Agroecology is in fashion, and now constitutes a territory in dispute between social movements and institutionality. This new conjuncture offers a constellation of opportunities that social movements ...can avail themselves of to promote changes in the food system. Yet there is an enormous risk that agroecology will be co-opted, institutionalized, colonized and stripped of its political content. In this paper, we analyze this quandary in terms of political ecology: will agroecology end up as merely offering a few more tools for the toolbox of industrial agriculture, to fine tune an agribusiness system that is being restructured in the midst of a civilizational crisis or, alternatively, will it be strengthened as a politically mobilizing option for building alternatives to development? We interpret the contemporary dispute over agroecology through the lenses of contested material and immaterial territories, political ecology, and the first and second contradictions of capital.
The origin and evolution of the transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina is analysed through five evolutionary stages. In the 1980s the withdrawal of the state from rural areas simultaneously ...weakened corporativist and clientelist control over rural organisations, even as conditions worsened in the countryside. This gave rise to a new generation of more autonomous peasant organisations, who saw the origins of their similar problems as largely coming from beyond the national borders of weakened nation-states. A transnational social movement defending peasant life, La Vía Campesina emerged out of these autonomous organisations, first in Latin America, and then at a global scale, during the 1980s and early 1990s (phase 1). Subsequent stages saw leaders of peasant organisations take their place at the table in international debates (1992-1999, phase 2), muscling aside other actors who sought to speak on their behalf; take on a leadership role in global struggles (2000-2003, phase 3); and engage in internal strengthening (2004-2008, phase 4). More recently (late 2008-present, phase 5) the movement has taken on gender issues more squarely and defined itself more clearly in opposition to transnational corporations. Particular emphasis is given to La Vía Campesina's fight to gain legitimacy for the food sovereignty paradigm, to its internal structure, and to the ways in which the (re)construction of a shared peasant identity is a key glue that holds the struggle together despite widely different internal cultures, creating a true peasant internationalism.
Rural Social Movements and Agroecology Rosset, Peter M.; Martínez-Torres, Maria Elena
Ecology and society,
01/2012, Letnik:
17, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Rural social movements have in recent years adopted agroecology and diversified farming systems as part of their discourse and practice. Here, we situate this phenomenon in the evolving context of ...rural spaces that are increasingly disputed between agribusiness, together with other corporate land-grabbers, and peasants and their organizations and movements. We use the theoretical frameworks of disputed material and immaterial territories and of re-peasantization to explain the increased emphasis on agroecology by movements in this context. We provide examples from the farmer-to-farmer movement to show the advantages that social movements bring to the table in taking agroecology to scale and discuss the growing agroecology networking process in the transnational peasant and family farmer movementLa Vía Campesina.
The transnational rural social movement La Vía Campesina has been critically sustained and shaped by the encounter and diálogo de saberes (dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) ...between different rural cultures (East, West, North and South; peasant, indigenous, farmer, pastoralist and rural proletarian, etc.) that takes place within it, in the context of the increasingly politicized confrontation with neoliberal reality and agribusiness in the most recent phase of capital expansion. This dialog among the ‘absences’ left out by the dominant monoculture of ideas has produced important ‘emergences’ that range from mobilizing frames for collective action – like the food sovereignty framework – to social methodologies for the spread of agroecology among peasant families.
This paper delineates the growth of Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) in India. From its origins as a peasant-led social movement in the state of Karnataka, to becoming institutionalized in a state ...program in Andhra Pradesh, ZBNF is attaining scale and reaching more and more peasant families. We look at some of the key factors that have triggered ZBNFs growth, as well as highlight some of the challenges and contradictions that may arise in the institutionalization process.
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.
According to the economic law of comparative advantage, agribusinesses should export the food, agrofuels and other products that are grown in a country, while cheaper foods are imported to feed the ...people. Because most of the global food reserves have been deregulated and are now controlled by the private sector, outside investors can buy and sell food in the same way that they speculate in gold or oil.
In this essay, we look at the symbolic and material territorialization of agroecology in La Via Campesina (LVC) through peasant-to-peasant processes (PtPPs) in the broad sense. The most significant ...examples of the scaling up of agroecology are clearly tied to organizational processes and in our perspective, PtPPs are the motor of these changes. We contend that agroecology, subjects, and territories are articulated in these processes, making up a powerful dispositive or device for agroecological transformation and scaling up. We also introduce a discussion on the emergence of a historical-political subject, the "agroecological peasantry," within the larger territorial dispute concerning the transformation of the agri-food system and living conditions in the countryside.
Agroecology as a transformative movement has gained momentum in many countries worldwide. In several cases, the implementation of agroecological practices has grown beyond isolated, local experiences ...to be employed by ever-greater numbers of families and communities over ever-larger territories and to engage more people in the processing, distribution, and consumption of agroecologically produced food. To understand the nonlinear, multidimensional processes that have enabled and impelled the bringing to scale of agroecology, we review and analyze emblematic cases that include the farmer-to-farmer movement in Central America; the national peasant agroecology movement in Cuba; the organic coffee boom in Chiapas, Mexico; the spread of Zero Budget Natural Farming in Karnataka, India; and the agroecological farmer-consumer marketing network "Rede Ecovida," in Brazil. On the basis of our analysis, we identify eight key drivers of the process of taking agroecology to scale: (1) recognition of a crisis that motivates the search for alternatives, (2) social organization, (3) constructivist learning processes, (4) effective agroecological practices, (5) mobilizing discourses, (6) external allies, (7) favorable markets, and (8) favorable policies. This initial analysis shows that organization and social fabric are the growth media on which agroecology advances, with the help of the other drivers. A more detailed understanding is needed on how these multiple dimensions interact with, reinforce, and generate positive feedback with each other to make agroecology's territorial expansion possible.
An important question in agroecology is that of social process methodology to achieve scaling. Despite the great achievements of the Campesino a Campesino (CaC) (peasant to peasant) methodology to ...multiply agroecological practices among the peasantry, many experiences continue to use the technical assistance conventional extension model, which consists of hiring technicians for a public sector institution, an international organization or a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to "transfer" agroecological practices to their clients or beneficiaries. CaC, instead, is designed to establish a network of farmers who share their own practices with each other, and the role of the technician changes to that of facilitator in the design and execution of the overall process. In this article we present a model in which we simulated the experience of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) in Cuba and compared it with conventional extension, systematically exploring which properties make CaC a more effective, less costly and more dynamic methodology for territorializing or scaling agroecology.
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