Organic agriculture, which seeks for healthy food, revalues local knowledge
and fosters solidarity, can be a promising alternative for peasants in Latin
America, if they are incorporated into social networks backing small-scale,
environment-friendly farmers. Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS)
are open, interactive spaces for organic certification and sales which are
increasingly employed by such networks. To know and understand how PGS
and other related activities are working in reality, we conducted a case study
of rural community located in the State of Tlaxcala, Mexico. There, a non-poor
farmer family and their relatives began to produce, process and sell maguey
and other crops in an ecological and integrated manner, through getting deeply
involved in the development of organic agriculture supporting networks in
the state since its formative stage. Their history and little diffusion of organic
practice among other families show a kind of positive feedback mechanism
that favors ‘insiders’ thus restricting entry, a comprehensible phenomenon
given still little demand for organic products in the domestic market. Our
research also suggests the necessity of different approaches to ‘outsiders’,
i.e., those peasants who have too few resources (ex. land, skills, education and
social capital) and/or missed the timing.
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