Doctoral Dissertation Research: Agro-Ecosystems and the Politics of Commodity Reregulation in Veracruz's Coffee Lands

全球咖啡市场的动荡对全球2500万咖啡生产者产生了深刻影响，其中大多数是发展中国家的小农。在墨西哥的韦拉克鲁斯（Veracruz），自20世纪60年代以来，国家咖啡机构的总部就设在这里。在20世纪80年代，市场崩溃和国家计划的解体对小农造成了双重影响。咖啡生产商制定了独特的策略来应对经济转型的影响，从替代作物到彻底的政治行动主义。国家机构最近制定了一些计划，试图以传统的、自上而下的资源政治方式直接控制农村生产者和环境管理。然而，国家行为体现在必须适应1980年代后韦拉克鲁斯农村发展起来的更加多样化的权力结构。虽然最近的研究考察了社会组织形式如何对抗经济和制度重组的更恶劣影响，但这些分析并没有对咖啡给予太多关注，尤其是在墨西哥。此外，相对较少的研究考察了国家本身如何应对、选择和/或整合这些社会生态变化。这个博士论文研究项目寻求以下问题的答案：小规模咖啡生产者如何发展新的社会网络和环境战略来调解社会经济变化的影响？土地利用的变化是由这些新的社会关系引起的吗？这些社会生态实践如何塑造了国家在管理咖啡景观方面的角色？博士候选人将使用多种方法来测试这些问题的答案，包括民族志技术的组合，包括与咖啡生产商、生产商组织和政府机构官员的半结构化访谈。社会组织与土地利用变化之间的关系将通过当地制图项目和对遥感LANDSAT图像进行时间序列分析来衡量。这项研究将通过解释家庭层面的咖啡生产者如何成为全球经济和社会变革的积极推动者，而不仅仅是被动的受害者，来弥合文献中的差距。社会组织和农场实践之间更深层次的联系也对生态多样化的遮荫咖啡景观产生了重大影响。关于土地覆盖变化的学术讨论已经确定需要案例研究和理论上可靠的分析，将实际的土地覆盖变化与经济、制度和政治变化直接联系起来。本项目将通过对官方文件和项目的访谈和话语分析来阐明定量数据，从而解决这一需求。由于该项目将把社会经济转型与农村生计和土地利用的实际变化联系起来，它将有助于确定对遮荫种植的咖啡农业生态系统及其所维持的家庭最具可持续性的社会关系和环境实践类型。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项将为有前途的学生提供支持，使他们能够建立强大的独立研究事业。

Volatility in the global coffee market has deeply impacted the world's 25 million coffee producers, most of whom are smallholders in developing nations. In Veracruz, Mexico, where the national coffee agency had been headquartered since the 1960s, smallholders were doubly impacted by market collapse and the dismantling of state programs during the 1980s. Coffee producers developed unique strategies to weather the impacts of economic transformation, ranging from alternative crops to outright political activism. State agencies recently developed programs that attempt to directly control rural producers and environmental management in the manner of traditional, top-down resource politics. State actors now must accommodate more heterogeneous configurations of power that developed in the post-1980s Veracruz countryside, however. While recent studies have examined how forms of social organization contest the more egregious effects of economic and institutional restructuring, such analyses have not given much attention to coffee, especially in Mexico. In addition, relatively few studies have examined how the state itself responds to, co-opts, and/or integrates these socioecological changes. This doctoral dissertation research project seeks answers to the following questions: How have small-scale coffee producers developed new social networks and environmental strategies to mediate the impacts of socioeconomic change? Are changes in land use resulting from these new social relationships? How have these socioecological practices shaped the state's role in regulating coffee landscapes? The doctoral candidate will test answers to these questions using a multi-method approach, including a combination of ethnographic techniques, including semi-structured interviews with coffee producers and officials from producer organizations and government agencies. The relationships between social organization and land-use change will be measured through local mapping projects and through time series analysis of remotely sensed LANDSAT images.This research will bridge a gap in the literature by explaining how coffee producers at the household level are active agents of global economic and social change rather than merely passive victims. A deeper sense of the connections between social organization and farm-level practices also has material implications for the ecologically diverse shade-grown coffee landscape. Scholarly discussion on land-cover change has identified the need for case studies and theoretically robust analyses that directly relate actual land-cover transformations to economic, institutional, and political change. This project will address this need by articulating quantitative data with interviews and discourse analysis of official documents and programs. Because this project will link socioeconomic transformation to actual changes in rural livelihoods and land use, it will help identify the types of social relationships and environmental practices that are most sustainable for both the shade-grown coffee agro-ecosystems and the families they sustain. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.