Miriam Boyer and Carlos A. López Morales will give a presentation on “Understanding the links between social reproduction and technological structure: A social accounting matrix of milpa agriculture in the Huasteca Veracruzana, Mexico” at the ESEE Degrowth Conference in Pontevedra, Spain.
Abstract
This contribution departs from the premise that the definition and support of any transition from current practices to alternative futures requires a comprehensive understanding of production technologies, particularly with regards to the conditions of ecological sustainability and social reproduction. The focus on the social dimension of technologies has been present for some time in some disciplines. In particular, the representation of the technological structure of a society in input-output economics has been linked with income distribution and institutional analysis with the development of social accounting matrices (SAMs), such that the exploration of production technologies can go beyond the analysis of input requirements in the industrial network to include the generation and distribution of income and of others determinants of social reproduction. However, the development and application of social accounting matrices has been dominated historically by analyses at the national and regional scales.
This presentation reports on research constructing a social accounting matrix of a local economy to study the ways in which it articulates around a particular technological structure that structures the conditions for social reproduction. The local economy is constituted by four peasant communities dependent on small-scale, community-based Milpa agriculture that are located in the mountainous huasteca region of the Mexican State of Veracruz. The indigenous population in these communities faces several challenges ranging from high poverty, lack of economic opportunities, migration, and climate change. We investigate the extent to which traditional agriculture based on Milpa technology is able to guarantee the basic conditions of subsistence while articulating the communities beyond food production. We report on the results of a field study conducted in these communities to construct a social accounting matrix at the local level that describes the way in which small-scale agriculture contributes to the maintenance and reproduction of the local economy.
Methodologically, this exercise tests the possibilities of SAMs for expanding the analysis of production technologies to include social and institutional aspects that are excluded from traditional input-output analysis, while applying it to the local level. SAMs work both as an economic model (in this case, of income distribution) and as a database (depicting the circular flow of income), and we investigate on how their economy-wide scope and consistent methods can be of use for the understanding of the social implications of production technologies.