How much of the Mexican agricultural supply is produced by small farms, and how?

The contribution of small farms to the global food supply is in debate due to lack of empirical evidence. In Mexico, small farms have been relatively important for national food supply due to an agrarian reform in the first half of the 20th century, but their role has been decreasing in the last decades. The aim of this study is to quantify how much small farms produce of the Mexican agricultural supply, and with which farming practices, using the 2019 National Agricultural Survey. The results show that small farms produce 19% of the national agricultural production with similar farming practices to those of medium and large farms. When considering imports and exports, small farms produce 15% of the national agricultural supply. The production of small farms consists mainly of cash crops (e.g. sugar cane, fruits & vegetables, animal products, fodder crops) and, to a lesser extent, staple crops such as maize and beans. The fact that small farms produce one fifth of the national production after decades of governmental support towards large farms suggests that they have resilient production systems. The results of this study support that stronger efforts should be made to enhance the role of small farms in achieving Mexican food sovereignty. This will not only have benefits in terms of food supply but may also have a wide range of social and environmental benefits.

Global shocks, cascading disruptions, and (re-)connections: viewing the COVID-19 pandemic as concurrent natural experiments to understand land system dynamics.

Context: For nearly three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human well-being and livelihoods, communities, and economies in myriad ways with consequences for social-ecological systems across the planet. The pandemic represents a global shock in multiple dimensions that has already, and is likely to continue to have, far-reaching effects on land systems and on those depending on them for their livelihoods. Objectives: We focus on the observed effects of the pandemic on landscapes and people composing diverse land systems across the globe. Methods: We highlight the interrelated impacts of the pandemic shock on the economic, health, and mobility dimensions of land systems using six vignettes from different land systems on four continents, analyzed through the lens of socio-ecological resilience and the telecoupling framework. We present preliminary comparative insights gathered through interviews, surveys, key informants, and authors' observations and propose new research avenues for land system scientists. Results: The pandemic's effects have been unevenly distributed, context-specific, and dependent on the multiple connections that link land systems across the globe. Conclusions: We argue that the pandemic presents concurrent "natural experiments" that can advance our understanding of the intricate ways in which global shocks produce direct, indirect, and spillover effects on local and regional landscapes and land systems. These propagating shock effects disrupt existing connections, forge new connections, and re-establish former connections between peoples, landscapes, and land systems. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-023-01604-2.

Landscape products for sustainable agricultural landscapes.

Landscape products link to low-input practices and traditional ecological knowledge, and have multiple functions supporting human well-being and sustainability. Here we explore seven landscape products worldwide to identify these multiple functions in the context of food commodification and landscape sustainability. We show that a landscape products lens can improve food systems by fostering sustainability strategies and standards that are place-sensitive, and as such can mitigate conflicts related to food production, social justice and the environment. Co-management strategies and information policies, such as certification, labelling, product information and raising of awareness could accelerate, incentivize and catalyse actions to support landscape products in the context of sustainability strategies.