Abstract

ORTIZ YAM, Inés  and  ZULETA, María Cecilia. Neighborhood Affairs: Locusts, Agricultural Protection and the Rise of Pest Management in Mexico and Central America in the 20th Century. Hist. mex. [online]. 2020, vol.70, n.1, pp.313-373.  Epub Aug 28, 2020. ISSN 2448-6531.  https://doi.org/10.24201/hm.v70i1.4081.

This article studies the fight against locusts in Mexico and Central America in the first half of the 20th Century. The most devastating of these has been Schistocerca piceifrons, which has been a problem in this cross-border region since pre-Hispanic times. It studies the fight against this locust in two historic moments: the first is the domestic campaign in Mexico in the 1920s, primarily focused on Yucatán and Veracruz; the second is the Mexican-Central American campaign in the 1940s and 50s, with the formation of the International Techni cal Committee for the Fight against Locusts in Mexico and Central America. The analysis of the initial local and national stage of the anti-locust campaigns reconstructs how and with which regulatory tools and scientific and institutional mechanisms the plague was fought and controlled in the Gulf Coast and the Yucatán Peninsula, explaining the rise of state and federal pest management policies. The second stage, that of the Mexican-Central American campaign against locusts in the 1940s and 50s, is studied as an experience that went beyond the principles and methods of domestic pest management, leading to the creation of transnational animal and plant management and oversight bodies, intergovernmental agreements and scientific, technical and sanitary mechanisms for the entire Mesoamerican region, promoted by the FAO. This article argues that locusts interconnected a variety of bioregions in different countries, promoting both local control measures as well as national and supranational pest control regulations and applied entomological research, contributing to the birth of an agricultural biogeopolitics in Mexico and Central America.

Keywords : Locusts; Agricultural Protection; Mexico; Central America; History of Pest Control; Biogeopolitics.

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