THE MILPA AS A SUSTAINABLE ALTERNATIVE ORIENTED TO GOOD TO LIVE

Abstract

The article analyzes how the so-called milpa system, based on diversity and complementarity, in addition to consisting of a low entropy model as it operate with its own energy, and highly resilient, is more “efficient” than monoculture, since in small plots provides sufficient assets for the social reproduction of a family. It is argued that it has been persecuted and repressed from public policies aimed at promoting market insertion and, in return, the need to reassess it, understanding that it responds to a different model,the reproductive logic, whose objective is the satisfaction of needs, of the members of the Domestic Unit.
In this sense, it is argued and intended to demonstrate, based on case studies in Tlaxcala-Mexico, how it constitutes a logic of thought, based on diversity and complementarity, that is opposed to rational-Cartesian thinking, which is based on the opposition and singularity. As a logic of thought, it does not apply exclusively to agricultural production, but to other fields of social life. Communitarianism and the domestic unit would be referents of the existence of collective subjects, rather than individual ones, while the meaning of production, understood as reproductive logic, would provide the good living of such collective subjects. It is argued and intended to show that it is a rationality founded on different premises, that is to say another epistemology, whose advantages lie in the density of social relations and with nature and its disadvantages, communal authoritarianism.