Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conflict:
The Case of Chiapas, Mexico

This paper identifies the different forms of environmental scarcities that affect the people of Chiapas, Mexico. In recent years, these scarcities have become acute. Increased demand for cropland arising from high human fertility and an influx of migrants occurred within the context of a long-standing inequitable distribution of land resources. The contribution of cropland degradation to environmental scarcity was localized to the Central Highlands. Environmental scarcities did not cause civil strife by themselves; in interaction with other factors, however, they multiplied the grievances of the campesino and indigena communities. At the same time, economic liberalization reduced the governing regime's capacity in Chiapas and provided greater opportunities for violent challenges by opposition groups.

In the hushed morning after San Cristobal's New Year's celebration in 1994, hundreds of masked rebels moved through the empty streets, cutting phone lines, immobilizing the local security apparatus, and establishing an alternative political order. This revolutionary Zapatista government lasted only four days in San Cristobal and other urban centers of the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. However, in the next two years, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), or Zapatista National Liberation Army, would bring the plight of Chiapan peasants to the attention of Mexicans, foreign investors, and the international community, challenging anew the legitimacy of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).¹ Commentators have attributed a range of revolutionary objectives to the Zapatistas, often obscuring the insurgents' principal goal: relief from escalating environmental scarcities that have impoverished their communities.²

There are three common explanations for the conflict in Chiapas. First, orthodox political-economic explanations emphasize broad - and often external - forces driving the conflict.³ These include the PRI's neglect of peasants as a client group, the difficulties of economic restructuring, the inadequacies of Mexican electoral reform, the fear of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the class basis of land concentration, resurgent Mayan identity, and generalized poverty. Although these explanations sketch the national and international context in which the crisis evolved, they obscure the role of ecological and demographic forces.

Second, environmental explanations suggest that the rebellion is somehow connected to deforestation, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss.⁴ However, these explanations fail to specify the links between degradation and the Zapatista rebellion. The Zapatistas are not fighting for conservation issues as they are commonly understood by Northern environmentalists, even though the Lacandon Rain Forest is one of the last large tropical rainforests in North America and is the focus of many Mexican and international conservation efforts. As a group, these environmental explanations of the conflict are often ideologically biased, describing the main actors, for example, as evil landowners and innocent peasants.

The third group of explanations falls between these two perspectives. A growing and insightful body of literature emphasizes the maldistribution of natural resources - especially land - as the central grievance of the EZLN and its sympathizers.⁵ This literature argues that the development model used by the Mexican government has generally failed. The government's focus should be on microeconomic and micropolitical issues, such as market access, peasant agriculture, local corruption, and the control of PRI political bosses. The virtue of these studies is that they analyze both the structural inequities of land distribution and the history of impediments to real reform.

We show below that the insurgency was a product of three simultaneous factors: rising grievances among peasants caused largely by worsening environmental scarcity, a weakening of the Mexican corporatist state by rapid economic liberalization, and efforts by churches and activist peasant groups to change peasants' understanding of their predicament.

An accurate understanding of the roots of the Chiapas conflict is important for U.S. and Canadian policy makers. The conflict helped trigger an economic crisis by reminding the world that Mexico is a developing country that has yet to solve many underlying economic and social problems. Moreover, the EZLN inspired campesinos, indigenous people, labor, and the urban poor of central and northern Mexico to express discontent with the PRI regime by engaging in violent protest and grassroots democratic campaigns. Mexican authorities have been forced to devote substantial resources to keep similar insurgencies from flaring up elsewhere.

Geography. The southernmost state in Mexico, Chiapas shares a 962-kilometer international border with Guatemala and internal borders with the states of Tabasco, Veracruz, and Oaxaca. Chiapas has an area of 7.6 million hectares administered by 112 municipios, which are administrative areas centered on principal towns. Chiapas can be roughly divided into three regional bands running from northwest to southeast across the state: the Soconusco Coast along the Pacific Ocean, the Central Highlands, and the Eastern Lowlands (see Figure 1). The Soconusco Coast is dominated by great plantations of cash crops for export and some light industry served by modernizing port facilities. The Central Highlands rise 900 meters from the coast to the fertile lands of the Grijalva River and its tributaries. The Highlands encompass two major urban centers, Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capital, and San Cristobal, a former seat of colonial power and now a popular tourist destination. Also in the Central Highlands is the municipio of Reforma, with abundant oil and natural gas reserves. The Eastern Lowlands include the Lacandon Rain Forest, which is bounded by the Usumacinta River and Guatemala to the east, the vast deforested area of the Marques de Comillas in the south, and the increasingly populous area of the Canadas at the foot of the Highlands. It is in this frontier region between the Highlands and the Eastern Lowlands that people have been most severely affected by environmental scarcities, and it is from here that the EZLN draws its support.

The southern states of Mexico are rich in oil, natural gas, forests, and farmland. In most southern states, and particularly in Chiapas, these resources are extracted by the national government for the use of Mexico's central and northern states. Chiapas produces 5 percent of the nation's oil, 12 percent of its natural gas, 46 percent of its coffee, and 48 percent of its hydroelectric power, yet only a tiny portion of the wealth generated from these resources is returned to the state for development programs - leaving it one of the poorest in Mexico.

Demography. Since 1970, the population of Chiapas has grown 3.6 percent annually, though the rate for the indigena population - speakers of the Mayan family of languages - has been 4.6 percent.⁶ According to official Mexican statistics, the total indigena population in Chiapas is currently over 700,000. A full demographic assessment, however, must also include 60,000 indigena refugees who fled Guatemala between 1980 and 1985 and the annual fluctuation of another 60,000 to 120,000 Guatemalan migrant laborers.⁷ Most of the Chiapan and Guatemalan indigenas live in the Eastern Lowlands, a socially and economically marginalized region with inadequate educational and health infrastructure (see Appendixes 1 and 2 in print version of paper). Adding migration from Mexican states to the north, the population growth in the Canadas and other frontier communities has been between 8 and 12 percent annually for the last two decades (see Figure 2, available in print version).⁸

Class Relations. In the story of the Zapatista uprising, six groups are important. As mentioned above, the indigenas are the native peoples of this region. One-third of indigenas are unilingual speakers of an indigenous language, and 70 percent live in towns of 1,000 people or less. Spanish is at best their second language, and indigena cultures and languages cut across state and municipio boundaries. The state and municipio governments try, but often fail, to contain and manage these groups. The largest groups are the Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Chol. The vast majority of the EZLN members are indigena coffee growers. The insurgents do not represent all of the people of the Eastern Lowlands; they represent the most marginal of those who have colonized the Lacandon in the past forty years.

The campesinos usually speak Spanish as their first language. As with the indigenas, they are generally subsistence farmers who produce their own food on their own small plots, on commonly owned plots, or on illegally occupied land. Their monetary income is derived from several sources, including raising cattle for large ranches in the region, producing small tradable items, working in tourist industries, engaging in seasonal labor in developing areas of the state, and growing cash crops that are sold to local marketing boards or directly exported.

The latifundistas are a relatively small class of landowners that has long controlled vast territories in the state. In the Eastern Lowlands, most of this land is devoted to capital-intensive cash crops for export: mainly coffee, cocoa, and citrus fruits. Distinct from but similar to the latifundistas are the rancheros, a relatively new group that has taken control of huge tracts of land with the encouragement of state subsidies. They are largely responsible for converting forestland into pastures for grazing, particularly around Palenque at the northern edge of the Lacandon. In Chiapas, both groups have withstood federal attempts at political reform and land redistribution and have retained control of state politics. Working for the PRI, affiliated parties, and the latifundistas are the caciques, political bosses who mobilize communities to support the PRI, exact tithes for traditional festivals, and benefit economically by containing opposition to the ruling regime.

Finally, a group of intellectuals and church and opposition leaders has helped organize indigenas and campesinos and encouraged them to express dissatisfaction with the unfulfilled political promises of the caciques and the oppression of the latifundistas. Many of this group fled political persecution in other parts of Mexico, and some sought refuge in the Chiapan Central Highlands after the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City.

According to the National Statistics and Geographical Information Institute (INEGI), in 1992, 44 percent of Mexico's 84 million people lived in poverty, with 16 percent in extreme poverty. Fifty-six percent of the extreme poor are engaged in agriculture in rural areas.⁹ Class distinctions in Chiapas are acutely evident in statistics on the distribution of education, infrastructure, fuel supplies, wages, and economic activities (see Appendixes 1 and 2 in print version of paper, or link to selected statistics).

Race Relations. Distinctions of race in Chiapas are even more sharply defined than those of class. Statistics show that subordinate racial groups systematically receive less public investment in infrastructure, education, and health than the state or national average. Indigena populations are rigidly confined to a limited number of occupations, mainly in agriculture; most indigena workers earn the minimum wage or less. Poverty statistics reveal striking economic marginalization: in municipios where the indigena population is less than 10 percent, 18 percent of the people are at or below the poverty line; for municipios where the indigena population is between 10 and 40 percent, 46 percent of the people are poor; and for those where more than 70 percent of the population are indigena, over 80 percent are poor.¹⁰ These figures suggest that racism has consistently affected the design and implementation of public policy in Chiapas. Policy elites have rarely consulted indigena communities during the planning of welfare programs.

The combined effect of class and racial barriers faced by indigenas and campesinos drives them to rely increasingly on wage opportunities within the rapidly expanding market economy. The market generates an incentive structure that redirects this labor into the production of cash crops or into local industry to supplement subsistence agriculture. As a result, smallholders become bound to the prices and economic fluctuations of distant markets. In addition, the labor demands of oil exploration and production in the north, of industrial and hydroelectric projects on the coast and in the Central Highlands, and of latifundios on the coast provide many with seasonal cash income.¹¹ Some workers use this income to buy consumer goods or fertilizers and herbicides for their farms. Elites - especially plantation owners and industrialists - have often profited from this increasing supply of cheap, competitive, and largely unorganized labor. Labor competition is accentuated by migrations from other states and Guatemala.

There are three types of environmental scarcity: Demand-induced scarcity is caused by population growth or increased per capita resource consumption; supply-induced scarcity is caused by degradation and depletion of environmental resources; and structural scarcity, the type most often stressed by political analysts, is caused by an unbalanced distribution of resources that severely affects less powerful groups in the society.¹²

Demand-Induced Scarcity: A Growing Population on a Limited Land Base

From 1970 to 1990, the population of Chiapas doubled, from 1,570,000 to 3,200,000, with an average annual growth rate of 3.6 percent. During this period, the growth rate for indigena populations was a percentage point higher, with the total almost tripling, from 288,000 to 716,000. Although these indigenas are spread throughout the state, many are concentrated in the Eastern Lowlands, especially the Lacandon. There, migrations of poor farmers from other parts of the state and of indigenas from Guatemala have combined with natural population growth to boost the total from 12,000 in 1960 to over 300,000 today.¹³

The 1983 eruption of the Chicon volcano in the northern Central Highlands displaced thousands of people into the Eastern Lowlands. Over the next few years, as many as 300,000 Guatemalans moved across the border during the civil conflicts in that country. Additionally, before several huge hydroelectric projects flooded high-quality farmland in the Grijalva basin, the government forcibly relocated tens of thousands of smallholders into the Eastern Lowlands.¹⁴ These people now live in one of the most marginal parts of the state, often without potable water, electricity, or infrastructure.¹⁵ In the 1960s and 1970s, the movement of seasonal labor to other parts of Chiapas relieved the increased population pressures on small farms, but with economic downturns in the mid-1980s, this option was no longer as easily available.

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that the Eastern Lowlands and the Central Highlands suffer the highest demand-induced scarcities of cropland, good data are available only for the state as a whole, as shown in Figure 3. This graph demonstrates that land availability per capita increased for much of this century as new lands, especially forestlands, were opened to cultivation. Around 1975, the curve turned sharply downward. There are significant regional differences, however, among the Soconusco Coast, the Central Highlands, and the Eastern Lowlands. Great plantations of coffee and maize have existed in the coastal region since before the Revolution, and labor demands of the coastal latifundios have helped absorb population growth and migration. In contrast, the Central Highlands have seen ever-higher population densities on marginal farmland.¹⁶

Particularly in and around San Cristobal, the growing population has consumed much of the forest and occupied most of the potentially arable land, greatly changing the local landscape. Even the expansion of municipio boundaries by some ten-thousand hectares every twenty years has not offset the demand for cropland reflected in the dramatic rise in the percentages of worked and pastoral land and the decrease in the percentage of forested area (see Table 1).¹⁷

Supply-Induced Scarcity: Deforestation and Soil Erosion

Supply-induced scarcity arises from degradation or depletion that shrinks the pool of resources. In Chiapas, the critical environmental resources are forests and cropland. Land degradation often begins with forest removal, continues with unsustainable agricultural practices, and ends with overgrazing by cattle, sheep, and goats.

Deforestation. When the Spanish found the Lacandon Rain Forest along the Usumacinta River and its tributaries, they called it the Desierto de los Lacandones - a "desolate" forested area of about 1.5 million hectares. Five hundred years of use have reduced the virgin forest by two-thirds, to about 500,000 hectares. Much of this deforestation has taken place in the last twenty-five years. The largest unfragmented tract of forest - and the largest remaining tract of tropical rain forest in Mexico - is in the Montes Azules Bioreserve. The reserve is also the most diverse ecosystem in Mexico and contains the only Mexican habitats for many endangered mammals.¹⁸

Over the years, the Lacandon Rain Forest supplied wood for local harvesting and international export and topsoil for monocultural production and cattle grazing. Each of these natural services is now seriously taxed. While the average annual rate of deforestation for tropical forests since the 1950s in Mexico has been 2.44 percent, some parts of the Eastern Lowlands have been deforested at 4 percent per year, and Palenque in the northeast has lost a total of 76,000 hectares at 12.4 percent per year (Figure 4).¹⁹ Moreover, the Lacandon Rain Forest has been increasingly fragmented by squatters' settlements and rancheros, boosting the amount of pastureland within the forest by 200 percent between 1980 and 1988.²⁰ According to the most comprehensive study of forest loss, between 1974 and 1986 the Lacandon Rain Forest was reduced by 7.7 percent a year. In all, 42 percent of the newly exposed area was converted to pasturelands, 42 percent was overtaken by secondary forests, 6.7 percent was lost to severe soil erosion, and only 3.7 percent was ever used for agriculture.²¹ The fragmentation of forests by road construction, hydroelectric and oil projects, logging, and slash-and-burn or pastureland agriculture has also disrupted the overall integrity of the forest ecosystem. In general, as forests are lost, grassland spreads, as indicated in Figure 5.

In the Central Highlands, deforestation has led to firewood shortages. Highland Mayan communities use oak, madrona, and cedar to cook, to fire ceramic goods, and to distill moonshine.²² Many communities have exhausted nearby supplies and must travel high into the hills for wood. These "cloud forests," which are home to flora and fauna only found at the crests of hills permanently engulfed by tropical mists, are now the prime target of firewood gatherers.

Soil Erosion. Soil erosion occurs when land is stripped of vegetative cover, tilled or overgrazed and exposed to the energy of the wind, rain, and runoff. Highland soils are particularly vulnerable to erosion, because the steepness of the land makes it easier for wind and rain to dislodge soil particles. Fine-grain eroded soil often contains three times more organic matter and nutrients than the coarse-grain soil left behind. Erosion also reduces soil depth, the diversity of soil biota, and water infiltration and holding capacity.²³

The rate of erosion is strongly influenced by the kind of processes that expose land to the elements. Logging, road construction, swidden agriculture, and prolonged overgrazing, especially by goats and sheep, all make erosion worse. For example, long-term study of the hillsides of La Fraylesca and Motozintla on the Chiapan border with Guatemala found high levels of soil loss - twenty-five tons per hectare per year - for maize fields that have been stripped of forests, burned, and grazed; losses of fifteen tons for fields that were burned but not grazed; and losses of less than three tons for fields that were neither burned nor grazed.²⁴

Much peasant farmland in Mexico is vulnerable to degradation. Neil Harvey notes that the ejidos and communidades agrarias make up about half of Mexico's land area, but most of this land is "rain-fed, undercapitalized and of poor quality."²⁵ In Chiapas, he finds a sharp drop in milpa output: 19.6 percent for maize and 18 percent for beans between 1982 and 1987.²⁶ This drop has occurred despite increases in the area of land dedicated to production (20.6 percent and 10 percent over same period, respectively), because, Harvey contends, much of this expansion had been into the Lacandon, where "tropical soils are notoriously unsuited for sustainable agriculture once the biomass has been destroyed."²⁷ There has been no credible long-term study of soil erosion in Chiapas,²⁸ but by piecing together available data and anecdotal evidence, we can clarify the story of supply-induced scarcities of cropland in the state.

In 1990, the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi, Kenya, and the International Soil Reference Center in Wageningen, the Netherlands, issued a set of maps of soil degradation around the world.²⁹ Although the data for any specific region are highly aggregated, the maps do provide provisional soil degradation information for Chiapas. They indicate that moderate topsoil loss due to water erosion affects 20 to 50 percent of the Central Highlands and that 5 to 10 percent of the Highlands suffer from moderate terrain deformation caused by water erosion.³⁰ This damage is caused by farming and forestry practices, and its severity is increasing rapidly.

The maps further indicate that up to 5 percent of the area of the Eastern Lowlands is moderately degraded by terrain deformation due to water erosion as a result of deforestation. This damage is, in the maps' terminology, increasing at a "medium" rate. In a twenty-kilometer-wide strip along the Soconusco Coast, roughly corresponding to the major coffee-producing area of the state, 10 to 25 percent of the land is moderately degraded by loss of topsoil due to wind erosion, and up to 5 percent is strongly degraded (which means the land is "unreclaimable at the farm level") by waterlogging. The cause of this damage, which is increasing at a medium rate, is farming. Finally, the maps identify a sixty-kilometer-wide strip of land between the Coast and the Central Highlands that is affected by conditions similar to those in the Eastern Lowlands.

In a 1975 study of farming techniques in a subregion of the Chiapan Central Highlands, George Collier analyzed the causal links between soil erosion and agricultural production.³¹ Land abuse was occurring elsewhere in the Central Highlands, he argued, but the growing population of Chamula (a municipio north of San Cristobal) particularly tested the ecological limits of highland soils. Collier noted that the region's population grew from 16,010 in 1940 to 22,029 in 1950 and to 26,789 in 1960. Farmers in the region engaged in swidden agriculture: every few seasons, they cut down and burned the forest and brushland to supply fresh fields; once their crop yields fell, farmers fallowed the tired fields or turned them into pastureland. Since the population in Chamula now exceeds 51,000, these degradation processes have probably worsened. Although swidden agriculture is often ecologically sound, if population densities are too high - as they have been now for many decades in Chamula - fallow periods are neglected and the soils do not regenerate adequately. As Collier describes it:

The water supply in hamlet water holes becomes variable, the soil having lost its capacity to maintain a high water table through the dry winter season. Heavy summer rains erode the edges of trails that crisscross the grasslands, silting in the natural limestone sinks, which alternatively flood and dry as mud flats according to the season. Continued shepherding takes its toll. Because of constant clipping off at the roots, grass gives way to gullies of erosion, which spread out from trails along the hillsides. In a matter of years a hill can erode from grazing land to a heap of rocks devoid of top and subsoil.³²

Since Collier's 1975 study, Chamula's pattern of declining agricultural production due to environmental scarcities has been replicated, with some variation, in parts of the Eastern Lowlands as structural scarcities have forced hundreds of thousands of people from the Central Highlands and the Soconusco Coast on to the largely unclaimed lands of the Lacandon frontier. This process sharply accelerated in the early 1990s. The new colonizers often use upland swidden agricultural techniques not suited to a tropical ecosystem.³³ The forested land that they clear for subsistence agriculture quickly loses productivity and is converted into pastureland for cattle.

A Model of Soil Erosion in Chiapas. We illustrate the impact of supply-induced scarcity on campesinos and indigenas in the Central Highlands and Eastern Lowlands by adapting a general model of the economic costs of soil erosion developed by David Pimentel and his colleagues.³⁴ The model begins with several assumptions: seven hundred millimeters of rainfall a year, soil depth of fifteen centimeters, land slope of 5 percent, loamy soil with 4 percent organic matter, and a soil erosion rate of seventeen tons per hectare per year. Under these conditions, the study estimates, the loss of agricultural yield after one year is 8 percent and that after twenty years is 20 percent. The Pimentel study further calculates that in the United States it costs $196 per year in extra fertilizer and water to replace the soil resources depleted by erosion and thereby to compensate for the yield loss. In developing countries where such funds are not available, the economic cost is paid in lower food production.

Table 2 compares the starting assumptions in Pimentel's model with estimates of conditions in the Central Highlands and Eastern Lowlands of Chiapas. This allows us to gauge the relative severity and cost of soil erosion affecting exposed land in these regions. The differences between Pimentel's starting assumptions and our estimates for Chiapas suggest that yield loss and resource replacement costs are significantly higher in Chiapas. Not only is annual rainfall two, three, and sometimes four times greater, depending on the location in the state, but the type of rainfall - torrential, heavy tropical rains coupled with high winds - significantly increases soil erosion. The slope of land in the Highlands is often much greater than 5 percent, which means that water runoff is substantial and more likely to carry away the soil. In the Lowlands, the soil is fine. The amount of organic matter in this soil is higher than that of the Highlands, but because of the thinness of lowland soil the extra nutrient content is quickly depleted by successive seasons of production. Taking all these factors into consideration, we estimate that erosion rates in the Central Highlands and the Eastern Lowlands are probably in excess of the baseline rate of 17 tons per hectare per year found by Pimentel et al.³⁵ Of course, communities that use large amounts of fertilizer may temporarily relieve the effects of erosion, but often at the expense of groundwater pollution and attendant health problems.³⁶

The Pimentel model applies to a temperate ecosystem. Although erosion rates may not always be higher in tropical zones than in temperate zones, the consequences for agricultural productivity are often more severe. Rattan Lal notes that "the drastic erosion-caused productivity decline in soils of the tropics is due partly to harsh climate and partly to low-fertility."³⁷ Because of the shallow topsoil, we estimate in Table 2 that productivity losses from erosion will be greater in the tropical Eastern Lowlands than the more temperate Central Highlands.

It is also important to distinguish between the rate of soil erosion on exposed land and the total quantity of eroded soil in a given region. Since more land is exposed in the Central Highlands, this region has suffered from more total erosion than the Eastern Lowlands; yet it is not clear that the erosion rates for exposed land in the two regions differ that markedly. So far, soil erosion in the Lacandon is only evident on the steepest slopes at the highest elevations, but given that the population of the Highlands and several other areas is spilling over into the Lacandon, it is likely that erosion there will worsen and will be accompanied by economic consequences of a magnitude suggested by the model in Table 2.

Structural Scarcity

In Chiapas, the average land endowment for subsistence production is two hectares, while for commercial production it is twenty hectares.³⁸ This structural scarcity of land for poorer farmers arises from the domination and manipulation of land-tenure arrangements by a wealthy elite of agricultural producers. It is reinforced by the political hegemony of this elite, by the economies of scale and commercial success of large agricultural producers, and by corrupt and inequitable credit and social-spending programs managed by the state. In many areas of the state, prices for agricultural products do not accurately reflect the products' market value, because PRI representatives and caciques control the transportation sector, manage many produce-purchasing programs, and in general manage the market access of smaller producers. This control permits them to secure political support and to enforce the regime of unequal land distribution.

The impact of structural scarcity of land on peasants in Chiapas is magnified by inadequate access to credit and by limited infrastructure. Since the 1980s, access to government and private agricultural credit has increasingly benefited beef producers; on the other hand, small commercial and subsistence farmers have had increasing difficulty getting credit. From 1985 to 1989, almost 80 percent of all agricultural producers in Chiapas had no access at all to government credit. By 1990, the figure was over 87 percent.³⁹ In addition, economic liberalization has reduced government subsidies for fertilizer, tools, and other inputs. In response, small commercial farmers have set up their own credit agencies, returned to subsistence farming, or left agriculture altogether.

As people spill into the Eastern Lowlands, they move into a situation of deeply institutionalized economic marginalization. Figure 6 shows the per capita distribution of key infrastructural services on a ten-square-kilometer grid of the state for 1990. The darker the area in the map, the lower the availability of potable water, electricity, and educational and health services. For the large black region in the Eastern Lowlands, low population density is the main cause for the paucity of infrastructure. However, what is most telling about this map is the strip of "high" marginality (represented by dark gray) that runs from the Central Highlands in the northwest to the Eastern Lowlands in the southeast. This part of Chiapas has a significant and rapidly growing population in areas of marginal infrastructure.

Sixty percent of the productive territory in Mexico is pastureland, producing meat for a population 50 percent of whom never eat meat.⁴⁰ The rapid expansion of the economically powerful cattle industry has made structural scarcities of environmental resources worse for many peasants and small farmers. In recent decades in Chiapas, the cattle industry has grown very quickly (see Figure 7), and it now occupies 30 percent of the state's total land area. Between 1950 and 1970, the population of grazing animals quadrupled, with 75 percent of the total on private lands.⁴¹ By 1990, the population of grazing animals had doubled again, for the most part still on private lands.

In popular accounts, Latin American beef production for export inevitably causes environmental destruction - especially loss of forests - and various social ills. However, recent scholarship suggests that this "hamburger thesis" is misleading and that it must be heavily qualified by accounts of the specific demand-induced and structural scarcities in each area.⁴² In Chiapas, deforestation is only an indirect result of the activities of the rancheros. Particularly in the Highlands and around Palenque, rancheros are responsible for buying, illegally renting, or taking over land that has been cleared of its forest by smallholders and squatters. The slash-and-burn agriculture of these smallholders initially provides rich ground for their crops, but as fields lose productivity, rancheros take over, and their cattle make an already existing erosion problem worse.

Serious structural scarcities can also be found in coffee production. Most of the best land for coffee lies along the Soconusco Coast and is controlled by a small number of large coffee estates. The largest 116 owners control 12 percent of the land devoted to coffee production. As one moves east across the state to land of generally lower quality, farm size drops and the land becomes predominantly public and communal (for example, ejidos) rather than private. The 91 percent of coffee growers in Chiapas who own less than five hectares are mainly located in the Central Highlands and the Eastern Lowlands. Table 3 shows that as of 1990, the distribution of coffee land was significantly more skewed toward the wealthy in Chiapas than in Mexico as a whole: Mexico and Chiapas have virtually the same percentage of coffee producers with two hectares or less of land, yet in Chiapas the percentage of coffee growers with more than fifty hectares is twice as high. Additionally, two-thirds of Mexico's producers with over one hundred hectares operate in Chiapas.

In sum, Chiapas' population - especially its poorest members - has been affected by all three types of environmental scarcity: demand-induced, supply-induced, and structural. Demand-induced and structural scarcities are the most severe; the former are driven by the large increases in the indigena and migrant populations living in the Eastern Lowlands on the frontier with the Central Highlands. The limited evidence available suggests that supply-induced scarcities are sometimes harsh but are generally not as severe or widespread as the other two types. Soil erosion affects the ability of some parts of the Central Highlands to support agriculture; forest resources are particularly taxed near urban areas. The perceived differential between the availability of land and forest resources in the Central Highlands and that in the Eastern Lowlands stimulates the migration of resource-poor peasants into the Lacandon. Unfortunately, the migrants do not escape the impact of the three types of scarcity and of the dislocations caused by economic reform. This is especially true in the Canadas region of the Eastern Lowlands, the region that spawned the EZLN insurgency.⁴³

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