Sociology of rural territory

Today’s world is facing sustained population growth and advanced social metabolism. These variables, together with the food vulnerability revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic, reveal important changes in the biosphere. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was already facing difficulties in agricultural production, rural territories had to face structural adjustment policies for more than two decades, and these policies exacerbated the rational logic of family farming in an atmosphere of territorial transformations and reconfigurations. The impact of the pandemic accentuated this logic and prompted changes in modern and traditional agricultural practice.

If we consider that today’s world population obtains most of its calories from a small number of crops, with only about 30 species accounting for 95 % of the world’s food energy and more than 50 % of these species being horticultural crops, it is necessary to understand how these transformations and reconfigurations have affected rural social actors to guarantee future food supply. It is possible that this figure is underestimated, as each culture has an extensive food catalog of commercial and noncommercial edible plants. Humanity depends to a large extent on agriculture for its subsistence, an agriculture that is organized in agro-productive systems and that is active in all rural territories around the world with an agricultural vocation, and in this logic a strategic agro-productive system is horticulture. In the world, rural territories are endowed with agro-ecological conditions that are ideal for horticultural production, and one of the countries that supplies vegetables on a global scale is Mexico. Knowing the logic of its farmers, who make horticultural production a reality and the security of inserting them into international trade is an aspect that must be understood to guarantee future generations the way in which we should produce and supply food.

Mexico is one of the main suppliers of vegetables to the United States, Japan and Canada. Since the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic, this dependence has deepened, and in the case of trade relations with the United States, it has been accentuated with the Mexico, United States and Canada Agreement (USMCA) to measure its importance; in 2022, the United States accounted for more than 70 % of the value of trade in the agri-food sector; in the horticultural sector alone, trade exceeded the value of 7 billion dollars.

Some basic aspects that benefit the current trade in vegetables between Mexico–United States–Canada are the elimination of child labor (Lugo- Morin, 2013a), a measure that has a direct impact on some horticultural products such as tomatoes, chilli, zucchini, onions and leeks, as it limits their export (SIAP, 2023). In this context, small and medium-sized horticultural farmers have started a process of updating their strategies, including aspects such as ethnocompetitiveness, social networks, or multi-rationality. The idea of implementing these response strategies is to generate relationships of cooperation, trust, and negotiation, build new learning habits through (virtual or face-to-face) platforms for training, establish weak links with peers to foster rural innovation, and adopt new technologies to optimize horticultural production and marketing.

The dynamics of change mentioned above is not only promoted by the new USMCA rules, also the agro-ecological aspects and the specifics of the territories and their crops is key, in this sense, it is important to mention the temporal limitation of vegetables, also known as agricultural seasonality, which is not regulated by the USMCA, The problem with this is the lack of lawyers specialized in resolving this type of dispute, and here horticultural farmers may find an obstacle to enforcing the stipulations of the USMCA.

In this situation, it is important to remember that horticultural crops have short growing seasons (3 months) with high yields and a high demand for labor, making them the second most important agricultural sub-sector after cereals. In addition, a significant number of highly nutritious and medicinal edible plants (e.g., Nasturtium officinalis, Portulaca oleracea, Chenopodium berlandieri, Porophyllum ruderale), called quelites (SIAP, 2023), have been revalued as therapeutic foods to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic (Lugo-Morin, 2022). The COVID-19 virus emerged in China and caused a pandemic declared by the WHO on March 11, 2020. To date, more than 771 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported, including more than 6.9 million deaths (WHO, 2023).

According to Schwentesius and Gómez (1997), the following forms of production can be distinguished in Mexico: (i) smallholder, low technological level, summer and autumn production, located in the belts of large cities and areas close to large population centers such as the states of Tlaxcala, Puebla and Hidalgo; (ii) medium-high technological level commercial production for national supply, located in different states, such as Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos and San Luís Potosí; (iii) production for fresh export, located in Sinaloa, Sonora, Guanajuato and Baja California and (iv) production of vegetables for agro-industry, located in Guanajuato (broccoli and cauliflower) and Sinaloa (tomato-red).

Although the aforementioned states have vegetable production, those in northern Mexico stand out for their production, yields and increasing modernization. However, in central Mexico, particularly in the State of Puebla, horticultural production is growing significantly, promoted by a family agriculture that has been able to incorporate itself into the regional, national, and international food supply chain (SIAP, 2023).

In the State of Puebla, the main municipalities with horticultural production are San Francisco Mixtla, Santa Isabel Tlalnepantla, Cuautinchan, Tzicatlacoyan, Tecali de Herrera, Los Reyes de Juárez, San Salvador de Huixcolotla, Tepeaca, Cuapiaxtla de Madero, Tecamachalco, Santo Tomas Hueyotlipan, Tochtepec and Acatzingo. This last municipality is the geographical space of the case study because it is one of the main vegetable producers, an aspect that has triggered a dynamic of changes in its territories, impacting on rural social actors and generating within them strategies of collective and individual action responses.

In this logic, the horticultural agro-productive system of the municipality of Acatzingo has historically been built by configuring the rural territory through social relations and networks. Various economic actors participate in the horticultural system and in the value chain: small farmers, suppliers of agricultural goods and services, and marketers. They exchange goods and services, generating a social network based on relations of subordination and negotiation.

The progressive increase in horticultural crops in global demand has led small farmers and traders to build relationships in an atmosphere of arrangements, interests, and economic needs (Lugo-Morin, 2017). This has enabled positive scenarios for small horticultural farmers, but also challenging scenarios such as the limitation on the use of child labor imposed by the USMCA, as well as struggles and adjustments in the structural positions of rural social actors that deepen social differentiation, where economic power becomes the articulating element of the system.

Global economic dynamics have had an impact on the relations between agricultural production systems, a good example of which is the USMCA, to which Mexico, the United States and Canada are signatories. The emergence of new trade agreements, far from leading to the disappearance of small farmers, generates processes of resilience that allow them to adapt and learn from new situations, and these situations affect not only small farmers in Mexico but all Latin America.

The opportunity for the horticulture sector in the face of the entry into force of the USMCA and the economic recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is the promotion of new adjustments that lead to sectoral policies that consolidate response strategies at the level of family farming. Likewise, the peasantry requires support in the use of information and communication technologies to bridge the digital divide in the agri-food sector to expand marketing channels beyond Mexico’s northern borders (Murillo-Villanueva, 2022), as is currently the case with the trade agreements with Japan, China and South Korea, among others. Mexico currently has 19 trade agreements signed with more than 46 countries in which the Mexican primary sector participates.

In Mexico, rural territorial reconfiguration is present in the horticultural agro-productive system of the municipality of Acatzingo, Puebla. Here, small farmers have promoted strategies of agricultural recomposition, modernizing horticultural production. In the horticultural agro-production system, the following components can be identified: production process, agricultural goods and services, and marketing, with the participation of various social and economic actors. In the first, small-scale farmers participate in the production process. The second is composed of suppliers of agricultural goods and services. In the third, local intermediaries and self-service shops, exporters, and packers (Lugo-Morin, 2017).