Casos de Cabildeo en México en los últimos años

Doing business

According to villagers, the most effective way of responding to drought was doing business, because compared with agricultural production, drought exerted very limited impact on business. The profit from successful business was much higher than the profit from farming.

The story of Zhao Wu’s household provides an example. Zhao is in his early fifties. He lives with his wife and his parents-in-law in Shijia. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Zhao is the hamlet head of Shijia as well as the forest ranger of the administrative village. At the time I met Zhao, he was serving his second term as the hamlet head. Zhao has two children. His son went to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province, as a migrant worker, after he graduated from senior high school. His daughter Shi Ling was the first university student of Shijia hamlet, and since graduation has worked in Kunming’s Subway Company. When Shi Ling was studying in university, her mother also migrated to Kunming, and worked as a waitress in an inn to economically and emotionally

support the girl’s education. During that period, Zhao withdrew from his office work to ensure enough time to work on the farm as well as take care of his aged in-laws. After his wife returned to the village in 2011, he was re-elected as the hamlet head. At that time, the consecutive years of drought had greatly eroded his household’s agricultural income. This pushed Zhao to seek off-farm opportunities. Meanwhile, his granddaughter was born in 2012 and was left with her maternal grandparents, who live in a county close to Kunming.

Zhao and his wife were eager to take care of the girl by themselves because she is considered part of their family, but this meant that their son and daughter-in-law needed to find local job opportunities better than their migrant work in Kunming.

In late 2012, the county government approved a new commercial street project. Zhao asked his son and daughter-in-law to bring their daughter back to the county city and run a restaurant on the commercial street. Both Zhao and his son were experienced chefs. The restaurant achieved great success in the first year and has maintained a stable income since. More importantly, it seems that running the restaurant not only helped the family escape the countryside when it was most heavily affected by drought, but also provided them with a stable place to stay and a stable income. This enable them to change their household registration and permanently reside in the county city.

Outmigration

Although doing business was viewed by villagers as the most favourable coping strategy, in all the field site hamlets, only a very small number of households were able to start their own business. One of the most common strategies villagers adopted in response to the great disturbances of agricultural production caused by drought was migrating out of the village in search of non-agricultural income earning opportunities. While disaster events are not the only factor that may lead to migration, there is a consensus in global disaster studies that rural outmigration is a common strategy for coping with changes in climatic and environmental conditions as it helps improve the employment and earnings prospects of migrants, and it may also help rural households through remittances (Adger et al. 2002, Wodon et al. 2014).

The recent consecutive years of drought exacerbated the decline of agriculture in rural Yunnan. Consequently, within the province, governments at all levels actively promoted villagers’ migration during the drought. Across the province, between 2009 and 2014, over 2 million villagers living in affected regions migrated out (Cui 2015, 5). Data from field site village committees also indicate an increase in the number of migrants, including both long-term and seasonal migrants, between 2009 and 2014. However, whether there was a strong link between the drought and Yunnan villagers’ migration remains debatable. The most obvious problem here is lack of reliable village committee data. As one village cadre in Shijia commented, “Since migration is a fluid and forever changing activity, we don’t have accurate figures on how many people are involved in migration. The county and township government keep encouraging villagers, especially young villagers to migrate out in response to the drought. According to the higher-ups, aside from earning incomes, migration was an effective way to lighten the burden of water shortages of rural households. Therefore, we reported a growth trend of villagers’ migration to the township government to indicate the effectiveness of their policy.”64 _{“However, it does not mean that we provided fictional figures,” he further}

argued, “It is common sense that since the middle and late 1980s, migration has become a common phenomenon in rural areas, and in recent years, more and more people are working outside the village.” Similar claims can also be heard from village cadres in other field sites, thus illustrating the uncertainty of the connections between drought and outmigration in the field site hamlets. Moreover, some village cadres pointed out that since the government did not provide any concrete support to people who migrated out during the drought, they really could not tell whether the increase of outmigration was a response to the drought or was merely a reflection of the general social and economic trends in rural China.

Nevertheless, in all the field site hamlets, there were villagers who reported that their family members or neighbours, who were engaged in agricultural activities before the occurrence of the drought, left their home and found waged employment opportunities in the city in order to deal with the adverse impact of drought. In general, migration was usually undertaken by individuals. In each field site hamlet, only a very

small number of households (less than 5 percent) migrated entirely. The issue of who migrated out within the household will be explored in Chapter 5.

Apart from long-term migration, seasonal migration to supplement income was also a common coping strategy adopted by households. Many households in the field site hamlets had some household members stay at home and work in the fields while others sought seasonal waged work in a nearby township or county. For example, I met Zhang Yunli in a township market. It was not a busy season for silkworm raising, so she was able to grow some vegetables and was selling them in the local market. Her husband was doing seasonal construction work in the neighbouring county. He left in November, after the couple had harvested all the silk, sold it to the silk company and cleared the land. According to Zhang, her husband would be back before the spring festival in February. He would join the early stage of silkworm raising, complete some of the labour-intensive tasks, such as growing mulberry trees, cleaning and fumigating the breeding room, then leave the village to find temporary work until the next harvest season.

Compared with other field site hamlets, Baijia had the least number of households engaging in either long-term or short-term migration during the drought. As the local industry in the region is much more developed than in other field site hamlets, it was more common for Baijia villagers to be employed in local businesses near their homes, such as the cement plant and quarry. Villagers generally went to work during the day, returned home at night, and quit the job during the busiest agricultural seasons. The number of these seasonal workers increased rapidly between 2009 and 2014, as the impact of drought on agricultural production became more severe. In 2014, 36 of the 58 households in Baijia had at least one member working in local industry; double the number before 2009.