Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico: Climatic, Institutional, and Economic Change (review)

Many rural Mexicans produce corn and beans for daily subsistence on small plots, even in the 21^st century. Hundreds of thousands of campesinos, especially in southern and central regions of the country, use traditional agricultural practices as one element of their livelihood strategies. These people, and their resilience in the face of economic and environmental volatility, are the subject of Hallie Eakin's excellent monograph.

The strength of Eakin's research is a fine-grained case study of three communities in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley in central Mexico, where extreme weather from El Niño challenged rural livelihoods in the 1990s, especially for farmers with small landholdings. During the same period, neoliberal policies and their rapid institutionalization via NAFTA exacerbated the difficulties of small farmers in a variety of ways. For instance, the government slashed price supports for crops; legalized and encouraged the privatization of collective land (the ejido sector); promoted rural industrial parks that usurp agricultural land; and permitted the importation of cheap corn from the United States.

Eakin explores the vulnerability of campesinos – and their adaptive capacity – by talking with farmers, surveying households, and collecting and analyzing a wealth of pertinent historical, statistical, and comparative data. A period of eighteen months of fieldwork gives Eakin considerable insight into farmers' complex survival strategies, their willful determination, and their creative adaptations in profoundly difficult situations. Most of those who have the means to do so, diversify their agricultural activities and in many cases, combine non-farm and farm income to protect their households against extreme market fluctuations.

The salience of micro-geographies is documented, showing that farmers in the three villages make distinct choices because of different institutional, political, and environmental constraints and opportunities at the local level. Within these villages, Eakin reveals some of the principal coping strategies for various households including diversification into livestock, new plant crops, factory income, or even migration to the United States on the part of some household members. Many farming choices that might seem reasonable in the abstract seem less reasonable as a result of Eakin's detailed analysis. For instance, farmers in Nazareno who produce commercial crops such as tomatillos, zucchinis, and carrots encounter sudden drops in vegetable prices such that it often is not possible to sell their crops at any price. When asked to identify and map their competitors in other regions of Mexico, farmers discussed (and mapped) the effects of frosts and drought in distant places that impact the marketability and price of their own crops. Eakin provides some of these results in Figure 8.2 on page 151. While we might imagine that access to irrigation would give Nazareno farmers an advantage (over farmers in the other two villages), it actually creates new and complicated difficulties for these farmers under present circumstances.

Eakins' research builds on, and engages, debates in agrarian studies, political ecology, climate change, and vulnerability. In doing so, she carefully outlines the contours of pertinent debates while grounding them, and testing them against the experiences of farmers and farm households in her three case study communities: Plan de Ayala, Torres, and Nazareno, settlements that lie along a continuum of the degree of involvement in agricultural markets.

It would be interesting to see more about the gender dynamics within these households, and to see more about the gendered dynamics of social reproduction in these agrarian contexts. There are some fascinating hints about gender dynamics yet this is not Eakin's focus, so I cannot fault her for this. Still, I can ask readers to ponder: does it matter that these Mexican households subsidize the cost of social reproduction (and the health and bodily integrity of) a young man working as a landscaper in posh neighborhoods of Los Angeles or busing tables in a chichi restaurant in San Francisco? Eakin...