The Stenocereus montanus plant is a wild cactus that is widely distributed in the arid and semi-arid territories of northwestern Mexico. It provides the inhabitants of the region with a fruit whose collection and sale is economically profitable for the families that dedicate themselves to it during the almost three months that the annual season lasts; the economic spillover that this entails hasn't been studied. Therefore, its analysis in this chapter serves as a frame of reference for a change of vision regarding its potential use as a trigger for economic, social, and sustainable development.
TopIntroduction
Concretely, in agrarian aspects, Sinaloa is a state known as “Mexico’s barn”, due to its estimated agrarian production of 1,029,978.08 hectares, which by 2022, has represented a production value of $70,194,634.88 mexican pesos. (AEPA, 2023). However, despite the region’s large amount of farming land and an adequate weather for the growth of products such as corn, beans, wheat, tomato, pepper, mango, among others, the people from mountainous areas can opt for wild flora of temporary growth, this, along with other socio-demographic aspects, limits economic development of rural communities (CONEVAL, 2018).
The fact that rural communities use wild life resources as a complement for their economy and subsistence, has been widely studied, as we see in the document from the World Union for the Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Program for the Environment and the World Forum of Wild Life (IUCN/PNUMA/WWF, 1991), that approaches the topic from a standpoint where the communities: look for sustenance and a good life, depend on the local resources and there is egalitarian distribution of the benefits, considering sustainability.
For our region, this is not different, and one of the most appreciated resources for the people are arborescent cacti the Stenocereus genus, these plants can be found in arid and semi-arid zones. Many of the populations where we can find this fruit take advantage of its sale and consumption, generating a positive impact for the inhabitants of the community (Lopez Vazquez, 2018).
The inhabitants of the zones where this plant proliferates, work taking advantage and recollecting the pitaya in the months of April, May and June; fulfilling the role of social and economic activity. However, recollection of this fruit is not exempt from difficulties, given that the first challenge to obtain it is to lower it from considerable heights and it has thorns that need to be removed for consumption or sale, moreover, each year, the amount of collected fruit diminishes, given that it gets affected by fires (common in the area) and the change in soil usage for agriculture.
Characteristics of the S. montanus
The Stenocereus genus is one of the most diverse in the whole world, including 23 species, out of which we find 19 in Mexico, distributed in almost all the country (Bravo and Sanchez, 1991). Eight of them are endemic of Sinaloa, highlighting their usage: S. martinezii in Arroyo Grande, Sanalona; S. montanus in Choix and Badiraguato, and S. thurberi in El Fuerte and parts of Ahome (Hunt, 1999; Salomón, 2018).
The wide distribution and use the fruit has, would make us believe that it’s a widely studied species, however, it’s not, the amount of available information for the Stenocereus genus, and their synonyms in different scientific repositories, can be found only around 315 times, for Latin America, out of which 73 of them correspond to mexican territories and less than 10 of them to Sinaloa, most of them being found in work notes about the distribution of the species.