Revising the concept of crop health from an agroecological perspective

ABSTRACT

The concept of health has been widely used to refer to soils, crops or agroecosystems. It resembles the idea of wholeness or general well-being, which is interesting to integrate different disciplines. There have been valuable contributions in the area of agroecological management of diseases, pests and weeds with the aim of promoting crop health. Nevertheless, they remain relatively disconnected and lack of a comprehensive conceptual framework that helps to define crop health and how to promote it. The aim of this article is to re-conceptualize the notion of crop health from a transdisciplinary and holistic perspective. The system of reference is redefined by including the relationships between the populations of domesticated plants and the farmers. This implies a multidimensional approach and assumes that crop health is related to farmers’ objectives, knowledge, point of views and values. Based on the review of studies in the field of agroecology, four components are proposed to evaluate crop health status: usefulness, adversities, safety and autonomy. Three components of health promotion were adapted from the salutogenic model proposed for human health: meaningfulness, comprehensiveness and manageability. This article intends to make a contribution on theoretical and conceptual aspects of a key concept for agroecology.

KEYWORDS:

• Crop protection
• disease
• pest
• weed
• transdisciplinarity

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the Doctor Thesis of D. Vega, which has been developed at the Doctoral Program in Agroecology, University of Antioquia (Medellin, Colombia), which is held in association with the Sociedad Científica Latinoamericana de Agroecología (SOCLA). S. L. Poggio is research scientist of CONICET, the National Research Council of Argentina. Authors declare that there is no conflict of interest related to this study. We thank Delfina Arancio Sidoti for kindly providing the photographs for Figure 4, and the team of the course Agroecosistemas campesinos (Facultad de Agronomía, Universidad de Buenos Aires) for promoting solidarity and closeness with the realities of peasant communities of Misiones (Argentina).