Peasant logic, agrarian policy, land mobility, and land markets in Mexico

Abstract

Mexican rural reform has questioned the role of the peasantry and private national producers in agriculture. The reform followed a neoliberal paradigm for incorporating the nation into the global village. As part of a government strategy, land reform in Mexico aims to change entrepreneurial and land tenure patterns in rural areas into an individual, private, large-scale, and capitalist productive structure, and the land market is vital in allowing the land transfers needed to change the land tenure pattern. Alternative land reforms favor a smallholding structure, and many academics, peasant and indigenous organizations, and even government officials, now favor structural changes that are related to the factors of production in rural Mexico and to the historical construction of the nation. This paper argues that the land market should have a vital role in an agrarian reform that favors the peasantry and indigenous people. There is a need to understand the peasants and indigenous people's logic, rationality and subjective construction of land, for land is the foundation of their survival strategies. The land market can answer to values that have deep cultural roots. The modernization of rural Mexico could be more inclusive, and the land reform strategy could be designed from the bottom to the top and consider the diversity of the rural communities.