Trade, Rural Poverty & the Environment Project Profiles

Mexico

In Mexico, a team from El Colegio de México has worked with local partners to understand and address trade, poverty, and environment issues near the Sierra de Santa Marta Biosphere Reserve in the state of Veracruz. The area is biodiversity-rich humid and sub-humid evergreen rainforest, home to 1,411 species of plants, 561 species of birds, and 102 species of mammals. It plays an important regional role in terms of supplying drinking water to fast-growing cities like Coatzacoalcos.

The team has catalogued changes in rural production and survival strategies and resource management practices, and their relation to the liberalization of markets for corn, beans, and other agricultural products through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Mexican government’s policies on agriculture and rural development. They have examined how these changes, as well as demographic factors, are affecting the important biodiversity and ecosystem services provided by the Biosphere Reserve.

The team has also documented the widespread conversion of the traditional milpa system of agricultural production, which included a complex and diverse array of plants and crops, into monoculture corn production and livestock pasture. Though the impacts of this transformation on poverty have been mixed, there is clearly a reduction of the rich on-farm agrobiodiversity preserved by the milpa system.

 Working in conjunction with the Proyecto de Sierra de Santa Marta, a local NGO with extensive experience in the area, the team is collaborating with farmers on several pilot programs to reintroduce “enhanced milpa” practices. They are also working at the local and provincial level to advocate changes in policy incentives and resource governance that will affect the future of the Biosphere Reserve.