Agriculture in Mexico has been an important sector of the country’s economy historically and politically even though it now accounts for a very small percentage of Mexico’s GDP. Mexico is one of the cradles of agriculture with the Mesoamericans developing domesticated plants such as maize, beans, tomatoes, squash, cotton, vanilla, avocados, cacao, and various spices. Domestic turkeys and Muscovy ducks were the only domesticated fowl in the precolumbian era, and small dogs were also raised for food. There were no large domesticated animals, such as cattle or pigs.
During the early colonial period, the Spanish introduced more plants and the concept of animal husbandry, principally cattle, horses, donkeys, mules, goats and sheep, and barnyard animals such as chickens and pigs. Farming from the colonial period until the Mexican Revolution was focused on large private properties. After the Revolution, these were broken up and the land redistributed. Since the latter 20th century NAFTA and economic policies have again favoured large scale commercial agricultural holdings.
Mexico’s main crops include grains such as corn and wheat, tropical fruits and various vegetables. Agricultural exports are important, especially coffee, tropical fruits and winter fruits and vegetables. Sixty percent of Mexico’s agricultural exports go to the United States.
History of agriculture in Mexico
Mesoamerican period
The territory of Mexico roughly corresponds with that of Mesoamerica, which was one of the cradles of plant domestication. Archeological research in the Gulf coast of Tabasco shows the earliest evidence of corn cultivation in Mexico. The first fields were along the Grijalva River delta with fossilized pollen evidence showing forest clearing around 5100 BCE. The domestication of corn is followed by sunflower seeds and cotton.
Agriculture was the basis of the major Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Olmecs, Mayas and Aztecs, with the principal crops being corn, beans, squash, chili peppers and tomatoes. The tradition of planting corn, beans and squash together allows the beans to replace the nitrogen that corn depletes from the soil. The three crops together are sometimes referred to as the Three Sisters.
Soil erosion from corn production has been a problem since the Mesoamerican period. This and other kinds of environmental degradation have been cited as the cause of the collapse of the Teotihuacan civilization. To create new areas for cultivation, Mesoamericans harvested rainfall, developed lakeshore irrigation systems and created new fields in the form of terraces and "chinampas" artificial floating islands in shallow waters.
Colonial period Although silver mining brought many Spaniards to Mexico and silver was the largest single export from New Spain, agriculture was extremely important. There were far more people working in agriculture, not only producing subsistence crops for individual households and small-scale producers for local markets, but also commercial agriculture on large estates (haciendas) to supply Spanish cities. In the early conquest period, Spaniards relied on crops produced by indigenous in central Mexico and rendered as tribute, mainly maize, following existing arrangements. Some Spaniards were awarded grants by the crown of indigenous tribute and labor in the conquest-era institution of encomienda, which was phased out replaced by indigenous labor allocations by the crown (repartimiento), finally wage labor or other non-coerced labor arrangements.
In central Mexico, the rise of the Spanish population in and the drop in indigenous population in the sixteenth century saw Spaniards acquiring land, creating haciendas and smaller farms called ranchos. Much productive land was held by indigenous villages, with the protection of the crown, but long-term trend over the colonial era and the nineteenth century was the transfer of those lands into non-indigenous hands. Haciendas have been well studied in Mexico, starting with François Chevalier's highly influential work,Chevalier, François,La formation des grands domaines au Mexique (Paris 1952); Spanish edition 1956; English edition 1963. followed by assessments of whether his generalizations held for regions of Mexico.Van Young, Eric, "Mexican Rural History Since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda," Latin American Research Review, 18 (3) 1983; 5-61.'Van Young, Eric, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1810. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981; 2nd ed. Rowman and Littlefield 2006. Studies found that haciendas were, in fact, not inefficiently organized and badly managed, nor did the concentration in land ownership result in waste and misallocation of resources. Hacienda owners (hacendados) sought to maximize income and minimize production costs, economically rational behavior. In economic terms, benefited in ways that small holders and indigenous communities could not, since they had economies of scale, access to outside credit, information about new technologies and distant markets, a level of protection from predatory officials, and greater security of tenure."Coatsworth, John H. "Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico." American Historical Review, vol. 83, no. 1 (Feb. 1978), p. 87 Although haciendas had advantages of scale in producing crops such as wheat and in ranching of cattle and sheep smaller producers of fruits, fresh vegetables, and small animals (pigs, chickens and their eggs) supplied local markets.Coatsworth, "Obstacles" p. 87. In Mexico City, chinampa agriculture was highly productive and labor intensive, supplying the capital, with land continuing to be held by indigenous farmers into the twentieth century.Gibson, Charles, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1964.
The Spanish introduced a number of new crops such as wheat, barley, sugar, fruits (such as pear, apple, fig, apricot, and bananas) and vegetables, but their main contributions were domesticated animals, unknown in Mesoamerica. The Spanish brought cattle, horses, goats, and sheep as part of what is now called the Columbian Exchange.Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange. Westport CT: Greenwood Press 1972. These animals often caused damage to indigenous crops in central Mexico, but outside the zone of intense indigenous settlement and cultivation, cattle and sheep were grazed on land not previously devoted to agriculture. Sheep grazed on previously cultivated land had disastrous environmental consequences, documented in a classic of Mexican environmental history.Melville, Elinor G.K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. Many breeds of the animals the Spaniards imported are still raised today called "criollos."
With the discovery and exploitation of large-scale silver deposits in Zacatecas and Guanajuato, cultivated areas outside of traditional agriculture expanded, particularly in the Bajío, which became the bread basket of Mexico producing the imported grain, wheat. Unlike central Mexico, which had a long indigenous tradition of sedentary agriculture, much of the Bajío was a marshy wetland not continuously occupied or cultivated. For the Spaniards, the Bajío was a disappointment, since there were no deposits of precious metals and no indigenous populations with existing hierarchies, but the region did show promise for initially the grazing of cattle and later agriculture. With population growth in silver mining cities in the eighteenth century, agriculture expanded and cattle grazing was displaced to more marginal lands and declined in importance. Agriculture in the region was productive, but was not technologically innovative. The bottom lands were rich in nutrients Spaniards had no sense that access to productive land was restricted, which might have sparked innovation in cultivation. However, the shaping of the regions hydrology with dams and canals in the eighteenth century made possible wheat cultivation on a large scale. Spaniards developed irrigated agriculture, with the construction of canals and dams, marshy land was drained and redirected.Sánchez Rodríguez, Martín, "Mexico's Breadbasket: Agriculture and the Environment in the Bajío" in Christopher R. Boyer, A Land Between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2012, pp.50-72.
A number of native plant and animal species from Mexico proved to have commercial value in Europe, leading to their mass cultivation and export including cochineal and indigo (for dyes), cacao, vanilla, henequen (for rope), cotton, and tobacco. A high quality, fast red dye from small cochineal insects that were cultivated and collected from the nopal cactuses on which they thrived was an extremely important export to Europe, the second most valuable after silver. Cochineal production was labor intense and largely remained in indigenous hands. Mesoamerican staple foods, especially maize, continued to be important. In the eighteenth century, when the Spanish crown was seeking new sources of income, it created a monopoly on tobacco production and processing, restricting cultivation to areas around Orizaba.Deans-Smith, Susan. Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press 1992.
Recent assessments of the Roman Catholic Church's role in the Mexican economy have examined the hypothesis that the church was a major drag on the Mexican economy. The church was the recipient of the tithe, a tax on agricultural production, but with indigenous communities exempt from the tithe and considerable number of haciendas owned by the church itself, it has been argued that more land remained in indigenous and church hands than otherwise would be expected. Since the church functioned as the main source of credit to elites, its lending to them at below market rates cost the church revenue and increased the wealth of those acquiring the credit. The church owned considerable land in its own right. An advantage of church-owned haciendas over privately held ones was that unlike individual hacendados, whose deaths triggered a division of property among the heirs, the church as a corporation continued to consolidate its wealth over time.Coatsworth, "Obstacles", pp. 89-90.
19th century