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Villa Díaz Ordaz, agriculture under climate vulnerability

by Dr Gabriela Martínez Aguilar
Agriculture as an essential activity in the countryside has become marginal for most of the benniza’a families in Villa Díaz Ordaz, Oaxaca. They no longer depend on it as their main source of food. The environmental conditions they face, due to the lack of water in the subsoil and the drought in their cornfields because of the absence of rain, increasingly scarify the harvests to provide themselves with basic grains such as corn, beans or pumpkin.
Of Mixteco-Zapotec origin, Dr Gabriela Martínez Aguilar holds a PhD in Regional and Technological Development from the Tecnológico Nacional de México. Since 2014, she has been documenting the field of traditional medicine and its healing practices in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, with the aim of highlighting the urgency of its legal protection from the perspective of the intellectual property held by indigenous communities and their holders of traditional knowledge: healers, midwives, herbalists. She has also documented some of the local responses that traditional medicines in rural contexts provided to face the different health challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic, after having been left out of government medical services. From a postdoctoral research at the Centro de Investigaciones en Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Pacífico Sur, she participates in the project “Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene” and from a Medical Anthropology perspective, she seeks not only to contribute to the study on the affectations that anthropocentric activity has been systematically causing in the rural societies way of life, particularly to women and their families whose socioeconomic activities are linked to agricultural practices, but also to investigate the impacts on their health through an interdisciplinary perspective.

Learning points

  • What consequences, in terms of health, do you think that the scarcity of water, as a natural resource, indispensable in the planting fields, could result in for those who depend on agriculture as a means of food subsistence?
  • What measures, among these provided, could the benniza´a farming families take to face these challenges?: a) crop diversification; b) rainwater harvesting, conservation practices and irrigation systems; c) capacity building in sustainable agricultural technical areas; d) education focused on the local context in health and food practices; e) agricultural cooperatives; f) access to health services with an intercultural approach; g) governmental support with an intercultural approach. Do you know any other ways?

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