ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Land, Livelihoods and Food Security
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1630643
This article is part of the Research TopicIndigenous and Local Knowledge as a Catalyst for Sustainable Agriculture and Food SecurityView all 13 articles
The key role of learning by observing and pitching in (LOPI) in the resilience of Yucatec Maya food systems; bases for culturally sensitive extension programs
Provisionally accepted
Francisco J. Rosado-May1,2*
Bernardo Caamal Itzá3,4Valeria B Cuevas-ALbarrán1,2,5Loida Briceño Mukul6- 1Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, José María Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico
- 2Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, Mexico, JOSE MA MORELOS, Mexico
- 3Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas, Mexico, Peto, Mexico
- 4Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas, Mexico, Mexico, Mexico
- 5Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, Mexico, José Ma. Morelos, Q. Roo, Mexico
- 6Baktun Pueblo Maya, Jose Ma Morelos, Mexico
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The biodiversity in traditional Yucatec Maya food systems is well known and documented. However, through time more and more Indigenous farmers are incorporating inputs related to green revolution, causing negative impact on biodiversity, beekeeping, and changing the design and management of the food systems. Thus, the traditional resilience and biodiversity are threatened. With the objective of understanding whether the resilience and biodiversity of Yucatec Maya food systems are related to their cultural ways of learning, information was gathered using the Yucatec Maya method called tsikbal in four Maya communities. In each community two collaborating farmers, were selected; one had been farming for at least 20 years using only traditional ways, the other one had been farming incorporating elements of green revolution for at least 10 years. The information was organized based on the seven features of a paradigm called Learning by Observing and Pitching In, which emerged from several studies on how children in Indigenous communities, mostly Maya, learn. The results suggest that traditional farmers keep high biodiversity in their food system because their decisions and actions are based on the same features learned in their childhood. Based on these results, it is possible to suggest that the resilience and biodiversity of Yucatec Maya food systems are explained by their cultural ways of learning and creating knowledge developed overtime; when Yucatec Maya farmers introduce practices that come from other ways of knowing and change their local ways of learning with the objective of adapting to the new set of practices, the resilience and biodiversity of their food systems are negatively affected. These findings can be applied to extension programs to help the transformation of broken Indigenous food systems.
Keywords: Yucatec Maya, LOPI, Ali, Indigenous ways of learning, Extension programs, Food systems transformation. 1 Introduction
Received: 18 May 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rosado-May, Caamal Itzá, Cuevas-ALbarrán and Briceño Mukul. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Francisco J. Rosado-May, Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, José María Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.