Brian Palmer-Rubin
Book project · Working title
Mexico’s booming exports of berries, avocados, tequila, and mezcal have transformed rural economies. Yet access to these markets—and the benefits they generate—is deeply uneven. Some producers build profitable businesses, while others confront barriers to entry, dependence on powerful buyers, and growing pressure on land and water.
The Fruits of Our Labor asks when high-value export agriculture can support inclusive and environmentally sustainable rural development.
The project combines ethnographic field research, field experiments, satellite data, and original surveys with interviews and historical analysis. Together, these methods connect the politics of sector-wide regulation with the decisions facing individual producers and rural communities.
Who Benefits from an Export Boom?
The book compares four industries that connect Mexican producers to international consumers through strikingly different arrangements. These range from contract farming with multinational berry companies to artisanal mezcal production, alongside the distinctive regulatory systems governing avocados and tequila.
The central question is political: how do governments, firms, and producer organizations shape the rules determining who participates, how production occurs, and who captures its value?
By tracing the development of these industries through trade liberalization and subsequent market expansion, the project examines how early policy choices create opportunities and constraints—and how producers organize to change them.
Community Institutions and Rural Opportunity
Entering a lucrative market is only part of the challenge. Producers must manage investment risks, respond to volatile demand, and sustain the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend.
A second strand of the project examines how cooperatives, collective landholding institutions, and other community organizations help rural producers meet these challenges. It considers how relationships within communities—and connections to organizations outside them—can support investment, preserve artisanal production, and enable collective management of land and water.
The broader aim is to understand how participation in global markets can expand rural opportunity without undermining the social and ecological foundations that make it possible.
Related Publications
The Berry Revolution: Non-Traditional Agriculture and Economic Opportunity in Mexico. ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, February 25, 2024.
Work in Progress
Beyond Expansion: Spatial Permanence and Turnover in Mexico’s Protected Berry Agriculture
With Iskar Waluyo-Moreno and José Mauricio Galeana-Pizaña.
The Moral Economy of the Entrepreneur: Land Reform and Rural Upgrading in Mexico
Social Capital and Rural Upgrading: Cocoa in West Africa
With Alexander Jelloian.
Community and Craft: Traditional Governance in the Mezcal Industry