Agroecology and the reconstruction of a post-COVID-19 agriculture

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 crisis has created a moment where existing calls for agroecology acquire new relevance. Agroecology provides a path to reconstruct a post-COVID-19 agriculture, one that is able to avoid widespread disruptions of food supplies in the future by territorializing food production and consumption. There are five main areas in which agroecology can point the way to a new post-COVID-19 agriculture: overcoming the pesticide treadmill, enriching nature’s matrix, revitalizing small farms, creating alternative animal production systems and enhancing urban agriculture.

KEYWORDS:

• Agroecology
• COVID-19
• vulnerability
• equitable food systems
• resilience

Acknowledgements

We have written this article not so much as academic researchers, but more as agroecology practitioners. This is the reason why we opted to have this article in the Grassroots Voices forum of Journal of Peasant Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miguel A. Altieri

Miguel A. Altieri studied agronomy at the University of Chile, and graduated with a PhD in entomology at the University of Florida. In 1981 he became Professor of agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley. Now Professor Emeritus of Agroecology, he taught for more than three decades courses in agroecology, rural development and urban agriculture at Berkeley as well as in various Universities in Latin America, Japan, Italy, Spain and other countries. He is the author of more than 230 scientific papers and author of more than 20 books published in various languages, including the classic: Agroecology-the Science of Sustainable Agriculture.

Clara I. Nicholls

Clara Ines Nicholls is a Colombian agronomist with a PhD in Entomology and Biological Control from the University of California -Davis. She is a Permanent Lecturer on Sustainable Rural Development in Latin America at the University of California, Berkeley. She also teaches in various universities in Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Argentina, Spain and Italy. She served as the president of the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology (SOCLA) and is co-director of the Centro LatinoAmericano de Investigaciones Agroecologicas (CELIA-www.celia.agroeco.org). She is the author of 4 books (among them Biodiversity and Pest Management in Agroecosystems) and of more than 50 scientific journal papers.