Emancipatory agroecologies: social and political principles

ABSTRACT

We examine how the policies of governments and the projects of international agencies and many NGOs strip agroecology of its emancipatory potential. Adhering to the conventional logic of development, they reinforce or create dependencies, individualize communities, convert use values into exchange values, incorporate peoples into hierarchical structures of domination, promote the belief that peoples must be saved from poverty through the intervention of a benefactor, and teach to act based on capitalist economic rationality. Emancipatory agroecologies, on the other hand, are radically transformative processes which we summarize in seven principles.

KEYWORDS:

• Agroecology
• cooptation
• autonomy
• social movements
• critique of development

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In this essay, we assume that the reader is familiar with agroecology. For those who require updating or expanding their knowledge on the subject, we recommend Rosset and Altieri (2017).

2 Major global movements promoting agroecology include La Via Campesina (LVC), the Agroecology Movement of Latin America and the Caribbean (MAELA), the Réseau des Organizaciones Campesinas y de Productores de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (ROPPA), the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers (WFF), the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP), and many others (see LVC 2015a). Beyond these are national groupings like the National Agroecology Articulation (ANA) in Brazil, which brings together peasant organizations, NGOs and academics, and national and international scientific societies like the Brazilian Agroecology Society (ABA) and the Latin American Scientific Society for Agroecology (SOCLA). In the Latin American case in particular, these academic spaces are quite aligned with, and even form part of, agroecological social movements (see for example Rosset et al. 2022).

3 See their website: https://croplife.org/news/what-is-agroecology/.

4 In terms of budget and scope, Sembrando Vida is one of the largest public policies in the world in the fields of agroforestry and agroecology. Its objective is to reforest one million hectares with agroecological agroforestry systems driven by monthly direct cash transfers granted to 400,000 Mexican peasant and indigenous persons. For a description and critique of this enormous social program, see Sandoval Vázquez (2021), and our webinar, ‘Understanding Sembrando Vida: The governmental programme in Mexico that inspired the COP agreement on reforestation,’ 25 November 2021, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9STiBJJYfv4 (English) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S90MeoN6fM (Spanish).

5 An example among many are the agroecological principles proposed by Altieri and Nicholls (2010): (1) Plant and animal diversification within the agroecosystem; (2) Recycling of nutrients and organic matter; (3) Management of organic matter and stimulation of soil biology to provide optimal conditions for crop growth; (4) Minimizing water and nutrient loss by maintaining soil cover, erosion control, and microclimate management; (5) Adopting preventive measures to control insects, pathogens and weeds, and; (6) Taking advantage of the synergies and symbiosis that emerge from plant-animal interactions.

6 Although Anderson et al. (2020) do include healthy reference to the emancipatory potential of agroecology.

7 In an earlier formulation of these arguments (Giraldo and Rosset, 2021), published in Spanish, we proposed 6 principles. In this much more up-to-date version, we have added the principle of autonomy.

8 See https://www.ecosur.mx/masificacion-agroecologia/.

9 Among the LVC organizations with which we have conducted research are the National Association of Small Farmers of Cuba (ANAP) (Machín Sosa et al. 2010; Rosset et al. 2011), the National Peasant Union (UNAC) of Mozambique (Val 2021), the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) in India (Khadse et al. 2018), the Federation of Agrarian Reform Cooperatives (FECORACEN) in El Salvador (Murguia et al. 2020), the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil (Fernandes et al. 2021; Borsatto and Souza-Esquerdo 2019), the Association of Rural Workers (ATC) in Nicaragua (McCune et al. 2017), and Boricuá in Puerto Rico (McCune et al. 2019). We have also documented the Campesino a Campesino processes in the framework of LVC at the international level (Val et al. 2019) and its training schools in Latin America (Rosset et al. 2019).

10 In Mexico, we have done work with Grupo Vicente Guerrero (Tlaxcala) (García and Giraldo 2021), Café Ecológico de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas (CESMACH) (Guzmán et al. 2019; Santiago et al. 2021), the Asociación Rural de Interés Colectivo Independiente y Democrática (ARIC-ID) (Chiapas) (Miranda 2019), the Centro de Desarrollo Integral Campesino de la Mixteca ‘Hita Nuni’ A. C. (CEDICAM) in Oaxaca (Royero-Benavides et al. 2019), and the ecological agriculture school U Yits Ka ́an in Yucatán (Valentín et al. 2020). In Colombia, work has been carried out with the Red de Semillas Criollas y Nativas (García et al. 2019), the Red de Mercados Agroecológicos del Valle (Franco et al. Unpublished), in Venezuela with the Cooperativa La Alianza (Domené-Painenao et al. 2020) and in Guatemala in the Maya-Achí territory of Baja Verapaz (Einbinder and Morales 2020; Einbinder et al. 2019, 2022). We have also researched public policies on agroecology in Latin America (Giraldo and McCune 2019). Finally, we draw on the lifelong experience of the second author, who beyond being an academic has also been a longtime staff member of LVC at the international level, and in Mexico.

11 Today, contrary to popular belief, industrial agriculture does not feed the world. Despite having 75% of farmed land, it provides only 30% of the world's food. Small scale producers, fishers, animal herders and collector/gatherers, on the other hand, provide 70% of the food (ETC Group 2022), much of which is produced using traditional agroecological practices. The political objective is that peasant production, which already feeds humanity, should be transformed in its entirety towards agroecology, and that it should eventually grow to encompass the entire agri-food system.

12 An example is the Sembrando Vida program in Mexico, which pushes exogenous cropping systems such as the Milpa Intercalada con Arboles Frutales (MIAF), which is at the same time an appropriation of the ancestral Mexican corn-bean-squash cropping system known as the milpa, and is a simplification and homogenization of it, which ignores local indigenous peasant knowledge. There are many reports of how government agronomists (many of them young people from urban backgrounds and recent university graduates), pressured by their superiors, force farmers to carry out practices that are irrational under local conditions, under the threat that if they do not do so they may be sanctioned and stop receiving the generous cash-transfer subsidy granted to participants by the Mexican government (Ceccam 2022). On the other hand, Valentin Val (2021), in a study conducted in Mozambique, documents how there is a showcase agroecology used to ‘hoodwink’ NGO staff, which local people call agroecologia para inglês ver (‘agroecology for the English to see’). A kind of ‘Potemkin village’ agroecology or performance in which communities, in a theatrical way, show outsiders how they prepare bocachi, biopreparations and natural repellents – practices they have learned in project workshops but which they do not use in their farms – and which serve as a kind of choreography to attract resources from development projects. For these communities, agroecology is associated with foreign practices that demand a lot of time and raw materials, although in reality their traditional agriculture is profoundly agroecological. Another example of how NGOs often design projects that ignore ancestral agriculture and local knowledge is found in the work of Einbinder and Morales (2020), Einbinder et al. (2019, 2022) in the Maya-Achi territory of Guatemala.

13 This is not to say that expert knowledge and Western-style science are not useful for farmers. In fact, methodologies such as Campesino a Campesino dialog with scientists and with so-called scientific knowledge. What we are questioning is the top-down logic with which rural development programs and projects are typically designed.

14 In Central America and Mexico, the Campesino a Campesino (Peasant to Peasant) movement lost strength when NGOs started paying promoters, as they neglected their plots, lost credibility with their neighbors and began to acquire the vices of professional extensionists, telling other peasants what to do.

15 Of course, this is not to deny the importance of productivity. In fact, agroecological science over at least the last 40 years has consistently shown that total production from agroecology is typically higher than from conventional monoculture (see data in Ch. 2. of Rosset and Altieri 2017). Beyond productivism, however, social movements understand agroecology as a way of life, and not as a technicality to be measured exclusively or even mainly by the criteria of neoclassical economic rationality.

16 The original quote says:

La lógica sería ésta: tienes una autonomía, ahora la reconozco en una ley y entonces tu autonomía empieza a depender de esa ley y ya no sigue sosteniendo sus formas, y luego, cuando va a haber un cambio de gobierno, entonces tienes que apoyar al gobierno ‘bueno’, y votar por él, promover el voto por él, porque si entra otro gobierno van a quitar la ley que te protege. Entonces nos convertimos en los peones de los partidos políticos … . (Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés and Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano 2018)

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially carried out thanks to a grant from the BPV program of the Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (FUNCAP) in Brazil, and with the support of the Social Research Institute (CUSRI) of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. It was also supported by a Bolsa de Produtividade em Pesquisa of the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) of the government of Brazil.

Notes on contributors

Omar Felipe Giraldo

Omar Felipe Giraldo Omar Felipe Giraldo holds a PhD in Agricultural Sciences from the Department of Rural Sociology of the Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo. He is currently a professor at the Merida Unit of the National School of Advanced Studies (ENES) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Previously he was a researcher and professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Chiapas, Mexico, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Social Research Institute (IIS) of the UNAM. Email: [email protected]

Peter Michael Rosset

Peter M. Rosset is Researcher and Professor in Agriculture, Society and the Environment at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Chiapas, Mexico. He is also BPV-FUNCAP Professor and Permanent Professor of the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia of the Universidade Estadual do Ceará (PPGS/UECE), Ceará, Brazil; Collaborating Professor in the Programa de Pós–Graduação em Desenvolvimento Territorial na América Latina e Caribe (TerritoriAL), Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), São Paulo, Brazil; and Visiting Professor at the Social Research Institute (CUSRI) of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. He is an Emeritus member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of the Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) of Mexico, and a Productivity Fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) of Brazil. Email: [email protected]