Food sovereignty and the role of agroecological diversification in farmer communities in southern Mexico

This article deepens and expands the notion of food sovereignty by presenting and contrasting testimonies and quantitative records of agroecological diversification, agrobiodiversity, and diets in rural communities. Our study emphasizes the critical role of strategic agrobiodiversity in fostering food sovereignty. We present the perspectives and experiences of coffee farmers, members of the organic cooperative Campesinos Ecológicos de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas (CESMACH) in southern Mexico, regarding food sovereignty and the role of agroecological diversification in achieving it. We compare the narratives and practices of these farmer communities. Our findings are the result of a Participatory Action Research process carried out since 2017, focusing on the contributions of on-farm diversification to households’ diets and livelihoods in coffee-farming communities from an agroecological perspective. We conducted monthly surveys over 1 year with 50 households across 21 communities. Additionally, we led focus groups in 12 communities to validate the surveys and understand the communities’ self-conception of food sovereignty. Following the objective of Participatory Action Research approaches to supporting epistemic justice, we describe coffee farmers’ conception of food sovereignty in their context. Metaphorically, we represent these elements in what we call the “tree of food sovereignty” for CESMACH members. In the tree, the cultural and spiritual values form the roots, motivating and nourishing the efforts of farmers to pursue food sovereignty. These values are linked to spiritual affinities (e.g., Catholic or Protestant), epistemic, and micro-political dynamics that reinforce the farmers’ identity in a context that often disregards traditional and ancestral values. In the trunk, we placed elements that mediate and enable food sovereignty through agroecology, representing the social and material structure. In the canopy of the tree, we find the more tangible elements, which are often measured in studies of food sovereignty as independent variables (e.g., dietary diversity). For those elements more directly linked to agroecological diversification—healthy and diverse diets, income and markets, social fabric, and increased autonomy and resilience—we triangulate our findings with quantitative data from the surveys. Finally, we bring together all our key findings into a discussion on the contribution of self-defined food sovereignty in the building process. Please refer to Supplementary Materials for a full text Spanish version of this article.