Event

Key Words: agroindustry, public-private partnerships, rural development, small and medium producers, food sovereignty

Agroindustrial parks in Mexico have carried the promise of inclusive rural development through public-private partnerships. This panel compares the cases of Cuenca Lechera de Tizayuca, which started as a public project, and Agropark Querétaro, which started as a neoliberal public-private partnership. In each case, the model of rural development initially promoted a high degree of cooperation between small-scale producers. Both cases have deviated significantly from their proposed designs. Despite aspirations of providing an alternative to privately controlled agro-industrial infrastructure, both cases have fallen short of the goal of inclusionary development.
Agropark Querétaro represents a post-commercial opening neoliberal model of a public-private partnership for an agroindustrial park. Agropark is home to 11 high-tech greenhouse producers on 180 hectares that produce more than 81,000 tons annually of tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers oriented toward the export market to the United States. High-tech greenhouses represent an emerging technology that is increasingly playing the role of critical infrastructure in the fresh food supply chain in North America. With field crops across the continent facing increasing risk of heat, drought, flood, and pest invasion due to climate change, greenhouses promise to offer the sustainable, high-yield production scheme of the agricultural future. The extremely high cost of construction – between $1 and $3 million USD per hectare— demands unprecedented levels of capital investment in agricultural technology, centering the role of capital finance in directing supply systems to meet basic needs. Due to the pressures of the international market and the profit-extraction motivation of investors, the project has deviated from the original goal of cooperation for medium-scale producers and instead has replicated the precarity of competition in the global supply chain.
The Cuenca Lechera de Tizayuca (CLT) represents a different example of an agroindustrial park started by an interventionist government model (through creating para-state infrastructure) and privatized in the transition to neoliberalism. CLT was founded in 1976 as part of PRODEL, a federal program to relocate the dairy farms in Mexico City due to sanitation problems. This large-scale project was carried out with a loan of $70 million USD from the Inter-American Development Bank, resulting in the relocation of up to 126 families to the state of Hidalgo. During the first 14 years of the program's operation, the State ran the milk production in Tizayuca, however, the change in economic policy in the late 80’s motivated PRODEL's sale. The state left the milk production chain, and the operation was outcompeted by two different companies. To produce raw milk, a new company entered in which the ranchers were shareholders; for the industrialization, distribution and marketing of pasteurized milk, a new company was created in which some investors had industry experience and others carried political ties. Milk producers in Mexico faced multiple crises due to increasing international competitiveness and the free-trade-backed importation of powdered milk. Eventually, all the large companies that operated in the CLT ceased operation; nevertheless, milk production has never stopped. Ranchers in the Cuenca now are medium size producers but are the largest milk producers in the state of Hidalgo. Through the second and third generation, they have learned to increase their productivity and are more business oriented but have lost their commitment to social economics and cooperative models. The history of the CLT is a story of uprooting and capacity building that involves three generations of ranchers. This model allows us to analyze the result of a robust public intervention, the effects of changing economic policy around the development of industrial districts, and the erosion of social economy orientation of agricultural producers.

This analysis proposes that agroindustrial parks in both cases, one of high-tech greenhouses and one of dairy production and processing, could have acted as social forms of production within the solidarity economy. But to reach a liberatory model, this discussion argues that critical changes would need to be made to make available public and/or solidarity-based financing at an industrial scale as well as grow opportunities for direct commercialization that do not rely on corporate gatekeepers. Both projects have been limited by the changing involvement of the state and the lack of social sector vision, both ending as private-sector industrial projects with limited contribution to inclusive regional development or sovereignty.

The Latin American city has always been one of infrastructural breakdowns and patchwork repairs, where much of the urban life at the socio-spatial margins revolves around struggles to access, adapt to or bypass unreliable or malfunctioning infrastructure. People’s social and political relationships with the bits and pieces that constitute failing infrastructures can be categorized as an “urbanism of fragments”—a product of the city's highly unequal political, economic, cultural, and social relations (McFarlane, 2021). At the same time, forms of everyday governance and urban innovation may be found in these very social and political interactions and contestations around malfunctioning infrastructure (Boudreau, 2022). Building on these and other insights and recent socio-technical debates on infrastructure (e.g. Simone 2016; Wiig & Silver, 2019), Latin American urban politics (e.g. Goldfrank & Schrank, 2009), and policy mobilities (Montero, 2017; Whitney, 2022), this article examines the opening of urban planning investments, including an outdoor electric escalator, in La Araña, Mexico City. It also sheds light on political imaginations, image-making tactics, and notions of social mobility in the urban outskirts associated with “best practice” policy mobilities that fail on their promise or work only partially as intended.

In 2017, Mexico City’s officials hired Medellin’s municipal planners as consultants to replicate some of Medellin’s social urbanism interventions, including what they branded “Escalators of Justice” in La Araña. La Araña is an economically marginalized neighborhood geographically removed from Mexico City’s central areas. The escalator, and several other investments, were directly inspired by social urbanism in Medellín’s Comuna 13, where escalators were implemented with functional goals to improve accessibility in the neighborhood and as part of an anti-poor agenda grounded on claims to social inclusion. Since its construction in 2011, Medellin’s escalators in Comuna 13 have stimulated new imaginations of social mobility for low-income dwellers who may now see themselves as emerging middle-class citizens able to access –if nothing else– innovative infrastructure at their doorsteps (Sotomayor, 2015; 2017). The Medellin-Mexico City policy mobility was grounded on political claims to social justice and neighbourhood improvement for Mexico City’s poorest.

Despite the promise of Medellin’s “best practice,” the neighbourhood improvement interventions in La Araña had little articulation with other local and city-wide infrastructures. The public works were awkwardly sited and designed: they were abandoned midway or were scaled down to the point that they were insufficient to be useful for most residents. With a flawed design and a newly elected mayor, the escalators and adjacent projects were shut down only two years after the inauguration.
Instead of explaining this case as a failure, nonetheless, we aim to overcome the success/failure dualism present in much of the policy mobility research that pits best practices against policy failures, recognizing that the mobility of all policies, social urbanism or otherwise, carries nuances and complexities that are better understood relationally (McCann & Ward, 2011). We find that an adequate approach to elucidate current outcomes, in this case, is to situate the escalators’ malfunctions within Mexico City’s normalized landscape of infrastructural breakdowns and patchwork repairs. As Boudreau (2022) observes, breakdowns and “practices of repair” are key to understanding the pace of urban life and ideas of futurity, but also governance relations in Mexico City. In examining this case, we also ask whether and how reimagining these escalators may afford a chance for community-centred innovation and what the opportunities are for more equitable place-making at the infrastructural repair stage.


Keywords: infrastructure malfunctions; social urbanism; urban governance; policy mobilities; equity planning.


References:
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Goldfrank, B., & Schrank, A. (2009). Municipal neoliberalism and municipal socialism: urban political economy in Latin America. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(2), 443-462.
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McFarlane, C. (2021) Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Montero, S. (2017). Study tours and inter-city policy learning: Mobilizing Bogotá’s transportation policies in Guadalajara. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49(2), 332-350.
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