Two sides of the same coin: increasing material extraction rates and social environmental conflicts in Mexico

Abstract

This article seeks to explain the multiplication of social environmental conflicts in Mexico as a consequence of expanding and intensifying extractive activities. It examines how the Mexican state has provided private and foreign capital greater access to the country’s natural resources in the transition from state-led import-substituting industrialization to export-oriented market-led development. This, it argues, has led to accelerating material extraction rates in the context of rising global demand for primary commodities; while the negative environmental and social impacts have in turn led to a growing number of conflicts involving the inhabitants of directly affected rural communities, who organize to resist. Based on standardized procedures for material flow analysis, it presents the results of an investigation into the domestic extraction rates of minerals, metal ores, biomass, and fossil fuels from Mexico, between 1990 and 2018. It finds that domestic extraction rates increased significantly during this period, with the exception of fossil fuels, which peaked in 2006, declining thereafter due to the exhaustion of the country’s most important oil reserves. The evolution of domestic extraction rates is juxtaposed with the emergence of related social environmental conflicts by drawing on multiple databases of conflicts around extractive activities in Mexico.