Migration and the breakdown of a peasant economy in central Bolivia

These strategies may include: creating irrigation networks; developing cropping patterns suited to the environment; linking crop production and animal husbandry; engaging in exchange networks and nonagricultural activities; and participating in seasonal migration. This paper examines the adaptive strategies of small farmers in the mountainous areas of Bolivia"s Mizque and Campero provinces in the Department of Cochabamba. The paper defines actions likely to encourage or limit environmental breakdown. It also explains why some farmers migrate while others remain at home, why some patterns of migration seem to reoccur, and what migration entails for the farmer households and for the regional economy. The paper maintains that farming communities in Mizque and Campero are highly polarized and socially divided groups and that farmers adapt different strategies in part because of ecological reasons, but even more because of the sociopolitical transformations stemming from the 1952 national revolution. The progressive reduction of the size of peasant plots, communal pasture lands, and forest reserves; the dearth of off-farm economic opportunities, credit, agricultural price incentives, and technical assistance; and the opening of the lowlands to commercial agricultural production -- all are part of this revolution. In this context, migration appears as a strategy which, while enabling farm families to ensure immediate and medium-term security, manifests the continuing and underlying inequalities of national development.