Social structure in an artisanal cocoa production network: La Chontalpa, Tabasco.

Abstract

The transformation of cocoa into a global commodity, with growing commercial value, resulted in a broad field of value extraction and modulation of local and regional agrifood systems, generating specific conditions of territorial planning and integration of local actors, but also creating structural, economic, legal and normative conditions in detriment of the artisanal peasant production of cocoa (Theobroma cocoa L.). However, rural communities are always trying to reformulate these parameters from their own organizational dynamics, rooted in the sociocultural processes that allowed cocoa to become an important food for ancient and current societies. The region of Chontalpa, Tabasco, concentrates more than 68% of the cocoa productive system in the country, and also focalizes an agrifood system and a field of conflict between conventional agroindustry and the artisanal way of cultivating cocoa, mainly because the latter tends to differ from the productivism of the former, but from an agroecological approach and the emergence of local relational structures. With the Social Network Analysis, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a group of key informants (artisanal cocoa producers), which allowed identifying relationships of input exchange (training, marketing and financing), as well as the degree of influence between cocoa producers. Networked social sub-structures were observed, through which information is handled in topics such as marketing, training, counseling, and financing of cocoa. These processes are characterized by being highly differentiated and hierarchical in access to this information, which generates growing conditions of vulnerability for cocoa producing communities.