William I. Jones, “Mexico’s Puebla Project: Is there Hope for the Minifundias?,” Ekistics 36, no. 217 (Dec. 1973), 395-397.

Notes

• 395 – “The area was picked because it seemed fairly representative of Mexico’s (and Central America’s) highlands, because it was close to CIMMYT, and because the Puebla State government seemed sold on the idea. Moreover, care was taken to select an area where maize yields could be doubled — where risks of failure from hail, drought, frost or soil deficiencies would not be too high.”
• “Maize yields were a modest 1.3 tons per hectare when the project started, and all the field crops together provided only about 40% of the farmers’ total income and only about ¼ of their cash income.”
• “From the media and their own practice farmers knew quite a bit about modern farming practices. Virtually all knew about fertilizer and 70% were using it. Over half knew about the maize hybrids developed by the Rockefeller program, but only 15% had tried them, and virtually all of these had found them wanting and abandoned them.”
• 396 – “Yet not one of the hybrids developed and released there was sufficiently superior to the project area’s traditional varieties to warrant recommendation. An improvement formula had to be worked out.// The formula evolved includes higher seeding densities and application of more, and a different mix of, fertilizers at different times than before. It requires more weeding and also more work in planting, applying the fertilizer, and harvesting and handling the bigger crop. New varieties are not a part of the formula.”
• “In 1968, 103 demonstration were run on farmers’ plots covering 76 hectares.”
• “1968 was a great maize year; the regional average yield was 2.1 tons per hectare. The yield on cooperators’ demonstration plots, however, was 3.6 tons per hectare. Leaders realized that their formula was not perfected, but they decided to aim for general acceptance on the basis of the 1968 results, improving the formula as they went along.”
• “Based on 1969’s experience and additional experimentation, fertilizer recommendations were changed in 1970. New counsels are more specific by location within the zone.”
• “So far, only 18% of farms and maize acreage are part of the project. The recommended formula is a big improvement over traditional practices, but not as dramatic as had been hoped — or as it was on experimental plots, of course. Not only were most farmers not joining, but some cooperators were dropping out.”
  • Notice: “of course” and the use of “cooperators” to describe participants
• “Detractors add that the project should not have started with such a short research base or that it was wrong to focus exclusively on maize.”
• “First, the farmers may be minimizing risk by not using borrowed capital on fertilizer for a strategy they still feel to be uncertain. Crop insurance guarantees the banks’ risks but not the farmer against famine and difficulty in getting future loans.// Interviews suggest that risk avoidance may be the predominant factor, although farmers could be using it as a pretext when another factor is more important. Work by Carlos Flor indicates that the farmers’ risk of actually losing by adopting the project strategy — principally in a very dry year — is only 2%. However, his work was based partly on experimental results; the figure may be considerably higher in the real world, as field workers suggest.”
• “Second, the estimates of profitability to the farmer may be wrong, understating his cost. There are, for instance, different figures on the amount of labor needed to implement the Puebla strategy on one hectare. Or perhaps, in the relatively industrialized Puebla zone, off-farm employment opportunities are higher than generally realized, thus raising the opportunity cost of farm labor even about the minimum farm wage.”
• “Third, participation or non-participation in Puebla Project may be simply a matter of individual variance. Everywhere, different people respond to the same economic circumstances differently.”