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. 2023 Feb 18;51(2):189–205. doi: 10.1007/s10745-022-00388-4

Land-System Changes and Migration Amidst the Opium Poppy Collapse in the Southern Highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico (2016-2020)

Gabriel Tamariz 1,✉, Karl S Zimmerer 1,2,3,4, Carolynne Hultquist 5
PMCID: PMC9938696  PMID: 36844033

Abstract

For decades, Mexico has been one of the major illegal opium poppy cultivation countries in the world. In 2017-2018 the price of the opium gum dropped abruptly to a historical low, causing a sudden collapse of production. We analyze the dynamics of rural land systems amid this price collapse through a multi-site approach in three neighboring municipalities in the Southern Highlands of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. We use medium-scale spatial resolution satellite imagery for a quantitative assessment in a five-year period (2016-2020), complemented by secondary data and structured/semi-structured interviews with poppy growers and other key informants. Findings show that all three municipalities experienced pronounced declines in the areas of overall cultivated agricultural land immediately after the poppy price collapsed (2017-2018). However, there is a clear contrast among municipalities in how these areas recovered the following years (2019-2020). We identify three differentiating factors that explain this contrast in land-system trajectories: different levels of extreme poverty, livelihood diversification, and geographic isolation associated to (trans)national migration networks. These findings contribute to the analysis of the dynamic relationships among rural land systems, local resource management (including agrobiodiversity), and economic globalization involving illegal crop-commodity cultivation and migration, particularly in Latin America.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10745-022-00388-4.

Keywords: Illegal crops, Out-migration, Resource management, Agrobiodiversity, Economic globalization, Oaxaca, Mexico

Introduction

After a century of territorial expansion and increasing profitability, the cultivation of opium poppy in Mexico collapsed in 2017-2018. Used mainly to produce heroin for U.S. markets, opium gum suddenly lost its commercial value. Its price had always fluctuated due to a simple supply and demand logic partly related to the varying intensity of the destruction of this illegal crop and the seizure of its byproduct by state agents. But in 2017-2018 the price dropped abruptly to a historical low. The reasons were at first unknown in the countryside. Farmers we spoke with in 2018 and 2019 could only speculate. Only later was it revealed that a synthetic substitute of heroin had taken over the markets (Le Cour Grandmaison et al., 2019). Illegally manufactured fentanyl and its precursor chemicals were first imported from China. Since 2021, however, large-scale clandestine fentanyl laboratories have been found in Mexico that demonstrate its massive production in the country (Navarro, 2022; Pérez Ricart, 2021; Sinembargo, 2022). Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and related commercial limitations, the fentanyl boom persisted, drastically undermining poppy-growing for heroin production. In fact, cases of fentanyl overdose deaths in the United States continued to increase during and after the pandemic (DiGennaro et al., 2021; Bitting et al., 2022; Shelley, 2020).

Mexico had been the third largest producer of opium poppy worldwide since the 2000s (UNODC, 2010, 2020a), but little is known about the land-system dynamics and trajectory of its recent price collapse in the countryside other than ethnographic descriptions. The fieldwork by Le Cour Grandmaison et al. (2019) and Álvarez (2021, 2022) in the states of Nayarit and Guerrero found that poppy production had stemmed out-migration to Mexican cities and the U.S. for decades, but given the critical situation related to the poppy collapse “some farmers considered quitting poppy cultivation, and said that emigration from their native land would be their only viable option if the US demand failed to rebound.” (Le Cour Grandmaison et al., 2019:322). In 2019, most agricultural lands in a village in La Montaña (Guerrero) that “were previously riddled with poppy flowers were now idled or dedicated to maize cultivation” (Álvarez, 2022, p. 7). Similarly in Oaxaca, as we have documented before (Tamariz, 2022), the price volatility of illegal crops has been a main driver of agricultural abandonment.

Motivated by these preliminary ethnographic findings, we seek to understand the land-system dynamics and trajectories of this shock through a multi-site quantitative analysis. To-date, the effects of the poppy collapse on land systems in rural Mexico have not been quantified, neither has there been an effort to study if, how, and why different poppy production communities have experienced the collapse differently. We use a case study of three neighboring municipalities in the Southern Highlands of Oaxaca for the period 2016-2020, and a mixed-methods approach that includes a quantitative analysis of Sentinel 2 satellite imagery and official secondary data, and a qualitative analysis of structured/semi-structured interviews (about livelihoods, land systems, and agrobiodiversity) with former poppy growers and other key informants. This case study of Oaxacan communities is representative of key main changes of ongoing land system-migration interactions in rural Mexico amid the opium poppy collapse (2016-2020).

Our results show that all three municipalities of study experienced pronounced decline in the areas of agricultural land immediately after the poppy price collapsed (2017 and 2018). However, there are clear contrasts among these municipalities in how the cultivated areas recovered the following years (2019 and 2020). One of them rebounded almost completely. The second municipality had a meager recovery at the end of the period. The third continued to decline, reaching its lowest point in 2020. We identify three influential factors in land-system dynamics that were present at different levels in these municipalities and that explain contrasting trajectories of change: extreme poverty, livelihood diversification, and geographic isolation mostly related to the existence or absence of (trans)national migration networks.

Our findings contribute to the analysis of the relationship between land systems, local resource management (including agrobiodiversity), and global change (especially economic globalization involving illegal crops and international migration), particularly in Latin America (Rudel et al., 2005; Klooster, 2013; Zimmerer, 2014; Zimmerer et al., 2021; Boillat et al., 2017; Robson et al., 2018; Radel et al., 2018, 2019). “Land systems”, as used here, refer to “all processes and activities related to the human use of land, including socioeconomic, technological and organizational investments and arrangements, as well as the benefits gained from land and the unintended social and ecological outcomes of societal activities” (Verburg et al., 2013, p. 433).1

In the following section we engage and advance the human-environment literature on the nexus of rural land systems, illegal crop commodities, and migration in Latin America. Then we give a snapshot of the opium poppy boom and bust in the state of Oaxaca, followed by a description of our case study in the Southern Highlands. The “Methods” section describes our main methods of data generation. Later we analyze our findings with primary and secondary data to explain the differing transformation of the area of agricultural land in the three case study municipalities. We conclude by discussing the contributions and limitations of this research.

Land-system Change Driven by Peasant Migration

Rural Out-migration and Focus To-date on Forest-transition Land Systems

The process of de-agrarianization has been associated, to a great extent, with massive rural–urban migration (Bernstein, 2010; McMichael, 2013). Consequently, land-system change has taken place both in the sending and the receiving areas of migration (Radel et al., 2019). In the former–the sending areas–scholarly work has analyzed how out-migration leads to household labor shortages, which subsequently has caused the reduction of the area used for the production of crops and for raising livestock (Hecht et al., 2006; López et al., 2006). The use of other natural resources such as water, firewood, wild plants, and fungi has also often decreased (Moran-Taylor & Taylor, 2010; Robson & Klooster, 2019; Taylor et al., 2006). In turn, the contraction or abandonment of land due to rural depopulation has led to forest recovery. Non-crop grass, shrubs, and trees have taken over abandoned lands in a process known as forest transitions (Walker, 2008). Various case studies have shown that parts of Mexico are representative of these forest transitions and rural decline (e.g., Lorenzen et al., 2021; Robson & Berkes, 2011).

Some have interpreted forest transitions as a positive and almost inevitable outcome of a combination of local ecological degradation and broader economic development (Perz, 2007; Walker, 2008). According to this approach, in a first stage of development “settlers overuse trees and soil, then pests, soil depletion, and weed crises arrive, then they abandon, sell, lose their lands or fallow more land and turn to other pursuits[…] and the new idled lands sometimes revert to forest” (Rudel et al., 2002, p. 89). Farmers move to the cities, where there is a high demand for labor in the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy. Following this explanation, while a country’s development in an early stage causes deforestation and forest degradation due to demographic expansion and agricultural production, in a later stage of development forests recover as part of agricultural intensification and the urbanization and industrialization of its economy. In sum, forest cover follows a U-shaped curve, whereby “at first, deforestation is rapid, but as the country develops, deforestation slows and finally reverses.” (Klooster, 2003, p. 228).

The Stewardship Model as a Contextual Approach to Recent Nontraditional Livelihoods

The forest transitions theory has been criticized for its emphasis on one or a few variables that were most influential in the history of the Global North (Klooster, 2003). As noted by Radel et al. (2019: 106), “drawing general conclusions on the impact of migration on forest resurgence and agricultural practices in migrant-sending regions has proved elusive because of the numerous contextual factors that also influence land-use decisions.” In many cases, particularly in Latin America, rural population decrease has not caused a proportional reduction in land use (e.g., Gray & Bilsborrow, 2014; Hecht et al., 2006; Moran-Taylor & Taylor, 2010; Radel & Schmook, 2008; Rudel et al., 2002). In several cases, the converse has occurred, with depopulation associated with the expansion of the agricultural area (McSweeney et al., 2017; Robson et al., 2018; Taylor et al., 2006). Similarly, as found by Zimmerer and Vanek (2016), depopulation or livelihood diversification, such as migration, can lead to the intensification of resource use.

Mixed pathways of land-system change related to peasant migration are due to multiple factors. Among the most relevant are: (1) the differing shifts in local livelihoods and economies following out-migration towards more intensive or extensive, subsistence or commercial, farm or non-farm activities (Hecht et al., 2006; Klooster, 2003; Moran-Taylor & Taylor, 2010; Radel & Schmook, 2008; Rudel et al., 2005; Zimmerer, 2013); (2) diverse ways in which domestic and international remittances are consumed and invested locally (Durand & Massey, 1992; Gray, 2009; Gray & Bilsborrow, 2014; Jokisch, 2002; Radel & Schmook, 2008; Taylor et al., 2006); (3) multiple and contingent forms to overcome labor shortages (Jokisch, 2002; Moran-Taylor & Taylor, 2010; Zimmerer, 2014; Zimmerer et al., 2021); (4) different relationships that temporal, circular, and permanent migrants have with land governance in their communities of origin (Bebbington, 2000; Klooster, 2003; Radel & Schmook, 2008; Rudel et al., 2002; Taylor et al., 2006); (5) contrasting geographic proximity to or isolation from external markets (Rudel et al., 2002, 2005); and (6) varying degrees in which new technologies and innovative natural resource management paradigms and institutions are adopted as a direct or indirect consequence of out-migration (Hecht et al., 2006; Klooster, 2003; Rudel et al., 2005).

In the light of this wide array of processes and outcomes, it is clear that out-migration and related population decrease do not have a relationship with land-system change that is linear nor a priori positive or negative regarding area and resource impacts (Boillat et al., 2017; Radel et al., 2019; Zimmerer & Vanek, 2016). Also, outstanding and away from common assumptions are the nontraditional livelihoods that emerge from the entanglements between migration and other local and extra-local social-ecological factors, which do not correspond to the simple rural/urban dichotomy (Zimmerer, 2014; Zimmerer et al., 2021). As such, a ‘stewardship model’ (Klooster, 2013)–accounting for multiple resource changes and the combination of community and household-level governance–rather than a ‘forest transition’ better helps to address the key question of how livelihoods and resource management (including forests, agriculture, agrobiodiversity, soil, and water) are transformed (not abandoned) by migrant communities in the sending areas (Klooster, 2013; Radel et al., 2019; Robson & Berkes, 2011; Robson & Klooster, 2019; Robson et al., 2018; Zimmerer, 2013, 2014).

Migrant-sending Areas in Oaxaca: Challenges and Opportunities for Resource Management

The stewardship approach is useful for the analysis of Oaxacan communities given the long history of out-migration and the heterogeneous and dynamic management of natural resources in this Mexican state. Most of the land in Oaxaca is common property and the majority of its municipalities are ruled locally by non-partisan governments known as Usos y Costumbres (UyC) (Barnes, 2009; Durand-Ponte, 2007; Hernández-Díaz, 2007; Recondo, 2007; Rentería-Garita, 2011). Together, common property and UyC condition land used by both migrant and non-migrant households. For example, Mutersbaugh (2002) analyzed the local politics of sending migration communities in a village in the Northern Highlands region (Sierra Norte), where he found that “the village acts, with measured success, to shape the timing and rhythm of migration” (p. 473). In other villages in the Northern Highlands and the Central Valleys (Valles Centrales), UyC governance requires migrants to send remittances in lieu of the unpaid community work (cargos and servicios) that they are obligated to give as members of the community (VanWey et al., 2005). In addition to community remittances, migrants need to assign a person who will carry out their share of community work (Robson & Klooster, 2019).

The strong ties Oaxacan migrants may hold with their households and communities notwithstanding, out-migration in some cases has weakened local governance and natural resource institutions (García-Barrios & García-Barrios, 1990; Robson & Berkes, 2011; Klooster, 2013). Collective action in agriculture, such as labor exchange, which had traditionally induced sustainable resource management in communities in the Mixteca Alta region, was found to be undermined by massive out-migration, which in turn caused a decline in agricultural productivity and the deterioration of soil and forests (García-Barrios & García-Barrios, 1990). Similarly, Robson and Berkes (2011) studied how a process of migration and land abandonment had a negative effect on biodiversity, despite forest regrowth, given the demise of local natural resources management, including agrobiodiversity. As noted by Klooster (2013, p. 57), migration may offer the possibility of tree cover conservation and expansion, but it “also threatens the agrobiodiversity of managed landscapes” as it “complicates communities’ ability to invest in commons management.” Those who stay become overwhelmed by community work that was previously carried out by many more, “leading to the erosion and abandonment” of cargos and servicios (Klooster, 2013, p. 66).

By contrast, in other Oaxacan cases temporal or permanent depopulation due to out-migration has offered an opportunity for a more sustainable and profitable resource management that involves ecotourism, payments for environmental services, and forestry (Robson et al., 2018; Robson & Klooster, 2019). As shown by Lorenzen et al (2021) in the Mixteca Alta, reduced communities have changed the governance of their lands “through the establishment of rules to limit grazing and logging, while also carrying out reforestations” (p. 1).

A Snapshot of the Poppy Boom and Bust in the State of Oaxaca with “Eradication” Data

Opium poppy has been cultivated in Oaxaca at least since the 1960s (Astorga, 2016; Tamariz, 2022). Recent reports of monitoring of poppy cultivation by the Mexican government and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime provide aggregated results at the state level using a sampling approach with high resolution aerial and satellite imagery, which is useful for overall assessments but provides limited local interpretation (UNODC, 2016, 2018, 2020b, 2021). Moreover, its imagery is not publicly available. Therefore, in this research we use a mixed-methods approach with structured/semi-structured interviews and open access satellite imagery (described in the “Methods” section) as well as multisource secondary data.

For a preliminary perspective and in order to give a snapshot of the poppy boom and bust in the whole state of Oaxaca, in this section we use annual data on the destruction of poppy (commonly known as “eradication” data) at the municipality level. In both scholarly and policy literature, “eradication” data has been used as a proxy of its cultivation (e.g., Toro, 1995; UNODC, 2010, 2020a; Medel & Lu, 2015; Dube et al., 2016; Resa, 2016; Frissard, 2021; Frissard et al., 2021). For reference, note that according to data from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency acquired and analyzed by Humphrey (2003; and personal communication, September 20–29, 2020), in the 1990s roughly 75% of illegal crops were destroyed in Mexico each year.

We requested and acquired data on the destruction of opium poppy in the period 1990-2020 from the Mexican Secretary of Defense (SEDENA) through the National Institute of Transparency, Information Access, and Protection of Personal Data (INAI) (requests #700085718, #700255721 and #700280721). This data includes the number of fields and the number of hectares destroyed by the Mexican army at the municipality level each year. Figure 1 shows that the destruction of poppy throughout these three decades reached its highest peak in 2017 (1,639 ha) and then its lowest number in 2020 (63 ha). We assume that this 98% decline in only four years is directly related to the poppy price collapse found in our fieldwork in Oaxaca. As mentioned above, the price collapse was also found by Le Cour Grandmaison et al. (2019) and Álvarez (2021, 2022) in their fieldwork in the Mexican states of Guerrero and Nayarit.

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

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Hectares of opium poppy destroyed by the Mexican army in the state of Oaxaca in 1990-2020. Data from SEDENA (2021)

Case Study: Three Neighboring Municipalities in the Southern Highlands

Based on our primary and secondary data (described in the “Methods” section), we selected three neighboring municipalities that belong to and are representative of the Southern Highlands region of Oaxaca (Sierra Sur). This region has historically concentrated most Oaxacan opium poppy production. Indeed, although it accounts for only 13% of the land area and 9% of the population in the state (INEGI, 2020), around 54% of poppy destruction by the army in Oaxaca was carried out in this region in 1990-2020 (SEDENA, 2021). The Southern Highlands is one out of eight regions in which the state of Oaxaca is divided. Its population is mostly indigenous and dedicated to the primary sector of the economy (INEGI, 2020). Most municipalities in the region are ruled by the Usos y Costumbres non-partisan regime (IEEPCO, 2018). Within the Southern Highlands, the three municipalities that we selected as a case study belong to the same district. As shown in Table 1, these neighboring municipalities share similar social and ecological conditions.

Table 1.

Spatial, environmental, and demographic characteristics of the three municipalities in the case study

Municipality A Municipality B Municipality C
Areaa (km2) 206.5 155.7 49.5
min (masl) 824 2114 1243
Altitudea max (masl) 2382 3382 2188
av (masl) 1754 2994 1817
Climateb (predominantly) temperate subhumid temperate subhumid temperate subhumid
Populationa 2010 (#) 3168 1099 1945
2020 (#) 3411 972 2182
Internal migrationc intensity (2005-2010) high high medium
intensity (2015-2020) high high high
U.S. migrationc intensity (2005-2010) low low very high
intensity (2015-2020) low very low very high
Indigenous speakinga 2010 (%) 69 96 89
2020 (%) 71 95 83
Indigenous languagea 2010 & 2020 Zapotec Zapotec Zapotec
Primary sectora 2010 (%) 92 71 91
2020 (%) 85 53 73
Maize yieldd (t/ha) 2010-2020 av 0.89 0.88 0.86
extreme (%) 2010 80 81 74
Povertye extreme (%) 2015 73 44 54
moderate (%) 2010 18 17 24
moderate (%) 2015 27 51 44
GINI indexe 2010 0.377 0.356 0.378
2015 0.436 0.324 0.358
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aData from INEGI (2010, 2020)

bData from CONABIO (1998)

cData from CONAPO (2010, 2020). By “internal migration” the Mexican National Council on Population (CONAPO, for its Spanish acronym) refers to migration within Mexico, as different to international migration (e.g., “U.S. migration”). CONAPO’s Migration Intensity Index is based on the percentage of households that receive remittances and have a current, circular, and/or recently-returned migrant (CONAPO, 2000, 2021)

dData from SIAP (2021)

eData from the Mexican National Council for Assessing Social Development Policies (CONEVAL, for its Spanish acronym) (2021). A person is considered by CONEVAL to be “extremely poor” when having three or more social scarcities (carencias sociales) within CONEVAL’s Social Scarcity Index, while at the same time being under the minimum well-being line. A person is considered by CONEVAL to be “moderately poor” when having two social scarcities and an insufficient income to cover food and non-food needs (CONEVAL, 2019)

We selected these three municipalities because of their proximity and their similar social and ecological conditions, which offer a benchmark for comparisons. They were selected also because we have primary information here on poppy production from our interviews, as well as cloudless satellite imagery in our period of study. Importantly, the three are among the top 15 (out of 570 municipalities) in the state of Oaxaca in terms of the number of hectares of poppy destroyed by the army in 2010-2020. Figure 2 shows a drastic decline in “eradication”–and therefore a presumed decline in poppy cultivation–in 2019 and 2020 in the three municipalities.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

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Hectares of opium poppy destroyed by the Mexican army in the three case study municipalities in the Southern Highlands of Oaxaca (2010-2020). Data from SEDENA (2021)

Methods

Using Sentinel 2 Satellite Imagery for Agricultural Monitoring

We use all bands with 10 and 20 m resolution from the Copernicus Sentinel 2 system for our first method of data generation.2 This represents a higher spatial resolution than other scientific studies that have analyzed land-system change related to illegal crop cultivation with open access imagery, which have mainly used Landsat at 30 m. Examples of these studies include coca in South America (Bradley & Millington, 2008a, b; Chadid et al., 2015; Dávalos et al., 2011; Rincón-Ruiz et al., 2016; Salisbury & Fagan, 2013) and poppy in Afghanistan (Ingalls & Mansfield, 2017; Mansfield, 2016, 2017).

In addition to its open access and medium resolution imagery, the Sentinel 2 system is useful for the purposes of this research given the type of electromagnetic bands that it images; namely, Blue, Green, Red, Red-Edge, and Near-Infrared (NIR). These bands are commonly used and have been determined methodologically accurate for agricultural monitoring (Clevers, 1999; Balaselvakumar & Saravanan, 2002; Nowatzki et al., 2004; Sabins & Ellis, 2020).

According to our fieldwork data, the fields in which illegal crops are grown in Oaxaca each cover an area of between 0.001 and 2.0 hectares (ha); 0.3 ha on average (Tamariz, 2022: p. 304). On the other hand, according to “eradication” data, poppy plots in the state of Oaxaca are 0.1 ha on average (SEDENA, 2021).3 Both averages (based on our fieldwork and on official data)4 are bigger than the 100 and 400 square meters resolution captured by the Sentinel 2 bands used in this study. This suggests that the spatial resolution of this satellite imagery is high enough to identify most illegal crop fields in the case study.

Initial Methodological Steps Using the Satellite Imagery

In order to select, download and pre-process the Sentinel 2 imagery, we used the QGIS Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin (SCP) (Congedo, 2021). With this plugin, we identified one single period with cloudless or almost cloudless images that cover the three case study municipalities over time; namely, a post-harvest period, from November 25 to December 10, in five consecutive years (2016-2020).5 We excluded the year 2015 because of a lack of cloudless images. For this two-week period, in total we downloaded and pre-processed 18 images, clipped them to the boundaries of the three municipalities, and merged them for each year. The years 2016, 2018, and 2019 have one to three small clouds each, which we masked and mosaicked with proximate-date images. The latter belong to the November 25 to December 10 period as well.6 In addition to being almost completely cloudless, the November 25 to December 10 period is useful for this study because it is a short period of only sixteen days, which allows valid comparisons among years (Fig. 3).7

Fig. 3.

Fig. 3

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Example of using band combinations to visually identify annual-crop fields

Visual Interpretation of Agricultural Polygons

We carried out a visual interpretation of all the agricultural fields that were interpretable with the remote sensing imagery in the three study areas. Visual interpretation techniques have been widely used with medium spatial resolution imagery, specifically for monitoring poppy (Demir & Basayigit, 2019; Simms et al., 2016; Taylor et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2014). With the SCP, we used two band combinations to create displays suitable for the visual identification of cultivated fields: a true color image of Red-Green-Blue and a false color image of NIR-Red-Green. The latter is particularly useful because it highlights high contents of chlorophyll associated with forest cover. We created a layer of post-harvest agricultural plots identified in each municipality for each year in our period of study (2016-2020). The purpose of this approach is to estimate the total annual-crop area (specifically, the number of pixels that correspond to this area) and its transformation over time and in relation to the poppy price collapse.8

It is important to note that, along with poppy, the main annual crop in the three municipalities is maize (Zea mays L.). In other words, the post-harvest area corresponds to a great extent to either poppy or maize, though other minor annual crops are also present, such as potato, oregano (Origanum vulgare), marjoram (Origanum majorana), and thyme (Thymus vulgaris) (SIAP, 2021).

We were not able to create the spectral signatures of maize and poppy to differentiate the transformation of each one of these crops over time because this can only be done during a pre-harvest period, when the plant is fully grown. As mentioned before, no useful pre-harvest period Sentinel 2 images are found that can be analyzed over time in these municipalities because of cloud limitations. The pre-harvest period is part of the rainy season in Mexico, which runs from June to September. In other countries like Afghanistan and Myanmar, poppy has been identified with high spatial resolution satellite imagery and its spectral signature created during the flowering season, which is brief and thus difficult to capture (Demir & Basayigit, 2019; Jia et al., 2011; Taylor et al., 2010).

Structured/Semi-structured Interviews with Poppy Growers and Other Key Informants

For our second main method of data generation, we carried out 68 structured/semi-structured interviews related to poppy cultivation with smallholder farmers in four state prisons of Oaxaca, Mexico. We accessed one female prison in the municipality of Tlacolula de Matamoros (the only female prison in the state) and three male prisons in the municipalities of Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, Villa de Etla, and Oaxaca de Juárez. The data were first generated from August 2018 to February 2019. Follow-up questions were later carried out to most interviewees, in July 2019. Ten of these imprisoned smallholders were originally from our three case study municipalities: five from ‘Municipality A’, one from ‘Municipality B’, and four from ‘Municipality C’; all of them produced opium poppy.9 The qualitative analysis in this paper is strictly based on these ten interviews. The names of interviewees are confidential and so pseudonyms are used.10

The interviews in prisons followed a structured format when collecting demographic and agrobiodiversity data and when comparing illegal crops and maize. The rest of the interview followed a semi-structured format to discuss livelihood and agrobiodiversity management and decision making related to poppy cultivation, before and after its price collapse.

In addition to the interviews in prisons, we carried out semi-structured interviews via phone call with two key informants in November and December 2021. They were interviewed twice each. Both informants have led projects on territorial management, sustainable forestry, and specialized-market coffee production and trade for over two decades in two of the municipalities in this case study (‘Municipality A’ and ‘Municipality C’). Their names remain confidential in this study as well.

While the spatial scale in the satellite imagery analysis is at the municipality level, the interviews offer key information at the village level, which is a finer scale. Municipalities in Mexico are formed by one or more villages.

Results

Decline and Differential Degree of Rebound in Annual Cropland

The visual interpretation of agricultural polygons with satellite imagery suggests a decline and then a differential degree of rebound in cropland. This is summarized in Table 2, which shows the number of agricultural polygons that we identified and created manually. It is also summarized in Table 3, which shows the number of pixels that constitute such polygons, and in Fig. 4, which illustrates the transformation of agricultural pixels over time.

Table 2.

Number of annual cropland polygons identified through a visual interpretation of Sentinel 2 images

Annual cropland polygons (#)
year Mun A Mun B Mun C
2016 346 342 137
2017 325 380 152
2018 128 213 100
2019 201 108 130
2020 233 191 118
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Table 3.

Number of annual cropland pixels identified through a visual interpretation of Sentinel 2 images

Annual cropland pixels (#)
year Mun A Mun B Mun C
2016 21394 25674 8608
2017 20493 19525 6674
2018 9533 9256 3226
2019 18972 5070 4884
2020 18636 7951 1908
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Fig. 4.

Fig. 4

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Visual interpretation of Sentinel 2 images: annual cropland pixels over time (see Table 3)

Near-complete Agricultural Rebound with Low-level Migration

The visual interpretation of satellite imagery shows a drastic decrease in the agricultural area within ‘Municipality A’ in 2018. The following year (2019), an almost total rebound took place. Considering the whole period of study, the agricultural area in 2020 had a decrease of only 13% with respect to 2016.

The analysis of interviews suggests that no considerable out-migration took place in this municipality as a consequence of the poppy collapse. Interviewees were not aware of relatives or neighbors who had left the municipality after the price of opium gum decreased from around 20,000 Mexican pesos per kilo in 2016 (some 1,050 U.S. dollars at the moment) to 3,000 pesos in 2018 (157 dollars).11 Poppy was almost completely abandoned and maize took over, along with other subsistence (i.e., self-consumption) food crops grown with maize as part of the traditional milpa polyculture; namely, beans, squash (chilacayote), and chili (tusta). The five imprisoned farmers we interviewed from ‘Municipality A’ mentioned and described three native varieties of maize that were cultivated before the poppy price collapse and increasingly so in terms of cultivation area after the collapse took place. The three maize varieties differed in color (black/purple, white, and white/pink), height of the plant when reaching maturity (from 1.5 to 2.5 m), and length of the growing period (three, six, and nine months). The latter is directly related to the altitudinal location and temperature within the municipality, whereby higher elevations, with thus lower temperatures, are related to longer growing periods.

Primary data (including interviews with imprisoned farmers and key informants) and secondary socio-economic data (summarized in Table 1) help explain some of the reasons for poppy growers to return to a subsistence-based agriculture in the face of this commercial shock instead of leaving their hometown in search of a source of monetary income elsewhere that could substitute poppy. One of these reasons is the high levels of extreme poverty that persist in the poppy village in ‘Municipality A’.12 Most of its population is still officially classified as enduring extreme poverty (73–80%; see Table 1). The poppy boom did not considerably increase farmers’ financial assets. According to farmer interviewees from this municipality, poppy profits were used mainly for household consumption needs, construction expenses to improve their dwellings, the acquisition of firearms to dissuade harvest theft, and to buy alcohol. Poppy profits were not used for production investments that could increase farmers’ monetary income in the future, which restricted their ability to pay for migration expenses.

A second factor that constrained out-migration in ‘Municipality A’, which is closely related to the first factor described in the previous paragraph, is a lack of livelihood diversification, specifically in the poppy village. Unlike the municipality-capital village (or cabecera municipal), where farmers have not been involved in poppy cultivation and instead have successfully invested in the production and trade of coffee for specialized markets, as well as in “sustainably managed” timber,13 the poppy village was almost fully focused on this illegal crop and on self-consumption food crops and small livestock before the poppy collapse took place.14 Evaristo, a former poppy grower imprisoned in Miahuatlán, noted that poppy had previously displaced other cash crops such as sugar cane and coffee.15 The undiversified portfolio rendered poppy growers highly vulnerable and deprived of alternative local monetary resources that could finance labor migration expenses. The 2015 GINI index in ‘Municipality A’ (0.44) reflects this inter-village inequality, being the highest among the three municipalities of study (see Table 1) and above the Southern Highlands average (0.37) as well.

Finally, the geographic and political isolation of the poppy village has historically limited the ability of its members to invest and take the risk of migration and thus their means to create trans-local and trans-national migration networks. This village is difficult to access, politically marginalized, and has experienced high levels of physical violence including homicides and criminal impunity (Tamariz et al., in press). Only recently, in 2017, a road was constructed connecting the poppy village directly to the highway.16 However, the village remains inaccessible by car from the cabecera (the municipality capital) and so people need to walk there, which is considered dangerous for anyone who is not originally from the village.17

Partial Agricultural Decline, Mezcal Boom, and Delayed Migration

According to the visual interpretation of satellite imagery, the agricultural area in ‘Municipality B’ decreased 69% from 2016 to 2020. Compared to ‘Municipality A’, clearly contrasting processes took place in ‘Municipality B’ in terms of the impact that the poppy collapse caused on migration and land-system change. In ‘Municipality B’ the specialization of smallholder farmers in poppy displaced the milpa polyculture system18; native landraces of maize were no longer found in 2018; only scientifically bred (also known as hybrid) varieties were grown (Tamariz, 2022). Although high-yielding, these non-native varieties did not provide for the entire maize consumption demand in the municipality. The production deficit was covered through household purchase of maize grain in local markets, as well as in state-managed stores selling cheap, subsidized staples (i.e., Diconsa stores). The abandonment of native landraces of maize and of the milpa system more generally helps explain why poppy growers did not turn back to subsistence agriculture immediately after the poppy collapsed.

Although poppy growers abandoned milpa, livelihoods in ‘Municipality B’ were diverse. In addition to poppy and hybrid maize, commercial agriculture involved potato, peaches, and oregano (SIAP, 2021). Only 71% of the population in 2010 and 53% in 2020 were involved in the primary sector, which are low numbers for rural communities in the Southern Highlands of Oaxaca (INEGI, 2010, 2020), and specifically compared to the other two municipalities in this study (see Table 1). Non-farm activities included transportation services (16%), small-scale manufacturing (13%), construction (11%), and trade (7%) (INEGI, 2020).

Livelihood diversity in ‘Municipality B’ involved commercial activities (on-farm and non-farm) that buffered the monetary impact of the poppy collapse. The immediate reaction to this collapse was a shift from poppy to the production and selling of mezcal, which is an ancient distilled alcoholic beverage made from the agave (also known as maguey) plant (Agave Agavoideae) (Eguiarte et al., 2000; García-Mendoza, 2002; CONABIO, 2021). The increasing popularity of mezcal since the early 2000s has led to a production boom in Oaxaca for national and international markets and a related increase of its commercial value (Bowen, 2015). According to Celestino, an interviewee, in ‘Municipality B’, after the poppy price collapsed, instead of growing agaves, which takes five to thirty years depending on the agave variety (Colunga-García et al., 2007), farmers used wild agave plants found within the municipality, which were ready for harvesting. But by 2019, after a single year of harvest, all wild agaves were depleted. Consequently, farmers left the municipality in search for a job, mainly in the city of Oaxaca. Celestino recalled how this was not the first time there was massive out-migration related to a poppy collapse in his municipality. In 2003–2004, most poppy farmers, including himself, out-migrated (also to Oaxaca City) due to an intense frost that was followed the next year by unusually intense “eradication”, which destroyed virtually all poppy production. This was a short-term and local (intra-state) migration. A few years later the affected farmers returned to their home-towns.

In sum, the 69% decline of the agricultural area in ‘Municipality B’ was likely related to the shift from poppy to wild agave harvesting for mezcal production and trade in a first stage (2018), closely followed by out-migration within Oaxaca in a second stage (2019). While livelihood diversification allowed an immediate shift to an alternative local source of monetary income, subsequent migration was facilitated by a recent experience of temporal intra-state migration. Both processes contrast with the extreme poverty, the lack of livelihood diversification, and the geographic isolation of the poppy village in ‘Municipality A’.

Lack of Agricultural Rebound amid Extensive Migration

Although ‘Municipality C’ is a middle ground between the other two municipalities in terms of extreme poverty and livelihood diversification, it experienced the highest change in the area of agricultural land with a 78% decline from 2016 to 2020 according to our satellite imagery analysis. As we will argue here, this extreme decline with no rebound is mainly related to the existence of transnational migration networks that have historically facilitated out-migration from ‘Municipality C’ to the United States. Land-system change in this case was directly related to out-migration.

In parallel with milpa production,19 farmers in ‘Municipality C’ have produced coffee for decades, but only recently did this perennial crop become profitable as the result of a management shift to specialized markets, also present in the capital village in ‘Municipality A’ (see the “Near-complete Agricultural Rebound with Low-level Migration” section).20 Going through a process of coffee tasting, as well as a recognition by the Mexican state for having a “biodiversity friendly” management,21 most coffee from ‘Municipality C’ is produced by a regional cooperative (Sistema Comunitario para la Biodiversidad, SICOBI) and exported to international markets by a non-profit environmental and development organization (Sustainable Harvest International).22 Other cash crops produced by smallholders in ‘Municipality C’ include oregano, marjoram, and thyme, which were sold in the coast of Oaxaca.23 Notably, on the other hand, unlike the cabecera village in ‘Municipality A’, timber production has been non-existent given the limited forest area in the municipality.24 Local economic activities were thus mainly focused on cash crops and subsistence agriculture.

Concurrently and most importantly, out-migration to the United States has been a key livelihood diversification strategy and a main source of monetary income for most households. According to the “U.S. migration intensity index” by the Mexican National Population Council (CONAPO, 2020), out-migration to the U.S. in ‘Municipality C’ during the 2015-2020 quinquennium ranked #1 in the Southern Highlands region and was among the highest in the whole state of Oaxaca (#5) and in all of Mexico (#10). See Table 4 for a comparison with the other two municipalities for the periods 2005-2010 and 2015-2020. In both periods, ‘Municipality C’ is classified as “very high” by this transnational-migration index, which is based on the percentage of households that receive remittances and have a current, circular, and/or recently-returned migrant member (CONAPO, 2000, 2021).25

Table 4.

U.S. migration intensity index in the periods 2005-2010 and 2015-2020

Municipality Households receiving U.S. remittances (%) Households with U.S. migrants (%) Households with circular migrants (%) Households with returned migrants (%) Migration Intensity Index Southern Highlands ranking Oaxaca ranking
2005 – 2010
  Mun A 0.7 2.2 0.6 0.5 Low 28 443
  Mun B 1.1 3.0 0.7 2.9 Low 40 370
  Mun C 15.9 27.4 1.0 5.5 Very high 17 27
2015 – 2020
  Mun A 5.1 5.2 0.1 0.7 Low 40 276
  Mun B 0.9 0.9 0.0 0.0 Very low 68 535
  Mun C 28.3 26.5 1.4 3.8 Very high 1 5
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The last two columns show how each municipality is ranked in terms of this index within the Southern Highlands and in the state of Oaxaca, respectively. Data from CONAPO (2010, 2020)

According to a 2008 survey by the Autonomous Group for Environmental Research and the Ford Foundation (GAIA-Ford, 2008), in ‘Municipality C’ the main “source of help” for labor migration was “having a contact with a relative or a friend in the U.S.” This factor was key for 47% of surveyed households. Other factors included “travelling with a relative or friend” (32%), “having contacted a smuggler [pollero] locally” (16%), and “travelling alone with no help” (5%). Except for two surveyed migrant households, all had relatives in the U.S., mainly in the city of New York and in the state of California (GAIA-Ford, 2008).

Transnational migration networks help explain the extreme decline in the area of agricultural land with no rebound in ‘Municipality C’ during the period of study, as found by the visual interpretation of satellite imagery. Poppy farmers were able to leave their town right after the poppy price collapsed.

Discussion and Conclusions

The price collapse of the opium-poppy gum that took place in Mexico in 2017-2018 had contrasting effects among the three case studies. In terms of land-system change, as measured and analyzed in this research with satellite imagery (2016-2020), the different pathways show a decline of the area of agricultural land followed by an almost total rebound (‘Municipality A’); a drastic drop that rebounded partially at the end (‘Municipality B’); and a constant reduction of agriculture throughout the whole period that in 2020 reached its lowest levels (‘Municipality C’). According to the triangulation of satellite imagery, interviews, and secondary data applied to the study areas, there are three main factors that drove these neighboring poppy-production municipalities towards different pathways: extreme poverty, livelihood diversification, and geographic isolation including the pre-existence of migration networks.

In ‘Municipality A’, out-migration was indeed constrained by a combination of high levels of extreme poverty, an undiversified economy dependent on agriculture, and the isolation of the poppy village even within its own municipality, all of which prevented out-migration and resulted in a folding back to milpa based self-consumption agriculture. As out-migration is costly, the poorest usually do not leave. Migrants must pay transportation and subsistence costs, as well as smugglers if migration is illegal (Kay, 2008). In Mexico and other countries in Latin America, most migrants belong to the economically better-off households, as they have enough resources to pay for migration expenses (Cohen & Rodriguez, 2005; Zimmerer et al., 2021). Remittances are often used to pay for these expenses or to pay the debt incurred for migrating (Jokisch, 2002). Furthermore, in the last two decades it has become more difficult and thus more costly to cross the Mexico-U.S. border (Cohen & Rodriguez, 2005; Robson & Klooster, 2019). Some farmers sell their land or use the profits from cash crops to pay for the trip (Moran-Taylor & Taylor, 2010; Zimmerer et al., 2021). But as described above, in ‘Municipality A’ poppy profits were not used directly nor indirectly for out-migration expenses.

Meanwhile, in ‘Municipality B’, where farmers were diversified and better-off economically, a brief shift to mezcal production delayed the out-migration of poppy producers to the capital city of Oaxaca, which had already been a temporal labor migration destiny for them in the past. By contrast, in ‘Municipality C’ massive out-migration happened almost immediately after poppy stopped being profitable, as it was facilitated by well-established transnational migration networks in the United States. Oaxaca-U.S. migration networks have been built for decades (Massey & Espinosa, 1997; Mutersbaugh, 2002; Cohen & Rodriguez, 2005; Klooster, 2013). They make out-migration less costly and less risky. As noted by Cohen and Rodriguez (2005), these networks are “defined through kinship and friendship, to negotiate successfully their border crossings [… and] link potential migrants to other migrants living in a destination community” (pp. 52 and 54).

Based on these findings, differing land-system trajectories of rural land use can be generalized in relation to the key human-environment dimension of milpa agrobiodiversity. In the first of these trajectories, the fullest re-expansion of agriculture (‘Municipality A’) is likely to have covered the largest area if milpa cultivation and the most diverse types of maize (in comparison to the other two municipalities in this study). However, other transition scenarios are possible, where a diminished agricultural landscape has a greater diversity of maize varieties and related crops. In fact, peasant agrobiodiversity conservation is compatible with agricultural intensification, as found by Zimmerer (2014) regarding maize diversity in Bolivia. Future research could further assess the relationship between the poppy price collapse, land-system change, and milpa agrobiodiversity in the three study sites analyzed in this paper (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5.

Fig. 5

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Key links between the poppy price collapse, land-system change, and peasant agrobiodiversity

The clear contrasts among these sites in the Southern Highlands of Oaxaca offer detailed examples of the complexity of the land system-migration nexus (Radel et al., 2019). Even between neighboring communities that belong to the same sub-region and have multiple social and ecological similarities, clear differences emerged in the evident stewardship of their land and other resources amidst the poppy collapse; namely, the management of their forests (for timber), cash crops (e.g., certified coffee), subsistence crops and agrobiodiversity (milpa), wild plants (agaves), and social (migration) networks. These findings confirm how dynamic these processes are and thus the need for the analysis of different temporal stages (Mutersbaugh, 2002; Radel & Schmook, 2008), even within a brief period of five years. Findings also confirm the need for different spatial scale analyses within the same community (Rudel et al., 2002, 2005), as shown particularly by the intra-municipality diversity (i.e., the inter-village differences) within ‘Municipality A’ (also see Tamariz et al., in press).

The five-year period in this study is a short segment of the longer impact of global market shocks on rural land systems in Oaxaca that continue to change amid de-agrarianization processes. Future research with a more extensive temporal perspective, quantitative surveys and modelling approaches, and in situ ethnographic approaches could potentially help further assess whether the impact of the poppy collapse represents a temporary change or rather a long-term structural land system transition,26 as well as its implications on local resource governance and agrobiodiversity management.

This research could also contribute to future studies on how (if) the social programs by the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) administration have influenced outmigration trends, land-system changes and de-agrarianization processes amidst the poppy collapse. Since 2019, AMLO´s social programs have channeled money directly to multiple vulnerable sectors of the population to reduce extreme poverty and reactivate local economies and production systems, particularly in Oaxaca. To-date, the analysis of their influence on local and global processes of change is still pending.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (DOCX 444 KB) (444.7KB, docx)

Acknowledgements

We are greatly thankful to Ramzi Tubbeh, Megan Baumann, Irene Álvarez, Salvador Anta, Marco Antonio González, colleagues from the GeoSyntheSES Lab, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous comments to earlier versions of the paper.

Authors’ Contributions

Gabriel Tamariz carried out the fieldwork and the data curation and wrote the main manuscript. Karl S. Zimmerer worked on the conceptualization, supervision, review and editing of the manuscript. Carolynne Hultquist analyzed and validated the methodology, software, and results, and reviewed and edited the manuscript.

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF, award #1932004) and the Pennsylvania State University Department of Geography and GeoSyntheSES Lab.

Availability of Data and Materials

All secondary data and satellite imagery are publicly available online.

Declarations

Ethical Approval

The research interviews conducted in prisons were approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Pennsylvania State University on August 6, 2018 (STUDY00009347).

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Footnotes

1

Land system science has evolved in the last decades from assessing land use and land cover change (LULCC; mainly forest/non-forest distinctions) and understanding the drivers of said change, to “a focus on using this understanding to design sustainable transformations through stakeholder engagement and through the concept of land governance” (Verburg et al., 2015, p. 29; Turner et al., 2021).

2

The Sentinel 2 system consists of two identical satellites in the same orbit and offers publicly available imagery since November 2015. The revisit frequency of the combined satellites is 5 days. Sentinel 2 has thirteen bands with spatial resolutions of 10, 20 and 60 m, depending on the wavelength. We excluded the latter (60 m) for this research given their low resolution for land classifications.

3

In order to estimate the average area of poppy plots with “eradication” data, we divided the total number of hectares by the total number of plots destroyed by the army in all the municipalities of Oaxaca in the period of study (i.e., years 2016-2020).

4

We assume that the difference between our fieldwork data average (0.3 ha) and the “eradication” data average (0.1 ha) is the result of a considerably different sample size. While our fieldwork involved 68 interviewees, official data involved 192 municipalities where “eradication” took place in this five-year period (i.e., n = 960).

5

The exact dates are: November 25, 2016; November 30, 2017; November 25, 2018; December 10, 2019; and December 9, 2020.

6

Mosaics correspond to the following dates: December 6, 2016; December 10, 2018; and November 30, 2019.

7

All the images that we downloaded are Level-1C and are thus not atmospherically corrected (ESA, 2021). Pre-processing involved a conversion from digital numbers to decimal value of reflectance, as well as the atmospheric correction of the images, which we carried out with the SCP (Congedo, 2021).

8

See the Supplementary file for a description and the results of two alternative satellite imagery analyses that we carried out of our case study, which are complementary to our main approach (i.e., the visual interpretation of agricultural polygons): (a) Supervised classification and (b) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index.

9

We interviewed five imprisoned farmers who were originally from ‘Municipality A’, twice each, in November 2018, January 2019, and July 2019, in the prisons of Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz and Oaxaca de Juárez. The imprisoned farmer from ‘Municipality B’ was interviewed three times, in October 2018, February 2019, and July 2019, in the prison of Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz. We interviewed four farmers from ‘Municipality C’, twice each, in November and December 2018, January 2019, and July 2019, in the prisons of Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, Oaxaca de Juárez, and Villa de Etla.

10

The research interviews conducted in prisons were approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Pennsylvania State University on August 6, 2018 (STUDY00009347).

11

According to interviewee #11 (prison of Miahuatlán; November 26, 2018), poppy gum reached its highest price in ‘Municipality A’ in “2008 or 2009”, sold for up to 30,000 Mexican pesos per kilo (i.e., around 1,570 U.S. dollars at the moment). He claimed that soldiers destroyed an unusually high number of poppy plots that year. As a consequence, the few remaining poppy gum that was harvested increased its price to unprecedented levels.

12

As described in Tamariz et al. (in press), ‘Municipality A’ is formed by four main villages. Only one of them produced poppy. We refer to the latter as the poppy village.

13

Interview with key informant #1.

14

Small livestock for self-consumption included chicken, turkey, goats, and pigs.

15

Interview #11, November 26, 2018.

16

Interviews #54 and #55, prison of Oaxaca de Juárez; January 2019 and July 2019.

17

Interview with key informant #2.

18

Specialization takes place when the agricultural system focuses in one or a limited number of species–compared to the diversity it previously produced and gathered–for reasons of efficiency, marketability, and profitability (Bellon et al., 2016, 2020; Di Falco, 2012; Kontoleon et al., 2009).

19

Interviewed farmers mentioned and described three varieties of maize being grown in ‘Municipality C’, the three for self-consumption. Two varieties were grown in the upper areas (a white and a dappled [pinto] one) and the third variety in the lowest and thus warmest areas of the municipality (a hybrid or non-native and high-yielding white maize).

20

Interview with key informant #1.

21

Key informant #2 explained that official recognition was given by the Mexican National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO, its Spanish acronym) and the Mexican Certification of Ecological Products and Processes (CERTIMEX, its Spanish acronym).

22

Interview with key informant #2.

23

Interviews #23, #47, and #57, prisons of Miahuatlán and Oaxaca de Juárez; November and December 2018; January, February, and July 2019.

24

Interview with key informant #1.

25

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a phenomenon of returned migrants in some municipalities in Oaxaca, mainly in rural areas (e.g., Barabas, 2020; Vásquez, 2021; Sánchez García, 2021), where the countryside became a refuge for the pandemic and this return likely involved increased labor for agricultural activities. However, such phenomenon was not relevant in neither of our three case study municipalities in 2020, as shown by the percentage of “households with returned migrants” in 2015-2020 (See Table 4, fifth column).

26

Radel et al. (2019) define land system transitions as “changes in which the structural character of the land system transforms socially and/or ecologically”.

The original online version of this article was revised to correct the following: (1) third author's family name, (2) table citation found in Fig. 4 caption, and (3) phrasing in Results section.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Change history

3/11/2023

A Correction to this paper has been published: 10.1007/s10745-023-00397-x

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