Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Growing coffee has been until recent times the main source of income for thousands of people in Mexico and Latin America. Climatic changes, local environmental degradation, unusual pest outbreaks, and social and political disorganization are configuring highly vulnerable landscapes, where local and global scales are interacting in a myriad of pathways, depending on local culture and historic particularities. However, international market volatility and its associated uncertainty is a common feature to all of them. Such vulnerability is here explored in the borderlands of Chiapas and Guatemala, belonging to the Tacana Volcano Biosphere Reserve. Post-colonial legacies, the influence of environmental international policies, and a political culture of governmental clientelism and paternalism come into play in a high mountain ecosystem, hit regularly by seismic and volcanic activity, together with increasing natural disasters. Coffee productivity, impacts of coffee leaf-rust, climatic variability perceptions, and scientific-local knowledge interactions are some of the topics explored through ethnographic methods along with questionnaires, as a part of an ongoing project whose final objective has to do with interactions between global discourses and local narratives regarding climate change in the Tacana hills on both sides of the border.