Landscape diversity in a rural territory: Emerging land use mosaics coupled to livelihood diversification

Over the past 20 years, the multifunctionality of tropical mountain rural landscapes has been encouraged to enhance the provision of numerous commodities, as well as ecological and cultural services. However, globalization and neoliberal policies have boosted agricultural production for global markets and simultaneously marginalized fundamental rural activities related to self-supply agriculture. This trend has modified smallholder livelihoods from being mostly agricultural to becoming increasingly wage-labor oriented. This shift in household income feeds back to land use configuration and landscape function. We examined origins, development and current states of farmer livelihoods and associated land use and cover changes that occurred in a tropical watershed landscape of the Huasteca Potosina in Mexico between 1970 and 2009. For this purpose, we adopted the Drylands Development Paradigm (DDP) as our analytical framework (Reynolds et al., 2007). Based on aerial photographs and interviews applied to farmers and key stakeholders, we identified local, regional, national and international socio-economic and biophysical drivers that led to current livelihood diversification in several communities sharing the same watershed, and the extent and rate of land use change that has occurred over the past 40 years. We found an increasingly fragmented landscape with a diverse mosaic of land use types (citrus, sugarcane, milpa and secondary forests) yet increasingly dominated by citrus plantations. This reflects an intergeneration livelihood transition towards land use decisions driven by the interaction of diverse and contrasting rural development policies, changing markets, price fluctuations and extreme climatic events. We suggest that the diversity of livelihood strategies and land use types is dynamic and continuously in transition; this creates a complex and changing landscape. The watershed landscape has responded to global markets at the cost of local needs, knowledge systems and social networks. Thus, landscape multifunctionality, preservation of ecosystem services and human well being could be at stake under current trends of globalization and global environmental change.

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