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Chiapas is considered one of the areas of origin for maize, and indigenous production systems remain a major element of maize farming and the food system of Mexico’s southernmost state. These traditional systems often include a complex, long-term relationship between maize farming and the larger landscape (Medellín and Equihua, 1998). However, what often appear to be static, steady states of small farmer land use in fact are highly dynamic systems that are in the midst of major adaptations to new climatic and economic conditions. The globalization of the agribusiness model that came to dominate the US landscape during the 20 th century has put intense pressures on small farmers in Chiapas, adding to complications arising from shifting growing seasons and other effects of global climate change. However, history has shown that Mexican small farmers are never passive objects of their circumstances, and their responses to early 21 st century marginalization take both centralized and local forms, in political and productive terms (Guevara-Hernández et al. 2011a). The balance of forces—capitalist agriculture, external input dependence, neoliberal national food policy on one hand; traditional knowledge, agroecological transitions, social movements on the other—in Mexican agriculture tends to distinguish two contending models for food systems, even as climate change, resource scarcity, and economic crises limit humanity’s options.

Shifting cultivation and other traditional systems of food production in Chiapas are being highly influenced by the slow-motion arrival of industrial agriculture, which is based on maximizing short-term …