Billie R. DeWalt, “Inequalities in Wealth, Adoption of Technology, and Production in a Mexican Ejido,” American Ethnologist 2, no. 1 (Feb. 1975), 149-168.

“In general, though, among the ejidatarios themselves, corn is not seen as a viable cash crop. Repeatedly I was told by informants that ‘maiz no es negocio’ (‘corn is not business’).”

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Notes

• 149 – “Many studies in the past have emphasized the relative lack of wealth differences in peasant communities. Homogeneity is also stressed with regard to peasant conservatism — their clinging to traditional culture patterns and unwillingness to adopt new forms of behavior. The purpose of this paper will be to take issue with these studies and to show how a focus on intra-cultural diversity can be of great utility in accounting for the sociocultural changes which are taking place in many peasant communities.”
  • Challenges the idea that all peasants, or even all peasants in the same community, can be described as having homogenous mindsets, attitudes to change, values, or principles.
• 150 – “from Cancian 1972:15) ‘a common view seizes on the label ‘peasant’ as a full description of the people who bear it. My impression is that researchers (and many others) presently give too much weight to ‘peasantness’ as an explanation of human behavior, both in the sense that they treat peasant societies as relatively homogeneous and in the sense that they see peasants as substantially different from other people.’”
• “Stereotyped descriptions of peasants have created expectations among change agents about what these people are ‘really like,’ which have usually been very poorly relatable to the realities of individual communities. On the one hand this has led to a feeling that the most important changes which need to be made are in the values, attitudes, and motivations of the peasant.”
  • How does this relate to Green Revolution programs in mexico?

 

• “[These stories] conveniently shift the burden for the failure to modernize to the peasants, thus leaving the larger societal structure relatively free of criticism. A second unfortunate consequence of these stereotypes is that they provide a built-in excuse for economic development agents when their programs fail. Thus, reasons cited for the failures of development schemes are not the inability of . . . a new type of wheat seed to grow . . . but rather, the supposed conservatism of the peasants who refused to cooperate with the benevolent agents of socioeconomic modernization.”

• Find examples of MAP, or CIMMYT using these excuses, ideally with reference to one of my economists, sociologists, or anthropologists

 

• 150-51 – “These statements about the expectations of change agents are not merely conjectural. Instead, they are based upon empirical evidence gathered in interview with a number of development personnel in the region of Mexico in which my fieldwork was done. The assertion was commonly made that the people in the area are very resistant to change and that the peasants do not understand the goals of the development agents. The ‘scientific validation’ provided in the literature for the impressions and/or prejudices of the layman are unfortunate.”
• “Although thirty years ago [in Temascalcingo municipio] the communities still retained the language and other features of Mazahua Indian culture, today everyone speaks Spanish wears clothing indistinguishable from the mestizos in the region, and Mazahua is spoken only by older informants.”
• “Another ‘ecological disadvantage’ of this community derives, paradoxically, from its favored geographic location. Agricultural agents and other developers frequently choose the ejido for experimental programs. Some of these have been notably unsuccessful, in some cases because of fradulent [sic] practices of bank and eijdal officials.”
• 152 – “On the other hand, the mono-cultivation of corn is rapidly depleting the soils. Although the valley had once been a major wheat producing area, declines in prices and recurrent plant diseases have discouraged the planting of this crop. Wheat has not been widely cultivated since around 1963, and there is no longer any rotation of wheat and corn as had been the practice in earlier years.”
• 153 – “The key informants were given cards, each containing the name of one person, and were asked to sorth these into groups on the basis of socioeconomic position. Instructions were purposely vague so as to allow the men to develop their own criteria for rating. They were also free to use as many categories as they wished. One of the men easily sorted people into five categories while the other used only four.”
  • What does this say about this as a research methodology — letting those queried create their own categories of themselves? Make their own determinations of class
• “Four quartiles of econoimc [sic] position, each of which contained approximately one quarter of the ejidatarios, were then formed by combining some of the ranks. While this procedure obscures some of the variation present, it is a common procedure in such analyses and greatly facilitates presentation and comparison.
  • So the results are a hybrid of indigenous evaluation and social scientific programming
• Describes a low, middle, and high income+asset family to personalize
• 154 – “Chemical fertilizers had not been used widely in the ejido nor in the general region until the past five years. This was due, in part, to a negative experience which people had with a program about twenty years ago which provided credit for fertilizer and a new type of wheat seed. The yield was worse than in most normal years because the seed was not well-adapted to the area, and, as a result, the ejidatarios concluded (quite logically) that fertilizer was not worth the investment.”

 

• “The first wide-scale use of chemical fertilizers came in 1970 when an agronomist came to the region to supply credit for fertilizers along with technical assistance for the improvement of the corn crop. About three-fourths of the farmers participated in this program to some degree. For reasons which are somewhat unclear, a dispute arose between the ejidatarios and the agronomist, and the farmers were prevented from doing any work on their own fields. Field hands from other communities were brought in to perform the necessary agricultural chores. Because of this, the eventual costs to the ejidatarios were very high. Despite increased yields of corn, many of the farmers had difficulty paying their debts. In spite of the overall negative result of this experience, the people felt that the merits of fertilizer had been demonstrated, and many of them have continued to use it.”

 

• 155 – “Data concerning use of fertilizers were obtained by means of structured interviews with a sample of eighty-seven household heads.”
• “Although the individuals of this ejido are considered ot be very conservative by development agents in the valley, only three of the total number of eighty-seven respondents have never used chemical fertilizers. Over 66 percent of the farmers have used fertilizer on at least parts of their fields in two or more of the years studied. This indicates very rapid and widespread adoption of fertilizer use. Contrary to some common sense expectations, we see that it is the poorest economic group which has the highest percentage of fertilizer adopters. The wealthiest people in our sample also show a high percentage of fertilizer users while the two middle economic groups have the lowest percentage of adopters. Although we would expect the highest economic group to have a high percentage of adopters of fertilizer, the finding that those in the lowest quartile are the most consistent adopters was unexpected.”
• “These findings raise some extremely important theoretical problems. The two most obvious ones, of course, are: (1) to reconcile these data with previous anthropological studies which have claimed that peasants are extremely conservative, and (2) to reconcile these data with other studies of adoption of new cultural items in which the poorest individuals are consistently found to be the last to take advantage of new opportunities.”
  • Are these anthropologists studying agriculture in mexico?
• 156 – “Some ejidatarios solicited technical assistance from engineers of Recursos Hidraulicos to establish their own fields of pradera. Others learned the technical details through the demonstration effects provided by their neighbors.”
• “We should now ask what implications these data have in relation to the several theoretical models scholars have proposed concerning the relationship between economic position and adoption of new cultural items.”
• 159 – “Another view of the process of the adoption of new technology has been advanced by Cancian (1967). The Cancian model is very similar to the linear model discussed above, but with the addition of some of Homan’s ideas about middle-class conservatism.”
• “It appears that the previously posited theoretical models cannot encompass both of the instances of technological adoption found in our study. The very large range of variation which was found in wealth and in differential adoption of the two new agricultural items made the ‘homogeneity’ model completely unacceptable.”
• 160 – “Most studies of the adoption of new agricultural techniques assume that the use of the new technology will result in significant economic benefits for the population. That is, there is usually no attempt to systematically assess future effects of the pattern of adoption of new techniques. Most important, however, is the fact that the net economic gain of the population adopting the new techniques is rarely considered. In the present case it is imperative to consider these economic costs and profits if we are to make some sense of the patterns of adoption which were found.”
• “The credit in 1970 covered not only the cost of the fertilizer but also included credit for hybrid seeds, the use of tractors, and for pesticides and herbicides.”
• 161 – “Although, as a group, the ejidatarios who use fertilizer are obtaining higher average productions, there is a great deal of variation, and some of those not using fertilizer actually obtained higher yields than some of those using fertilizer.”
• “Those in the top economic group who use fertilizer have an average total production almost 100 percent higher than those in the other economic groups who also use fertilizer. This emphasizes the importance of other agricultural techniques.”
• 162 – “Thus, on the basis of the average increases in corn yield per hectare, it seems clear that no one is significantly improving their economic position from use of fertilizer in the production of corn. Only those who have more than one allotment of ejidal land or who are obtaining considerably higher than average yields would be able to earn enough money from corn production to result in any measurable increase in their economic well-being.”

 

• “In general, though, among the ejidatarios themselves, corn is not seen as a viable cash crop. Repeatedly I was told by informants that ‘maiz no es negocio’ (‘corn is not business’).”

• This means everything up against econometrics

 

• “As a subsistence crop, however, corn is extremely important. It is the staple of the peasant diet. In this fact, we can see what may be the reason for the high rate of adoption of fertilizers by those in the lowest economic group. . . . [T]he production by people in the lowest economic group who do not use fertilizer is extremely low (42.6 costales [bags]). This is probably very near or under the minimal level which a family needs to last for the entire year. The incentive for those in the lowest economic group to use fertilizer may be to raise their corn production to the point where they are self-sufficient. Buying corn is, of course, expensive, espcially in the months just before the harvest. While they would not be averse to producing a surplus, the primary motivation is to eliminate the need to buy corn at high prices from the merchants in the town center. Having to buy corn is especially difficult for the poorest individuals, most of whom have no other steady occupation in which they can earn large sums of cash.”
• “This view is supported by other observations in the ejido. Many of those in the middle groups have other occupational pursuits besides agriculture. Many work at cutting stone in a quarry located in the community. Some work with their animals performing agricultural operations in the lands of a nearby community which is primarily devoted to producing pottery. Still others work for agriculturalists or merchants from Temascalcingo. Thus, many of those in the middle groups have other economic interests which are their main sources of cash. Having attained their subsistence goal. They are probably not very interested in increasing their corn production.”
  • To what extent does this indicate that subsistence is a value unto itself, over and above its economic underpinning of the household?
• 165 – “In looking at the pattern of adoption of these two new agricultural items, we discovered that the relationship between economic position and adoption of new technology is more complex than has usually been supposed. None of the earlier theoretical models was sufficient to satisfactorily explain both patterns of adoption found among these Mexican peasants.”

 

• “The data summarized by this model indicate that, given adequate evidence of new technology and the resources necessary to adopt its use, not even the poorest peasants will hold fast to traditional techniques.”