1990s, which was a fairly novel initiative for direct-to-consumer marketing at the time,

but today remains a fairly typical model of alternative food market. Individual producers

set their prices in the market, using information such as their own cost of production,

the value that consumers see in local and organic produce, as well as the prices set by

neighboring producers, and even the going price for comparable goods in conventional

markets. Due to that fact, prices often change throughout the season. Producers are not

guaranteed a certain number of sales each week, so they bear the risk of surpluses, and

typically have to search out multiple distribution channels to assure sufficient sales. The

value added to local goods is determined on a more collective level, with producers

engaging in outreach to educate consumers about organic production methods, so that

they may set prices based on a common understanding of the value of organic produce.

One major form of collective action that Círculo de Producción does engage in is

some level of support for producers who are adopting low-input growing methods, as

illustrated by the fact that farmers who are in the process of transitioning toward

organic production are still able to participate in the market. While some producers in

the market engaged in practices like seed sharing, this was not an active component of

the market. Similarly, transportation costs associated with participating in multiple

distribution channels were exclusively handled by producers within the network. For the

most part, adopting low-input growing methods was still an individual process, with

fairly minimal support from the market. Non-market activities like self-provisioning

also typically happened at the individual scale. In part due to size limitations, the

physical space of the market was almost exclusively used as a cite for alternative

exchange relations, rather than encouraging more diverse sets of relationships between

producers and consumers. Finally, the market has forgone government supports

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entirely, and though Círculo de Producción has been a major component of the local

food movement in Guadalajara for over 20 years, they have chosen to avoid direct

engagement with the formal political system. Though they did receive non-state funding

in the earlier years, the market is currently funded exclusively through its producer

members, who provide small payments each week that they participate.

While the Feria de Productores model is fairly similar to Círculo de Producción,

there are several more collective actions that take place within this market. This may in

part stem from the fact that their coordinator works nearly fulltime within his role,

which gives him more flexibility to develop additional practices within the market

model. The system of price setting is fairly similar, in which individual producers set

their prices each week based on factors like production costs, methods, collectively-held

values, and prices set by other vendors. Thus, prices within the market are also subject

to change, and producers again have little certainty in sales each week. Feria similarly

engages in educational work and cultural events to encourage consumers to better

understand organic growing practices, which again plays into the ability of producers to

demand higher prices for their goods. Reduced dependence on input markets are

typically individual adaptations, without a market-wide seed or compost sharing

program, or assistance in distribution within the network. However, Vicente does

facilitate connections between producers for the exchange of knowledge and potentially

inputs, and he told me that strengthening these connections was one of his future goals

for the market. Feria de Productores also has some degree of flexibility in their

standards, allowing producers in organic or agroecological transition to participate.

One of the more collective aspects of Feria de Productores is the number of non-

market activities that take place within the network, in part due to the size of the space

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and Miguel’s ability to engage in additional work within the organization. Miguel has

opened up the space to a variety of uses, including cultural events, workshops, and

aggregation for other local food initiatives. He also works with groups of consumers so

that they can more directly support producers, for instance through additional income

sources during times of economic stress. That being said, there is no mandatory level of

consumer participation within this initiative, and while household self-provisioning was

common, there was no facilitated system of exchange between producers and/or

vendors. Finally, consumer supports can also be seen as a collective form of disengaging

from the state, by providing producers with an alternative to government income

supports. Beyond this approach, Feria de Productores has also sought out some degree

of NGO support, though Miguel stated that financing for the market came

predominantly from the membership.

The Lake Chapala Farmers Market does engage in several forms of collective

action, however as I will highlight here, the degree of control that consumers hold

within the market model has some problematic implications for participating producers.

In this way, it is important to reinforce the fact that collective action based on exclusivity

may in fact do harm through the process of boundary-setting, even if that is not the

initial intention. The process of price setting for instance, is done collectively at

meetings with vendors and the board of directors, and vendors are subsequently

expected to sell at these pre-determined prices. Though this provides stability, Juan

Sebastián noted that it is typically the coordinator, Octavio, who has the final say in

prices, and two producers within the market felt that they were starting to struggle

because prices had stayed the same over the past five years. As one noted, this is in large

part because consumers have gotten used to prices the way they are, so the board of

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directors chooses to keep them stable. Producers have little certainty in their sales week-

to-week, and in fact some noted that as most of their consumers are seasonal residents

from the United States and Canada, the summer months can be quite slow.

In reducing dependence on input markets, Octavio noted that he buys large

quantities of seeds to share among producers. These initial purchases then act as a seed

bank year-to-year, where producers are expected to save part of their seeds to contribute

back at the end of the season. Transportation costs and labor on the other hand, were

the responsibility of individual producers. The standards for admission to the Lake

Chapala Farmers Market were noted as being particularly strenuous however, with

participants saying that it typically takes 2-3 months from the time of applying to

receive a response from the board of directors. Agustín, who had previously participated

in the market, believed that these standards were somewhat arbitrarily applied, and that

it was in fact the desirability of a grower’s product to the gringo consumer base that

determined whether they were admitted. While I cannot confirm the extent to which

this is true, I will note that one grower with an extremely niche and nutrient-dense

product reported being admitted to the market within the week, which is highly unusual

based on the ordinary process. Non-market activities were also used within the market

as a way of stabilizing farmer livelihoods. Octavio reported facilitating exchange

between producers and vendors in the market, oftentimes cash-based but not

exclusively. However overall, the market is predominantly designed to support

alternative consumption practices. There is no mandatory consumer participation,

though the board of directors is predominantly run by a smaller group of consumers.

Finally, the board of directors has chosen not to seek out state or NGO supports, and the

market is currently run through the weekly contributions of its vendors.

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The consumer cooperative La Milpa uses a significantly different marketing

model, which is designed to provide purchasing certainty to the producer. Roberto, the

coordinator, told me that prices were set at the beginning of the season during a meeting

with all of the producers and the board of directors, which is a smaller group of

consumer members. The producers report their expected production costs and what

they plan to charge, and Roberto facilitates the price setting process so that each

producer receives the same amount for comparable products. This way the producer is

able to participate in price-setting, and they receive a stable price throughout the

season. Producers also receive firm orders a week beforehand and are paid for the

entirety of their product upon delivery. This provides greater certainty to the producer,

while allowing producers and consumers to work collectively toward determining the

values of goods. That being said, Roberto noted that given that the cooperative currently

organizes baskets every 15 days, participating producers still need to seek out additional

markets. While they are able to provide some income stability to producers, the scale of

the cooperative is not sufficient to fully sustain a farmer’s livelihood.

There was less support in La Milpa for producers in reducing their dependence

on input-markets, and in fact Roberto would typically seek out producers himself based

on knowledge of their growing practices. In this way, it is expected that producers have

already met certain benchmarks of agroecological production before participating in the

cooperative. Similarly, there was no formal system of seed or compost exchange within

the cooperative, or of taking on the cost and labor that goes into transportation. In

terms of non-market activities, consumers are required to volunteer a few hours each

week in order to maintain their membership, including work like packaging member

baskets and educational outreach. One aspect that is fairly atomized within the market

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however, is the degree of connection among producers, or between producers and

consumers. By staggering producer drop-offs and consumer pick-ups, there ends up

being little interaction between producers and consumers within the network. While

part of the motivation for consumers to participate is the desire to support local farmers,

and there are also instances of consumers organizing additional income supports for

producers, it also remains that the main relationship between producers and consumers

is that of economic exchange, oftentimes without a strong personal connection. In terms

of disengagement from the state, the board of directors from La Milpa has chosen not to

incorporate the initiative as a formal cooperative, predominantly as a strategy to avoid

state oversight.

Finally, the producers cooperative Suelo Feliz is perhaps one of the most

collective approaches among the direct-to-consumer marketing channels included in

this study. This is in large part due to the origins and objective of the initiative, which

began as a training program for farmers in organic transition and has remained under

the control of participating producers. Price-setting for instance, is done among the

producers in the cooperative, considering the cost of production, added value for

organic production methods, and the labor and fuel required to aggregate and transport

products. Producers have a long-term guarantee for purchases every 15 days, however

the exact quantity ordered each week does vary. On the question of inputs, Vicente

continues to run workshops in organic agriculture for producers, regardless of whether

or not they participate in the cooperative. He also facilitates some level of seed and

compost sharing between participants within the cooperative. Suelo Feliz was also the

only initiative to handle distribution within the network structure, rather than expecting

that individual producers will take on this work. They did this by aggregating the

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produce at Vicente’s farm the day beforehand, and then he would take everything to

Guadalajara in a single trip. Vicente also noted that producers use aggregation days as

an opportunity to exchange products with one another, and that once a year, consumers

are invited to visit his farm to learn more about organic production methods and the

work that farmers do within the cooperative. However, as in La Milpa, face-to-face

relationships between producers and consumers are fairly minimal within this model,

which means that consumers do not have the same level of personal connection as they

might in the standard local market model. Finally, the cooperative does not receive any

form of state supports, nor do they currently receive any funding from alternative

sources such as NGOs or universities.

Each of these initiatives is contextually specific, run through a distinct

governance structure, and based in a unique set of objectives and strategies. As

demonstrated above, many of these initiatives rely on producers who are willing or able

to take the individual actions necessary to participate in direct-to-consumer markets, for

instance individual adoption of low-input growing methods, transportation between

farm and market, as well as the time and resources needed to participate in multiple

local distribution channels. Beyond these individual actions however, there are a

number of ways in which initiatives are developing more collective approaches to direct-

to-consumer markets, in which exchange relationships differ significantly from those

found in conventional food markets. Collective action may not always yield positive

impacts — take the collective pricing in the Lake Chapala Farmers Market, in which

exclusionary decision-making practices made it more difficult for farmers to control

their own sources of income — however, they do hold considerable potential when

considering the type of work required to coproduce radically different relationships of

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food production and exchange. I would argue that all of the initiatives discussed here are

engaged in the pursuit of autonomy in some way. But to sustain that work into the

future and make it more accessible to a greater number of farmers, I believe it is

necessary to support those strategies through which food networks are able to stabilize

farmer livelihoods collectively, by engaging in the coproduction of institutions that

provide greater control to farmers as they make decisions about how they grow and sell

food. While access to these niche markets may have important implications for farmer

livelihoods in general, I believe that those networks with a governance structure that

enables collective decision-making and non-market economic interactions represent the

strongest form of resistance to the structure of conventional food markets.

6.4 Applications of this Research

Throughout this thesis, my aim has been to develop a meaningful contribution to

the research on local food networks and rural development. I believe that this research

suggests several theoretical interventions within these bodies of work, it indicates

alternative strategies within the practice of agricultural risk management, and it

provides space for future avenues of research. This final section will begin with a

summary of my theoretical contributions, particularly the value of a focus on risk

perception and the purpose for my advancement of the term ‘autonomous food

geographies.’ This is followed by a discussion of the value that I see in certain practices

within direct-to-consumer markets, particularly how these strategies might contribute

to effective risk management practices. And finally, I will conclude this thesis with my

thoughts on a future research agenda based on this work.

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Beginning with the theoretical contributions of this thesis, one of my objectives

has been to use the concept of risk perception as a tool to better understand the efficacy

of local food networks and possible alternatives within rural development. Just as James

Scott argued that a phenomenological understanding of exploitation serves as a better

predictor of peasant behavior, I have argued that understanding farmer decision-

making in the context of uncertainty is best approached using perceived risk, rather

than probabilistic measures of so-called ‘real risk.’ I have further suggested that

perceptions of risk are in many ways conditioned by the environment in which

producers operate, including distinct market structures, geographical particularities,

political institutions, and social networks. One of the main theoretical contributions of

this approach, is that it serves to denaturalize the decision-making context. Unlike much

of the rural development research that deals with resilience and adaptation, in which

farmers are understood to react to situations that are not of their own creation, this

approach centers the experiences and agency of farmers. Throughout this work, I have

worked to demonstrate the rich set of understandings that farmers hold about risk, the

contexts that may produce these perceptions, and finally the role that farmers play in

constructing institutional contexts that may better stabilize their livelihoods.

As this work relates to the literature on local food, I have sought to highlight both

the scale and structure of local marketing channels, so that I might underscore those

practices that most substantially change the market model from that of conventional

food markets. This contrasts uncritical approaches to local food, which treat the local

scale of a food network as a final goal, without engaging substantively with market

structure or power imbalances at the local level (Born and Purcell 2006; DeLind 2011;

DuPuis and Goodman 2005). My objective here has been to interrogate the practices

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within each local food initiative as not only a method of reducing distance between

producer and consumer, but as various strategies used to construct alternative economic

relationships. While highlighting structures within direct-to-consumer distribution

channels that substantively alter the market arrangement from more conventional food

systems, I would also argue that it is crucial to focus on the actual livelihood impacts of

these changes, as I have begun to do through this study of perceived risk.

In relation to the literature on rural development, my contribution has been to

suggest certain parallels between work in development and alternative food networks.

Particularly given the fact that much of the literature on local food has focused on the

North American and European variants (Holloway et al. 2007), I believe it is useful to

explore the potential that alternative markets might hold for the improvement of farmer

livelihoods outside of the industrialized context. In contexts such as Mexico, in which

highly modernized production coexists with large populations of small-scale producers

using less capital-intensive growing practices, I believe it is valuable to explore the

development potential of direct-to-consumer distribution channels as an alternative to

the modernization approach pursued by the Mexican government. In the case of this

particular study, the market structure of direct-to-consumer networks influenced not

only the way that producers exchange goods, but also the decisions they make much

earlier in the production process, for instance the choice to diversify their crops, adopt

low-input growing practices, or prioritize household consumption. From a rural

development standpoint, I believe it is worth exploring how distinct market structures

enable certain sets of production decisions, rather than encouraging on-farm changes

while treating conventional markets as a fundamental component of rural livelihoods.

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Finally, within this thesis I introduced the concept of ‘autonomous food

geographies,’ as a way of understanding the political stance and material practices that

underpin certain elements of these local food initiatives. I believe that this concept is

particularly useful when distinguishing between local food initiatives that approach

scale as an end-goal, versus those that use a more local scale as a strategy in the pursuit

of alternative institutional arrangements. I find this to be a useful concept in several

ways. First, it suggests a particular set of politics, one in which alternative food networks

serve as a mechanism to reduce dependence on the deeply unequal power relations of

conventional food markets, as well as problematic interventions by the state. Second,

this concept helps describe many of the material pursuits of producers engaged in these

networks, as active choices to increase their own self-reliance and stabilize their

livelihoods. And finally, by teasing out individual versus collective understandings of

autonomy, this concept can be used as a guide for distinguishing between the individual

sets of adaptations that farmers make, and the collective approaches employed within

certain local food initiatives. In this way, the concept of ‘autonomous food geographies’

can be used to highlight the collective practices used to construct new institutional

relationships within food networks.

Connecting this research to concrete practices within agricultural risk

management and rural development, one of my main findings is that market structure

does impact the sets of on-farm decisions available to farmers. When considering crop

diversification for instance, which participants generally viewed as an effective method

of reducing environmental risks, the ability to sell a highly diversified set of crops is

dependent on access to compatible markets. Participants highlighted the fact that

conventional markets like wholesale buyers typically expect larger yields through

137

specialization, whereas in direct-to-consumer markets they are able to sell smaller

quantity of many different crops. This suggests that for rural development programs

that encourage the adoption of growing practices like crop diversification, it is

imperative that access to compatible distribution channels is also considered a priority.

In other words, growing practices that reduce on-farm risk can only be considered an

effective way of stabilizing livelihoods if producers also have an appropriate market in

which to sell those goods.

Furthermore, I would argue that this research suggests potential for using direct-

to-consumer marketing channels as a tool within rural development practice, however

this should be approached with several points of caution. First, based on the general

sense of mistrust directed toward state-led rural development, in this particular context

I believe it is important to consider the variety of actors who may engage in this type of

work, for instance non-profit organizations, universities, or informal civil society

groups. Moreover, should state agencies engage in support for local market

development, it is worth considering ways to improve the working relationship between

the state and farming groups, particularly through increased government transparency,

reduced bureaucratic burdens in the funding process, and alternatives to the direct cash

transfer model of government support. Second, if local marketing channels were to be

included in rural development work, close attention should be given to the sets of

collective actions that might ease farmer adoption of new methods of growing and/or

distributing their crops. And third, given the limited and contextually-specific nature of

this research, further investigation into the long-term livelihood impacts of producer

participation in these markets would be an absolute imperative.

138

Finally, this thesis has also opened up several avenues of future research. This

approach to measuring perceived risk could be a useful tool in comparative research, for

instance exploring risk perception within conventional and alternative markets, or

between alternative food networks in distinct local contexts. Similarly, it would be worth

exploring how participants in alternative food networks that are explicitly linked to rural

development objectives might perceive risks to their livelihoods, for instance in certified

Fair-Trade networks. The concept of ‘autonomous food geographies’ could also inform

future research within direct-to-consumer marketing channels, including the use of

different metrics to analyze the impact that distinct marketing structures have on farmer

livelihoods, or longitudinal studies that follow producer experiences over the course of

their participation. Moreover, this work could also serve as a guide for research that

engages directly with state-led rural development programs, to analyze the impact that

engagement with the state might have on producers’ risk perceptions.

The objective of this research has been to explore how farmers participating in

these five local food initiatives in Jalisco perceive and adapt to agricultural risks.

Moreover, I have sought to explore the specific practices adopted to stabilize farmer

livelihoods within these networks, with particular interest in the extent to which these

practices represent either individual adaptations or forms of collective action.

Throughout this thesis, I have sought to demonstrate that the institutional context

within which farmers operate has significant implications for the types of decisions that

are available to them. In this way, this type of study on distinct market structures deals

not only with how producers exchange goods, but it also explores the production

decisions that are informed by a specific type of market. Given the rich interconnection

between the institutions that influence agriculture, further study of agricultural risk

139

management should similarly seek to underscore how farmers respond to risks within a

distinct institutional context. As I have demonstrated here, the farmers who participate

in these five networks all have their own personal beliefs about risk, and they prioritize

their worries differently, however common sets of practices to handle these risks did

emerge. It is my hope then, that these practices that have been adopted to stabilize

farmer livelihoods, as well as the institutional contexts that best enable their adoption,

might subsequently serve as a guide for future work in food system localization and

agricultural risk management.

140

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Appendix A Farmer Survey Questions Biographical Information

1. Name: 2. Years farming: 3. Are you a first-generation or multi-generational farmer?

___________________________ 4. Are you a primary farm operator? Y N 5. If no, explain your role on-farm:

________________________________________________________

6. Number of family members working on the farm: _____________ 7. Number of non-family, paid employees working on the farm: ___________ 8. Do you perform paid work outside of the farm? Y N 9. Do members of your family perform paid work outside of the farm? Y N

Production and Distribution

1. Size of farm holding: _______________________________________________________

2. What type of land tenure do you have? a. Privately owned b. Rented land c. Title on public land (Ejido) d. Other: _____________________

3. Please describe what you produce for sale: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

4. Do you produce additional crops exclusively for family consumption? Y N 5. If yes, please describe what you produce for family consumption, and

approximately how many hectares are planted each year: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

6. Which of the following distribution channels do you use for selling your products? Circle all that apply:

a. Self-delivery to a wholesale buyer b. On-farm pick-up by a buyer or intermediary c. Arrangement with another producer (i.e. a second producer or household

handles distribution) d. Sale to a producers cooperative e. Direct sale in a local market f. Direct sale to other households g. Other:

___________________________________________________

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7. If you work with a wholesale buyer, do you have a contract? Y N 8. If yes, what is the timeframe of the contract?

__________________________________ 9. In the past year, have you used any public or private forms of farmer supports?

Circle all that apply: a. PROAGRO Productivo b. CADENA c. Ingreso Objetivo (SAGARPA) d. Incentivos a la Comercialización (SAGARPA) e. Financimiento desde FIRA y/o FND f. Incentivos para la Administración de Riesgos de Precios (ASERCA) g. Private crop insurance h. Credit from a private bank i. Futures contract j. Technical assistance (public or private) k. Other:

___________________________________________________ Risks and Decision-making 1. The following questions will ask you to select how much of a concern each of the following factors is for you. A rating of 1 means you are “not at all concerned,” and a rating of 5 means you are “extremely concerned.”

Not at all concerned 1

Not very concerned 2

Somewhat concerned 3

Concerned 4

Extremely concerned 5

Whether there will be paid work available for me outside of the farm

Whether I will be able to find an appropriate buyer for my products

Whether I will be able to rely on my current distribution channels next year

Whether prices will suddenly change for what I produce

Whether the price will suddenly change for the inputs that I use

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Whether a change in free trade agreements will negatively affect me

Whether some of what I produce will be rejected due to quality standards

Whether I will be able to access credit for the upcoming season

Whether I will be able to access public supports in the coming year

Whether an unexpected weather event will reduce my yield

Whether a new pest or disease will reduce my yield

Whether long-term changes to the climate will impact my future yields

Whether strained relationships (with market managers, buyers, neighbours) might impact my ability to sell my produce

Whether physical insecurity will impact my overall livelihood

Whether political changes will impact my overall livelihood

2. The following section will ask you to rank how important each of the following factors is when making production decisions on your farm. Please number the following factors from 1 (most important consideration) to 7 (least important consideration).

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Weather and climate variability (including losses due to weather event, emergence of new pests and diseases, and long-term climatic changes)

Price variation (including changes to market prices, and the expansion or reduction of free trade)

Market access (including access to an appropriate buyer and continued access to current distribution channels)

Outside income (including availability of paid work and access to credit)

The strength or reliability of personal relationships (including relationships with neighbours, market coordinators, buyers, etc.)

Present or future physical insecurity

Political changes (including changes to public supports, administration change)

3. The following section will ask you about your overall attitude toward risks, and how this informs your decision-making.

a) Which of the following would you generally prefer?

a. A higher source of income that could be lost at any time

b. A lower source of income that is stable into the future

b) To what extent do you agree with the following statement? “I like to experiment with new growing practices and farm management strategies.” Strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree

c) To what extent do you agree with the following statement? “It is necessary for a farm business to take risks if it is to be successful.” Strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree

d) To what extent do you agree with the following statement? “I have enough information to manage the risks associated with farming.”

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Strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree

e) To what extent do you agree with the following statement? “I feel that the decisions I make as a farm operator give me sufficient control over the viability of my farm.” Strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree

4. Would you be willing to participate in an additional interview (20-30 minutes) at a later date? Yes No Thank you very much for your time! Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns:

• Email: caroline.kam@mail.utoronto.ca

• Phone or Whatsapp: 8128975949

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Appendix B Interview Consent Form

Primary researcher: Caroline Kamm Contact: caroline.kamm@mail.utoronto.ca Mexican phone number: TBD Research advisor: Professor Ryan Isakson Contact: risakson@utsc.utoronto.ca Phone number: (416) 287-7345 Dear Participant, I invite you to take part in an interview as part of a study on the risks associated with small-scale farming in Jalisco, Mexico. I am conducting this research as the thesis component of my M.A. in Geography at the University of Toronto. Through my thesis, I am exploring the practices that have been used to reduce risks for small-scale farmers, including rural development practices and local initiatives. Your participation in this study will benefit the farming community, by informing more effective rural development policies and programs to support small-scale farmers. By participating, you will have the opportunity to contribute your own experience on the topic of risks in small-scale farming, so that your perspective may inform a better understanding of farming in Jalisco. You have been asked to participate because you are either a) the primary operator of a small-scale farm or b) a professional who holds expert knowledge on the question of agricultural risk. Participation in this study is entirely voluntary, and consists of a 30-60 minute survey and interview. You may choose not to participate, refuse to answer any questions throughout the interview, or withdraw participation at any time. Following the interview you will also have the right to withdraw your data from the study, up until the deadline of August 1, 2018. You may withdraw data by contacting me by email or phone, as indicated above. The content of these interviews will be subject to data management and analysis. I will have sole access to all stored data, including contact lists, recordings, and field notes. To protect the safety of participants in this study, all names and any identifying descriptions will be removed when referring to participants in writing or conversation. Should material from a specific interview be directly referenced in print, the speaker will

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be referred to pseudonymously. The results of this study will be used in my M.A. thesis and may also be printed in article format in a scholarly journal. Should you consent to be photographed, all photographs will be used to supplement my field notes. I will have sole access to any photographs taken and names will not be used in any filenames. If you consent to have these photographs used in print, all names and identifying descriptions will be removed. If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in this study, please contact:

• English correspondence: Office of Research Ethics at the University of Toronto, at ethics.review@utoronto.ca or +1 416-946-3273

• Spanish correspondence: Research advisor, Professor Ryan Isakson, at risakson@utsc.utoronto.ca or +1 (416) 287-7345

I sincerely hope that this information will be useful to the farming community, which is why I would like to make my study as accessible as possible. I will provide a summary of my research to all participants in the form of a research report. Your participation is very much valued, and I thank you for your time. Regards, Caroline Kamm

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Interview Consent I, __________________, agree to participate in an interview conducted by Caroline Kamm, on the topic of risk in small-scale farming. I acknowledge that the purpose and process of the study have been explained to me and I have been informed of my rights as a participant. I have been given the opportunity ask questions prior to participation. I understand that my answers to these questions may be published, but that my real name will not be used in publication. I reserve the right to withdraw participation at any time, up until the deadline of August 1, 2018. I also reserve the right to refuse to answer any questions. In consenting to participation, I additionally agree to: Have my words paraphrased in printed work Yes ____ No ____ Have my words quoted in printed work Yes ____ No ____ Audio recording of my interview Yes ____ No ____ Have photographs taken of me and/or my environment* Yes ____ No ____ Have these photographs used in print materials Yes ____ No ____

*Photographic materials will be used by the researcher as a component of the field notes. Unless additional consent is given, these photographs will not appear in print, and will remain in sole possession of the researcher.

Participant name (Print): Participant Signature: Date:

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Appendix C Key-informant Interview Guide

1. Please introduce yourself, including current role and responsibilities. 2. How would you describe the Mexican agricultural sector? Who are the main

actors and what are their relationships like? 3. Would you say that the agricultural sector is particularly risky? Explain. 4. Of the actors we discussed earlier, who do you think bares most of the risk in the

agricultural sector? Is it equally or appropriately distributed? Explain. 5. During the course of your careers, have these risks changed at all? Are there new

types of risks, have old risks been eliminated or minimized, or has the overall degree of risk changed? Explain.

6. In your experience, are there risks associated specifically with small-scale farming? Explain.

7. What mechanisms are you aware of that are designed to reduce risks for small-scale farmer?

8. Are there practices that you use specifically to manage risk, either for your organization, producers you work with, consumers, or the sector as a whole? Explain.

9. Who do you think should be responsible for managing risk in the agricultural sector? For instance, government agencies, marketing boards and business groups, individual producers and businesses, a combination, etc.? Explain.

10. Either within or outside of your organization, can you give me an example of a successful strategy for managing risk in the agricultural sector?

11. Do you think that these strategies could be expanded to wider areas or larger groups of farmers?

12. Do you think that there is enough information available about the agricultural sector for different actors to reduce their own risks?

13. What changes would like to see in the future, that might reduce risk in the sector as a whole?

14. What changes do you think might reduce risk specifically for small-scale farmers?

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Appendix D Farmer Interview Guide

1. Would you say that farming is a risky profession? Why, or why not? 2. Of the many forms of risk we have discussed, or any that have not been discussed

yet, what type of risk do you spend the most time thinking about? Why? 3. Over the course of your career, do you feel that farming risks have become more

or less manageable? 4. What types of information do you rely on when making decisions about

managing risk? 5. What are some of the steps that you take to reduce or manage the risks that you

face? 6. Have you seen successes through these practices? What have been some of the

most successful tools or practices for reducing risk? Are there any strategies you have used that were not effective?

7. Do you feel that there is sufficient government support for farmers to reduce risks? Are there specific areas where gaps exist?

8. Why do you choose to participate in local markets? 9. What are the main advantage of these markets to producers? To consumers? 10. How would you say that participation in these markets impacts the risks that we

have discussed so far? 11. Can you give me specific examples of how xxxx risk (cited as high worry in

survey) has impacted you or someone you know? 12. What changes would you like to see in the agricultural system to reduce risks for

small-scale farmers?