Agroecology needs to increasingly integrate feminist contributions to understand and transform power relations in food systems. This study is based on the participation in and analysis of meetings led by women from different territories in Latin America and the Caribbean, in 2018 in Chiapas (Mexico), in which they addressed problems and alternatives related to food and agriculture. Our analysis identifies the matrix of oppressions: heteropatriarchy, capitalism and colonialism, to understand the power relations in the current corporate industrial food system. We sustain that it is necessary to continue exploring practical alternatives to transcend inequalities and allow the territorial expansion of agroecology with socio-environmental justice.

Background: Some Mayan peasant-hunters across the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico still carry out a hunting ritual –Loojil Ts’oon, Loj Ts’oon or Carbine Ceremony– in which they renew the divine permission for hunting in order to continue deserving the gift of prey after a period of hunt. Thus they are granted access to game by the gods and the Lords of the Animals, particularly the spirit/evil-wind call. This paper focuses on the acts within the Loojil Ts’oon –which is performed in the X-Pichil community and surrounding area– that make it unique among the hunting rituals performed in other parts of the Peninsula. Methods: The Loojil Ts’oon hunting ritual was observed and registered in audiovisual format in two different occasions in X-Pichil (Friday 04/29/2011 and Friday 07/29/2011). Afterwards, we delivered digital videodisks (DVD) to hunters and their families and to the j-men (the magic-medic-ritual specialist) who participated in these ceremonies. This delivery produced confidence among participants to talk more openly and in-depth about the Loojil Ts’oon, revealing symbolic, psychological, and material details previously unknown to outsiders. Qualitative information was obtained through the ethnographic method using techniques such as participant observation and guided tours. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to obtain complementary information. Results and discussion: On one hand, we describe the preparation and cleansing of the “Sip soup”, as well as its parading and distribution –delivery to the spirit/evil-wind Sip– on the streets of the community (highlingting the role of the rooster as a counter-gift). On the other hand, the cleansing of the jaws (of deer: Odocoileus virginianus, Mazama spp.; and peccaries: Tayassuidae) and their return to the Lords of Animals in the hills so that they may give these animals new life. Conclusions: By performing the Loojil Ts’oon, the act of killing an animal is legitimized. The kill transforms into an exchange to perpetuate life, in which gods and Lords of animals grant the hunter the solicited new game if he has completed his ritual duties and has not broken the prescribed hunting rules. The Loojil Ts’oon does not only represent the continuity and regeneration of animals, that is, fauna as a resource, but also of the whole hunting cycle. The hunter does so to maintain and recreate order and equilibrium in one’s relationship with nature as a whole, with the rest of one’s social group, and with oneself. Thus, hunting transcends the exclusively material dimension of a subsistence activity.

Background: New kinds of knowledge, usage patterns and management strategies of natural resources emerge in local communities as a way of coping with uncertainty in a changing world. Studying how human groups adapt and create new livelihoods strategies are important research topics for creating policies in natural resources management. Here, we study the adoption and development of lagartos (Crocodylus moreletii) commercial hunting by Mayan people from a communal land in Quintana Roo state. Two questions guided our work: how did the Mayan learn to hunt lagartos? And how, and in what context, did knowledge and management practices emerge? We believe that social structures, knowledge and preexisting skills facilitate the hunting learning process, but lagarto ecological knowledge and organizational practice were developed in a “learning by doing” process. Methods: We conducted free, semi-structured and in-depth interviews over 17 prestigious lagartos hunters who reconstructed the activity through oral history. Then, we analyzed the sources of information and routes of learning and investigated the role of previous knowledge and social organization in the development of this novel activity. Finally, we discussed the emergence of hunting in relation to the characteristic of natural resource and the tenure system. Results: Lagarto hunting for skin selling was a short-term activity, which represented an alternative source of money for some Mayans known as lagarteros. They acquired different types of knowledge and skills through various sources of experience (individual practice, or from foreign hunters and other Mayan hunters). The developed management system involved a set of local knowledge about lagartos ecology and a social organization structure that was then articulated in the formation of “working groups” with particular hunting locations (rumbos and trabajaderos), rotation strategies and collaboration among them. Access rules and regulations identified were in an incipient state of development and were little documented. Conclusions: In agreement to the hypothesis proposed, the Mayan used multiple learning paths to develop a new activity: the lagarto hunting. On the one hand, they used their traditional social organization structure as well as their culturally inherited knowledge. On the other hand, they acquired new ecological knowledge of the species in a learning-by-doing process, together with the use of other sources of external information. The formation of working groups, the exchange of information and the administration of hunting locations are similar to other productive activities and livelihood practiced by these Mayan. Skills such as preparing skins and lagartos ecological knowledge were acquired by foreign hunters and during hunting practice, respectively. We detected a feedback between local ecological knowledge and social organization, which in turn promoted the emergence of Mayan hunting management practices.

Resumen 1 : Se analizan las formas de intercambio de productos de familias indígenas habitantes del casco urbano de Tarapacá en la Amazonia colombiana, como una dialéctica entre las relaciones de reciprocidad de las economías indígenas y la influencia de las economías de mercado. Para eso, se reflexiona sobre la forma como las familias intercambian y comercian con productos de la agrobiodiversidad presente en chagras, ríos y selvas. El intercambio, como parte del sistema social, se regula por una dialéctica del valor entre las formas comunitarias y capitalistas, que atraviesa en mayor o menor grado las formas que la economía indígena ha tomado actualmente.

Seasonal food scarcity during pre-harvest months is, widely, considered to be the principal manifestation of food insecurity, for some 600 million members of smallholder families, who rely on a variety of coping strategies. This paper analyses both the peasant-economy variables that explain the presence and intensity of seasonal food scarcity, and the coping strategies of 120 rural households in a microregion of southern Mexico. We, also, examine how supply networks for six archetypical foods of the peasant diet express robustness or vulnerability during seasons of abundance and scarcity. The method combines surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, statistical models and social network analyses. Results show that 74% of households experience at least one month of food scarcity annually, and 34% of shortages last more than six months. In total, 29% of affected households gather wild foods, and 14% use intense coping strategies, such as international migration, taking out rural loans, and parental food buffering. During scarce seasons, self-sufficiency networks for maize and beans contract, but still maintain the food supply of peasant households, while cash-consumption networks such as those of beef become accessible only to a small sector of economically differentiated households. In contrast to the vast majority of research, which simply reports the presence of seasonal food shortages and describes the coping strategies of rural households, this paper provides an in-depth analysis—based upon a novel methodological integration—of the socioeconomic, agrifood, and land tenure conditions that may determine why many peasant territories in the Global South face the “farmer–food-scarcity paradox”.

El crecimiento urbano afecta las áreas agrícolas y forestales situadas en sus inmediaciones y transforma las formas tradicionales de control y uso de la tierra. Se cuenta con poca información acerca de las modalidades que toma este proceso en las ciudades medias, y menos aún si se le enfoca desde la perspectiva de los actores locales. Aquí se presenta un estudio de caso que analiza el crecimiento de la ciudad de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, sobre un espacio rural aledaño y sus efectos sobre las áreas forestales y agrícolas. Aun cuando existe un fuerte proceso de urbanización, marcado por el aumento de la población, la fragmentación de la propiedad de la tierra y la llegada de los servicios urbanos, se mantienen algunas áreas forestales en reservas naturales y en espacios asociados a usos agrícolas y urbanos, las cuales forman un paisaje agroforestal que provee recursos naturales y servicios ambientales a la población local y urbana, entre ellos sobresale la recarga de agua. Lo anterior parece corresponder a una nueva ruralidad en que se presenta la integración espacial de procesos socioambientales urbanos y rurales, donde el bosque y la agricultura tienen un sentido y un valor distintos para los actores ahí presentes, que en no pocas ocasiones están en contradicción. Abstract Urban growth affects the agricultural and forest areas located in its immediate vicinity, transforming traditional forms of land control and use. Very little information is available on the patterns of this process in medium-sized cities, particularly if the information is provided from the perspective of local actors. This article presents a case study that analyzes the influence of the growth of the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, on an adjacent rural area and its effects on forest and farm areas. Although there is an intense process of urbanization, marked by a population increase, the fragmentation of land ownership and the arrival of urban services, some forest areas have been maintained in nature reserves and spaces associated with agricultural and urban uses, forming an agro-forest landscape that provides natural resources and environmental services for the local and urban population, foremost among which is recharging the aquifers. This appears to correspond to a new rurality in which urban and rural socio-environmental processes are spatially integrated and where the forest and agriculture have a different meaning and value for the actors there, which often contradict each other.