Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty

Michael A. Alteiri

Global forces are challenging the ability of develop­ing countries to feed themselves. A number of countries have organized their economies around a competitive export-oriented agricultural sector, based mainly on monocultures. It may be argued that agricultural exports of crops such as soybeans from Brazil make significant contributions to the national economies by bringing in hard currency that can be used to purchase other goods from abroad. However, this type of industrial agriculture also brings a variety of economic, environmental, and social problems, including negative impacts on public health, ecosystem integrity, food quality, and in many cases disruption of traditional rural livelihoods, while accelerating in­debtedness among thousands of farmers.

The growing push toward industrial agriculture and globalization — with an emphasis on export crops, lately transgenic crops, and with the rapid expansion of biofuel crops (sugar cane, maize, soybean, oil palm, euca­lyptus, etc.) — is increasingly reshaping the world’s agriculture and food supply, with potentially severe economic, social, and ecological impacts and risks. Such reshaping is occurring in the midst of a changing climate expected to have large and far-reaching effects on crop productivity pre­dominantly in tropical zones of the developing world. Hazards include increased flooding in low-lying areas, greater frequency and severity of droughts in semiarid areas, and excessive heat conditions, all of which can limit agricultural productivity.

Globally, the Green Revolution, while enhancing crop production, proved to be unsustainable as it damaged the environment, caused dramatic loss of biodiversity and associat­ed traditional knowledge, favored wealthier farmers, and left many poor farmers deeper in debt.1 The new Green Revolution proposed for Africa via the multi-institutional Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) appears destined to repeat the tragic record left by the fertilizer dependent miracle seeds, in Latin America and Asia by increasing depen­dency on foreign inputs and patent-protected plant varieties which poor farmers cannot afford (for example, fertilizer costs went up approxi­mately 270 percent last year) and on foreign aid.2

In the face of such global trends, the concepts of food sovereignty and ecologically based production systems have gained much attention in the last two decades. New approaches and technologies involving application of blended modern agroecological science and indigenous knowledge systems spearheaded by thousands of farmers, NGOs, and some government and academic institutions have been shown to enhance food security while conserving natural resources, biodiversity, and soil and water throughout hundreds of rural communities in several regions.3 The science of agroecology — the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agricultural ecosystems — provides a framework to assess the complexity of agroecosystems.This approach is based on enhancing the habitat both aboveground and in the soil to produce strong and healthy plants by promoting beneficial organisms while adversely affecting crop pests (weeds, insects, diseases, and nematodes).4

Miguel A. Altieri is professor of agroecology at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of numerous articles and books on agroecology (http://www.agroeco.org). He has helped to coordinate programs on sustainable agriculture in Latin America and other regions for the United Nations and NGOs.