Food security and knowledge politics in rural Oaxaca

Abstract

This study uses an embodied political ecology framework to evaluate the structural, discursive, and visceral effects of government food assistance policy in an agrarian community in southern Mexico. During the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the government’s efforts to resolve the growing double-burden of under- and over-nutrition included the expansion of food assistance programs alongside cash transfers conditioned on health and nutritional education. A parastatal company sourced and distributed foodstuffs to community and school kitchens, where mothers prepared them into meals. This research explores how women participating in government food assistance in the agricultural community of Santa Inés del Monte, Oaxaca, evaluated the foods they received and conceptualized broader changes in their food system and community health. Qualitative research methods, including interviews, focus groups and a community survey of 87 households, were conducted in the community in 2015, 2017 and 2018. Through attention to visceral experience, this study demonstrates how sensations of taste, embodied knowledge, nutrition discourses, gendered development programs, and structural marginalization combined to produce an outcome in which mothers accepted and prepared foods in the community kitchens that did not meet their standards of food quality. However, this study also finds that participating mothers and other residents continue to conceive of direct food production—especially organic production of local heirloom crop and animal varieties—as the best way to access good nutrition. These findings suggest the need for attention to knowledge politics in the design and evaluation of culturally appropriate food security policy.

Keywords:

• Development
• embodied knowledge
• feminist political ecology
• food assistance
• Mexico
• women

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Jennifer Burney, Diana Liverman, Hallie Eakin, Meg Mills-Novoa, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. She expresses gratitude and appreciation for all participants in this study for sharing their time, knowledge and opinions for the purpose of this research.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Research with human subjects statement

The research described in this study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Arizona, Protocol Number #1505867915.

Additional information

Funding

The author grateful acknowledges funding in support of this research from the US Borlaug Fellows in Global Food Security Program, the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego, the Tinker Foundation, and the Philanthropic Educational Organization (PEO) Scholars Program.

Notes on contributors

Fiona Gladstone

Fiona Gladstone is a human-environment geographer and political ecologist working at the intersection of global change and rural livelihoods in the Americas. Her research examines how people use collective action and knowledge to navigate processes of capitalist development, environmental change, and government policy in their everyday lives. Based on work training and engaging rural Oaxacan student-researchers, her dissertation explored the knowledge politics and political economy of a flagship anti-hunger campaign in Mexico. Her postdoctoral work at Duke University Marine Laboratory seeks to understand the role of different collective action institutions in recent system changes in Baja California Sur fisheries. Fiona holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Arizona, an MA in Geography from Portland State Universty, and a BA in English from Reed College.