Food Sovereignty and The Regeneration Of Terraced Landscapes

The emerging food sovereignty paradigm offers a viable alternative for food, farming and well−being in terraced landscapes and the territories they are embedded in. This paper first defines ‘food sovereignty’ and briefly describes the origins and history of this policy framework for food and agriculture. The second part of this paper then discusses some of the key ecological, economic, political and social challenges for the spread of food sovereignty to more people and places. The paper argues that by putting farmers and other people at the centre, food sovereignty can allow the historically important architects and custodians of terraced landscapes to regenerate local ecologies, economies, and cultures as part of a new modernity

From Transition to Domains of Transformation: Getting to Sustainable and Just Food Systems through Agroecology

The acceleration of ecological crises has driven a growing body of thinking on sustainability transitions. Agroecology is being promoted as an approach that can address multiple crises in the food system while addressing climate change and contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond the more technical definition as, “the ecology of food systems”, agroecology has a fundamentally political dimension. It is based on an aspiration towards autonomy or the agency of networks of producers and citizens to self-organize for sustainability and social justice. In this article, we use the multi-level perspective (MLP) to examine agroecology transformations. Although the MLP has been helpful in conceptualizing historic transitions, there is a need to better understand: (a) the role of and potential to self-organize in the context of power in the dominant regime, and (b) how to shift to bottom-up forms of governance—a weak point in the literature. Our review analyzes the enabling and disabling conditions that shape agroecology transformations and the ability of communities to self-organize. We develop the notion of ‘domains of transformation’ as overlapping and interconnected interfaces between agroecology and the incumbent dominant regime. We present six critical domains that are important in agroecological transformations: access to natural ecosystems; knowledge and culture; systems of exchange; networks; discourse; and gender and equity. The article focuses on the dynamics of power and governance, arguing that a shift from top down technocratic approaches to bottom up forms of governance based on community-self organization across these domains has the most potential for enabling transformation for sustainability and social justice

Feeding the People: Agroecology for Nourishing the World and Transforming the Agri-Food System

Agroecology is an idea inspiring more and more people, but it means different things to different people. Altieri (1983) defined it as the application of ecological principles to agriculture. This definition of agroecology includes farmers and farmers’ knowledge, and it sees farmers as stewards of the landscape, of biodiversity and of the diversity of foods. In 2002, Altieri developed his concept further when he proposed that agroecological systems should be based on five ecological principles: 1) recycling biomass and balancing nutrient flows and availability; 2) securing favourable soil conditions for plant growth by enhancing the organic matter; 3) minimizing losses of solar radiation, water and nutrients by managing the microclimate and soil cover, and practising water harvesting; 4) enhancing biological and genetic diversification on cropland; and 5) enhancing beneficial biological interactions and minimizing the use of pesticides

Financing agroecological transformations for territorial agri-food systems:Beyond the myth of financial scarcity

Today’s industrial agri-food system has significant negative impacts on the environment and society, including biodiversity loss, freshwater pollution and consumption, and contributing nearly 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Agroecology offers an alternative paradigm for agriculture and food systems. Diverse agroecological practices seek to imitate the structure and function of natural ecosystems and build socio-ecological resilience at different scales. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Panel on Climate Change both endorse the benefits and huge potential of agroecology for mitigating and adapting to climate change. But the most recent estimates show that transforming global agri-food systems toward more nutritious, inclusive, and net-zero models could cost up to USD 500 billion per year. The mainstream view is that public financial resources are not sufficient to transform agri-food systems for sustainability and that private finance is therefore essential to fill the funding gap. However, evidence presented in this paper debunks this deeply ingrained myth of financial scarcity. It identifies an abundance of public and private money potentially available to transform agri-food systems for climate repair and biodiversity conservation, and help achieve other goals, such as poverty alleviation, responsible consumption and production, reduced inequities, and food security. Accessing this finance will involve (i) redirecting finance, subsidies, and research away from industrial agri-food systems and greenwashing toward re-localized agri-food systems based on short food chains and circular degrowth metabolisms; (ii) using taxation to access hitherto untapped sources of finance and discourage destructive systems; and (iii) financing inclusive and participatory democracy to counteract the power of wealthy elites at this critical moment in history. The paper concludes by calling on agroecology practitioners to defy disciplinary boundaries and obedient knowledge, and develop new social norms and transformative visions for finance outside of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy