Population, Land Use, and Environment Research Directions (2005) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
10 People, Land Use, and Environment in the Yaqui Valley, Sonora, Mexico--Pamela Matson, Amy L. Luers, Karen C. Seto, Rosamond L. Naylor, and Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio
10 People, Land Use, and Environment in the Yaqui Valley, Sonora, Mexico--Pamela Matson, Amy L. Luers, Karen C. Seto, Rosamond L. Naylor, and Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio
Pages 238-264
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 238... ...
Our analysis draws from various disciplines, including agronomy, biogeochemistry, ecology, economics, geography, hydrology, international policy analysis, remote sensing science, and water resources engineering to address these questions at multiple points across the landscape. In this chapter, we first present an introduction to the Yaqui Valley study region.
|
From page 239... ...
. However, the land tenure in the region began to change in the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, when Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution established the ejido land reform program and declared all land ultimately the property of the nation.
|
From page 240... ...
The Agriculture System In the mid-twentieth century, the Mexican government and the international development community identified the Yaqui Valley as an appropriate center for agricultural development. In 1943, Normal Borlag, working for the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation, launched a wheat research program that was the forerunner of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)
|
From page 241... ...
users, as well as the influx of technological assistance in the form of national and international agricultural experiment stations, allowed the support of many more people than the arid region was earlier able to support. Coastal Zone Between 1940 and the 1970s, during the peak of agricultural intensification and expansion, land redistributions to ejidos were minimal, as gov
|
From page 242... ...
In the late-1980s, the administration of President Carlos Salinas distributed over 5,000 ha of nonarable coastal lands in southern Sonora to approximately 2,000 new ejidatarios as part of a state program that provided technical and financial assistance to the ejido sector for shrimp farm development. Despite these initial efforts, the industry did not begin to grow rapidly until almost a decade later, when a series of policy reforms opened the region to private investors (Luers, 2003)
|
From page 243... ...
In addition, government involvement in the Mexican agricultural sector provided price supports for agricultural products and input subsidies on water, credit, and fertilizer that by 1990 represented about 13 percent of the Mexican federal budget (Naylor et al., 2001)
|
From page 244... ...
fertilizer use and efficiency in the Yaqui Valley, asking how farmers managed fertilizer and why, what the consequences of their fertilizer practices were for crop yields and also for environmentally important losses of nitrate and trace gases, and what alternatives were available to them to reduce fertilizer losses to the environment. Our research was driven not only by broad issues related to agriculture and global environmental change, but also by concerns about plant nutrient use efficiency and farmer economic well-being.
|
From page 245... ...
When we began our study, the consequences of fertilizer management for emission of trace gases and nitrate losses in developing world agricultural systems had not yet been evaluated; it was one of several outstanding questions related to global atmospheric change as defined by the international global change research community (the International GeosphereBiosphere Program -- Matson and Ojima, 1990)
|
From page 246... ...
The survey results indicated that fertilization was the highest direct production cost in the Yaqui Valley farm budgets and the single most important cost component in the entire budget. Given the importance of fertilizer in the valley farm budgets, we evaluated the extent to which savings in terms of increased fertilizer efficiency represented a significant budgetary savings to the farmers.
|
From page 247... ...
Much of this research (funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) used time-series remote sensing data to examine land cover changes inside and outside the intensive irrigation district.
|
From page 248... ...
In 2000, price supports for wheat were reintroduced due to falling farm incomes and heightened competition from the United States, where farm supports are much higher. We are still trying to understand the consequences of these earlier and more recent and dramatic policy changes.
|
From page 249... ...
Thus, agricultural intensification in the irrigation district and the expansion of aquaculture appear to be directly linked. Our findings highlight the importance of looking beyond simplistic single-cause explanations of land use and land cover dynamics and toward explanations that incorporate both endogenous and exogenous factors that lead to different opportunities and constraints on land use and land cover changes (Lambin et al., 2003)
|
From page 250... ...
As policy makers shift their attention from broad assessments of potential global change impacts to specific preventive and mitigative action, the global change research community is increasingly focusing on questions about the vulnerability and resilience of people and ecosystems to environmental change (Liverman, 1994; Dow, 1992; Cutter, 1996; Kelly and Adger, 2000; Bohle, 2001)
|
From page 251... ...
Biological shocks such as whitefly invasion, continue to force farmers to respond through changes in management and in production patterns. Climate shocks and the ongoing drought are forcing farmers to consider alternate crops and changes in irrigation management, at the same time that policy changes with respect to water resource allocation are potentially opening new opportunities for efficient use of water.
|
From page 252... ...
In addition, our method revealed that valley farmers, without adaptations, are on average more vulnerable to a 10 percent decrease in wheat prices than a 1 degree (C) increase in average minimum temperature.
|
From page 253... ...
Lee Addams and Jose Luis Minjares from our team have developed a model of the water basin and water distribution system that we are using to assess alternative management plans. Meanwhile, David Lobell and Greg Asner are using Landsat TM and MODIS satellite images to assess the effect of water stress on yield for different crops under different management regimes.
|
From page 254... ...
Whether these workers migrated out of the region or were absorbed by local urban or rural economies is unclear from the available census data. Ciudad Obregon and Navajoa experienced significant economic and urban growth over the last three decades, but population data aggregated at the city level make it difficult to
|
From page 255... ...
, but we can only surmise that differential access is influenced by population dynamics. Are different components of the population differentially at risk under external pressures resulting from policy changes or climate change?
|
From page 256... ...
Do environmental changes at the local level warrant policy action at the federal level? Similarly, are incentive structures set by federal and state policy compatible with the constraints and development goals of the southern Sonoran region?
|
From page 257... ...
We used both approaches in Yaqui and encountered different challenges in each case. Over the course of our project, we carried out three farm-level surveys on general agricultural conditions, with each survey focused on a particular topic: nitrogen fertilizer applications (1994, 1996, 2001, 2003)
|
From page 258... ...
Our research was driven by broader issues related to agriculture and environmental change; our funding for the scientific work was from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and for the economic analysis from the Ford Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
|
From page 259... ...
With a grant from the Packard Foundation providing "matrix money" that allowed the coming together of many more researchers in the region, we expanded our project to include water resources, conservation, and marine researchers from Mexico. Importantly, we began to identify ways in which local stakeholders (including local farmers and the local research community)
|
From page 260... ...
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The work of a great many researchers has made this paper possible. We thank Lee Addams, Toby Ahrens, Kevin Arrigo, Gregory Asner, David Battisti, Michael Beman, Kim Bonine, Esther Cruz, Robert Dunbar, Dagoberto Flores, Steve Gorelick, John Harrison, Peter Jewett, Jeff Koseff, Jessa Lewis, David Lobell, Ellen McCullough, José Luis Minjares, Stephen Monismith, Jane Panek, Bill Riley, and Peter Vitousek.
|
From page 261... ...
Perspectives from social geography. IHDP Newsletter of the International Human Dimension Programme on Global Environmental Change 2:1-4.
|
From page 262... ...
1994 Vulnerability to global environmental change.
|
From page 263... ...
Matson 1993 Food, conservation, and global environmental change: Is compromise possible? EOS Transactions 74(15)
|
From page 264... ...
Matson 1993 Agriculture, the global nitrogen cycle, and trace gas flux.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.