Abstract
This chapter examines how climatic events affect agricultural livelihoods. Special emphasis is given to the effects of natural disasters on migration patterns. In addition, it aims to assess policy options to reduce the vulnerability of small-scale farmers (e.g. government-supported insurance schemes). To further this aim, this work draws on stakeholder consultations and descriptive analysis in three communities in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. It also puts forward stakeholder-based solutions, which embrace loss-sharing and risk-transfer mechanisms. The coping strategies revealed in this study encompass both immediate responses (e.g. sources of off-farm income, post-disaster financing sources, and emigration plans), and more structural and long-term strategies, such as re-orientation of production and improvement of infrastructure for production.
De los ranchos bajaba la gente a los pueblos; la gente de los pueblos se iba a las ciudades. En las ciudades la gente se perdía, se disolvía entre la gente. «¿No sabe ónde me darán trabajo?» «Sí, vete a Ciudad Juárez. Yo te paso por doscientos pesos… »
JUAN FULFO, Paso del Norte
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Notes
- 1.
Extreme poverty is defined as living below the food-based poverty line.
- 2.
The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality. It consists of a number between 0 and 1, where 0 means perfect equality (everyone has the same income) and 1 means perfect inequality (one person has all the income, everyone else has none).
- 3.
For further details about Endowment, and Endowment Effect, see John List (University of Maryland) and Daniel Kahneman (Homo sapiens vs. Homo economicus).
- 4.
- 5.
Consider that no major natural disaster had affected this region between 2000 and the application of this questionnaire in January 2005. After the flooding tragedy in September 2005, this community’s perception of the importance of government support and public insurance might have changed depending on government response following the disaster.
- 6.
Author’s estimates using data from Sistema Municipal de Bases de Datos, INEGI (www.inegi.gob.mx ). It should also be taken into consideration that official records tend to miss migratory moves taking place in two stages, that is, migrants who first move to cities within the same country and later leave the country.
- 7.
The flooding tragedy in 1998 affected 154,000 hectares of crops in the region, calculates CNC regional leader Indalecio Flores, from which farmers have not yet been able to recover. Also, municipal authorities in Escuintla claim that this event damaged the regional economy on such a scale that to date, 6 years later, economic activity has still not recovered to pre-disaster levels. Neither local authorities nor leaders in the region have contingency fund nor plans to establish one.
- 8.
CNC (Confederación Nacional Campesina) is the acronym in Spanish for the National Farmers Confederation, a national organization made up of mainly middle and low income farmers. It is affiliated with the PRI, the political party which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. The CNC is one of the four sectors of the PRI, and provides an ongoing slate of candidates for federal representatives and senators.
- 9.
CIOAC (Central Independiente de Organizaciones de Agricultores y Campesinos) is the acronym in Spanish for the Independent Union of Agricultural and Peasant Organizations, which is mostly made up of subsistence farmers from highly marginalized regions, most of which have ties to leftist organizations.
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Saldaña-Zorrilla, S.O. (2015). Stakeholders’ views in reducing vulnerability and resilience building. In: Natural Disasters, Foreign Trade and Agriculture in Mexico. SpringerBriefs in Environmental Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17359-7_6
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