Can the state take agroecology to scale? Public policy experiences in agroecological territorialization from Latin America

ABSTRACT

In this article we use a food sovereignty frame to analyze the role of the State in favoring agroecological scaling, particularly in Cuba and in the Latin American countries that elected leftist governments in the first years of the 21st century and currently face an upsurge of right-wing political forces. As with social movement participation in international governance structures, at the national level social movements face risks when they allow themselves to become absorbed in collaborations with the State in order to build public policy for taking agroecology to scale. By participating in the institutionalization of agroecology, movements become part of the established rules of the game, having to move within limits defined by a system that exists to preserve the interests of the dominant class. On the other hand, by boycotting the arena of governance, agroecological movements allow resurgent political and economic elites to grab land, territories and resources needed for agroecological food systems to ever become a global substitute for industrial agriculture. At the heart of the matter is the political character of agroecology: shall we continue betting on reform, in times of (counter) revolution?

KEYWORDS:

• Scaling-up agroecology
• political agroecology
• the state
• social movements
• the right

Notes

1. Other works have made recommendations for the design of public policies (Parmentier 2014), or have evaluated the scope of political instruments for the scaling up of agroecology in the region (Sabourin et al. 2017). This article contributes a critical analysis of the contemporary State from the point of view of agroecological social movements.

2. We understand institutionalization as the process by which State institutions formally recognize agroecology through legal frameworks, public policies and other actions.

3. The process began with Macri in Argentina in 2015, followed by Temer (2016) in Brazil, Kuczynski-Vizcarra in Peru (2016), Morales in Guatemala (2016), Danilo Medina in the Dominican Republic (re-election 2016), Lenín Moreno in Ecuador (2017), Piñera in Chile (2017), Hernández in Honduras (2017), Abdo Benítez in Paraguay (2018), Duque in Colombia (2018), Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018) and Bukele in El Salvador (2019).

4. The best-known example of this is from the public procurement programs in Brazil, in which the Brazilian government purchased food from family farmers of the Small Farmers Movement (MPA) for school lunch programs. In the hands of the Temer government, data on cooperatives is now a tool for judicial harassment against the MPA.

5. Data obtained by INIFAT of the Ministry of Agriculture of Cuba.

6. National Animal Traction Program, National Organic Matter Production Program, Popular Rice Cultivation Program, National Soil Improvement and Conservation Program, National Program to Combat Desertification and Drought, National Forestry Program, Participatory Plant Improvement Program, Integral Forest Farms Program (Machín Sosa et al. 2013).

7. The figures: Agricultural Production Cooperatives (CPA) and Credit and Service Cooperatives (CCS), created by the State, were fundamental to configure a national structure articulated to ANAP around agroecology (Machín Sosa et al. 2013).

8. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.

9. The most dramatic case is the “soy republic” in South America. This is an area that in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia grew from 17 million to 46 million hectares between 1990 and 2010, and in which 20 million hectares were deforested from 2000 to 2010 (World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 2014).

10. We remember the principles from peasant to peasant: start slowly and in small, limit the introduction of technologies, experiment on a small scale.