Institutionalization of the Agroecological Approach in Brazil: Advances and Challenges

Abstract

This article sketches a brief panorama of the advances and challenges involved in the implementation of the agroecological approach in Brazilian institutions. It begins with an account of the struggles of rural social movements working at the deepest grassroots level of the country's “agroecological field.” The processes that led to the creation and development of the National Agroecology Alliance (ANA) and the Brazilian Agroecology Association (ABA-Agroecologia) are presented as a key part of the construction now under way. Taking as a baseline the evolutions in the internalization of agroecology in official teaching, research, and rural extension services, the article identifies some of the powerful practical, theoretical, and politico-ideological obstacles preventing the rupture with the paradigm of modernization on the part of state institutions.

Keywords:

• political agroecology
• Brazil

Notes

1. The Combined Meeting of Workers and Rural, River and Forest Peoples, held in August 2012, represented a landmark in the building of convergences. For the first time, the principal rural social movements made explicit their decision to adopt agroecology as the guiding framework for implementing structural transformations in rural Brazil (Encontro Unitário dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras, Povos dos Campos, das Águas E Das Florestas 2012).

2. The social construction of local markets, which allow food production and consumption to be brought closer together, is another expression of these actively constructed responses to the processes of corporative concentration in the agrifood systems (Wilkinson 2008).

3. A key role in the process can be attributed to Ana Maria Primavesi and José Lutzemberger, two prominent intellectual leaders in this nascent movement.

4. The curricula of many of these new courses presented as “agroecological” are shaped by the promotion of organic farming based on input substitution and adopt conventional forms of teaching.

5. Despite the undeniable advance that it represents, EMBRAPA's recent launch of a portfolio of technologies generated for ecologically based farming systems reveals the difficulty of breaking with the diffusionist approach founded on the logic of technology transfer. For further information see: http://www.embrapa.br/embrapa/imprensa/noticias/2012/setembro/3a-semana/embrapa-lanca-portfolio-com-tecnologias-para-agricultura-organica-e-agroecologia (accessed on September 23, 2012).

6. The EMBRAPA research system includes two national level projects that have been generating a significant volume of technical information. However these results remain linked to the “input substitution” approach, which, in practice, does not favor the expansion of the ‘agroecological paradigm’ within the institution (Mussoi 2011).

7. As part of its process of legitimization, the modernization of farming relied on a powerful ideological offensive that was able to associate orthodox economic theory with a scientific-technological paradigm under construction. However, the affirmation and dissemination of the productivist paradigm in material terms relied on the definitive intervention of national states and their apparatuses. The interventionist-type development projects depend on discourses that promote the idea that the problems of development are better approached when, through mechanisms of diagnosis and prescription, they simplify the complex reality into a series of realities taken to be independent by the sector-based approaches that organize the state. This image of intervention policy and processes is reinforced by the notion of a “project cycle” that situates various activities (definition of the problem, formulation of alternatives, policy design, implementation and evaluation of results) in a linear and logical sequence (Long 2007).

8. Indeed, the rhetoric of coexistence has been a powerful device employed by proponents of agribusiness in the political arena in which the debates on rural development take place. This rhetoric is applied at various geographical scales with the purpose of legitimizing the progressive expropriation of family farming's means of production. At a macro scale we see the occupation of entire territories by monocrops under the allegation that other territories are granted to family farming. At a local level, the claim is made that conventional and organic farming, or transgenic and non-transgenic agriculture, can coexist when it is well known that the dispersal of pesticides and the pollen of GMOs does not respect the physical limits of the production units. At both scales, the rhetoric of coexistence obscures the fact that what is under dispute are the territories and that the territorial rights of family farming are being violated.