MasAgro o MIAF ¿Cuál es la opción para modernizar sustentablemente la agricultura tradicional de México

Official agricultural statistics for the last 35 years (SIAP, 2017) suggest that the advance in MasAgro’s objective of increasing rainfed maize production at national level and its yield is negligible. The authors of this paper call it unlikely that this goal will be achieved in the remaining five years of the program In this paper, the milpa intercalated with fruit trees technological system (MIAF) is discussed, as an alternative to MasAgro, in order to make traditional small-scale agriculture in Mexico more productive and sustainable. The MIAF has been developed by the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agricolas y Pecuarias and the Colegio de Postgraduados in Agricultural Sciences for more than 30 years of collaboration. Its design pursues the intensification of the paradigm of traditional agriculture (PAT) in small scale. It retains key advantages of the historic milpa as a) resilience supported by biodiversity; and b) relative land efficiency greater than the unity. It also takes advantage of the living wall terrace technology formed with fruit trees, to protect the soil against erosion and to increase family income and employment. It is concluded that MIAF is the technology indicated to modernize traditional small-scale agriculture in Mexico.