Mexican Land Reforms: Examining Exclusionary Resource Conservation Initiatives: Land governance strategies for conflict prevention; supporting peace agreements
Pablo Hernandez
In recent decades, Mexican smallholder or peasant producers or proprietors have diverted their attention from traditional rich biotic and cultural crop production to carbon forestry products – a more recent form of enclosure of common resources, including REDD+ initiatives. The diversion of labor, away from biotic and native cultural crop production, toward forest stock and sustainable conservation initiatives has been reinforced by an accompanying diversion of state and private funds to subsidize a growing number of carbon forestry projects in Mexico, resulting in rising debates on the docility of labor and the use of funds to stimulate sustainable practices when smallholder or peasant forms of agriculture and agroforestry production are at stake (Toledo 2015, Murillo 2015, Osborne 2013, and Shiva 2015). Socio-environmental conflicts have surfaced from these initiatives, some amplified more than others by recent Mexican agrarian reforms aimed at strengthening the presence of large agribusinesses vis-à-vis the rights and ancestral production modes of small rural producers. This paper studies recent Mexican agrarian reforms motivating the use of government funds to increase the presence of exclusionary conservation initiatives, like carbon forestry production, especially throughout the Mesoamerican region in Mexico. This problem relates to local and regional conflicts surrounding the sustainable management of enclosed community livelihoods. Historical roots of indigenous oppression in that region are underscored as are the contemporary attempts to alter labor relations as a growing agribusiness re-appropriation of resources displaces earlier forms of rural bio-cultural resources appropriation.
Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018
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