Abstract
Agroecology is beginning to dominate agricultural policy debates with advocates arguing from within international organisations like the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization and the European Commission that its holistic approach provides the necessary solutions to the challenges facing agriculture today. This paper will analyse agroecology as a concept, a science, a series of farming practices and as a social movement relying on a recent Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy document as a theoretical benchmark. It will ask whether agroecology is a much needed global solution for our food system crisis or a political agenda being imposed on the most vulnerable farming communities. It will conclude with ten points that will argue in favour of the latter.
Keywords
Introduction
Agroecology is a loosely defined concept that is attempting to redefine agriculture and global food systems. It comes at a time when global food security levels are being stressed by increased food supply demands from growing, more affluent populations, climate and biodiversity threats, energy constraints affecting basic resource and mineral prices as well as global socio-economic, geopolitical tensions. The logical response to this situation would be that we would need more technological innovations and more intensive agriculture to ensure that these important challenges are met. But agroecology is promising just the opposite: an alternative paradigm that is committed to overturning almost every scientific achievement over the last 70 years.
As more and more political leaders and international organisations are calling for agroecology as the solution to our present challenges, we need to ask: What exactly is agroecology, what are the motives behind it and is this the needed solution for our present food system crisis or a political agenda a group of activists are imposing on the most vulnerable farming communities for other objectives?
Agroecology has been increasingly occupying headlines as the solution to address the agricultural challenges facing humanity, being touted at the highest levels of the United Nations Environment Programme, Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), European Commission and many development NGOs. But how will agroecology provide these solutions? There are many organisations claiming different principles and practices as ‘agroecological’ so this approach (also called a science, paradigm or movement) will need to be clearly defined. This is a challenge since proponents of agroecology usually cherry-pick what they believe in and what criticisms they need not address.
There is no doubt agroecology is growing as a political force in agricultural policy debates especially within the context of the resilience of food systems in the face of climate stresses as well as a means to reduce CO2 emissions from farming methods. The United Nations’ FAO has an Agroecology Knowledge Hub 1 with a significant budget for publications (High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, 2019), research and development projects. The European Commission, in a recent report (European Commission, 2022) on how to address the coming food security issues following the war in Ukraine, cited agroecological tools as key in the strategic approach of the European Union. This is not surprising given the NGO long-term strategy of integrating their advocates within transnational governments and agencies to ensure their issues are continually at the front of international policy debates.
But while there are many organisations promoting agroecology as the solution for global food systems, we need, in this paper, to clearly define what exactly agroecology is, and how it compares to other food system paradigms. A recent document (Varghese, 2022) by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) provides the most comprehensive resource for assessing agroecology, encompassing the myriad of definitions and values behind the academic and political food system movement. To avoid shifting baselines, this paper will focus only on the IATP document as the single benchmark for this paper's assessment of the two questions at hand: What is agroecology and is it the much needed global solution for our food system crisis or a political agenda being imposed on the most vulnerable farming communities?
The IATP is one of the founding organisations of the agroecology movement. It was formed in 1986 following a meeting in Geneva of rural farm movements who had recognised the need to strengthen links between global policy and local communities particularly given the consequences of international trade agreements. Based in Minneapolis and growing out of the US farm crisis of the 1980s and the GATT-WTO trade protests, IATP has become a main academic, political and social voice for agroecology. The document this paper will analyse was attributed to Shiney Varghese, a policy analyst at IATP, with support from several colleagues. She was a member of the Fourth Steering Committee of the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition that produced the key UN strategy documents on agroecology.
Defining agroecology
Agroecology is a challenging subject to discuss because many of its proponents define it differently and often very broadly within larger political contexts. If one tries to narrow it down to consider any element, the common retort is ‘Oh, but that is not what agroecology is about’. Rather than just concluding that agroecology is a slippery rhetorical tool for political activists, the IATP article provides a sufficient baseline from which to work. The first section of their paper defines agroecology as an ‘approach’, a ‘paradigm’ and a ‘movement’:
As an approach, agroecology is fundamentally different from other approaches to agriculture and food systems development and represents an alternative paradigm in direct contrast to industrial agricultural approaches. Agroecology integrates transdisciplinary knowledge, the practices of food producers and eaters, as well as the priorities of social movements, while recognizing their mutual dependence. Whereas the current industrialized system is extractive and exploitative, agroecology recognizes the interdependence of living systems and honor (sic) the principles of balance, diversity, harmony and respect. Agroecology creatively enables those involved in the food systems to connect with each other and solve problems specific to their unique situations.
The first syntactical observation is the use of the term ‘food eater’ rather than ‘consumer’ (which would imply markets, retail and a form of capitalist exchange). Rather than markets, agroecology wishes to put ‘social movements’ between food producers and food eaters. They also avoid the word ‘farm’ referring to farmers as ‘food system workers’ or ‘food producers’. As a prosumer, an agroecological food producer would be making food available to be eaten, I assume, within some social commune or collective. There does not seem, in this reframing of agriculture, to be room for a market or for a capitalist means to reward farmers for better yields.
IATP identifies agroecology as a science, a collection of agricultural practices and as a movement but they clearly prioritise the movement aspect. Specific aims of the movement include food sovereignty, respect for and preservation of local knowledge, social justice, maintenance of local identity and culture, and rights to local and Indigenous seeds and breeds.
In defining themselves as what they are not – agroecology as an ‘an alternative paradigm in direct contrast to industrial agricultural approaches’, neither extractive nor exploitative – the framers of this movement are limiting themselves in how farmers can produce, expand and prosper.
The vocabulary to describe agroecological values is identical to the key principles behind the social justice movement dominating the left wing of the American political spectrum: balance, diversity, harmony and respect. That social movement, intended to serve as the liaison between food producers and food eaters, is imposing its political ideologies upon farmers in the same manner as they are imposing them on other aspects of society. In other words, agroecology is but a chapter in the neo-Marxist handbook, applying its anti-capitalist, anti-growth, deindustrialisation, social justice standards to farming.
The need for a farmer-centric approach
This IATP definition of agroecology gets one point correct: I have argued frequently (Zaruk, 2019) about the need for better integration of food systems. Our food chain is presently driven by the large food manufacturers and retailers marketing products for what they feel the consumer would want (buy) without any dialogue with what the farmer can actually produce. So we see large consumer-facing companies touting labels like ‘pesticide-free’ or ‘non-GMO’, imposing their ESG commitments on the farmers’ shoulders and tightening up commodity prices to meet their margins without any dialogue with farmers on which objectives are possible or impossible to meet.
If farmers fail, the market moves elsewhere within a global food chain via seamless logistics channels – farmers have little importance within a structure dominated global farm commodity traders. I agree with the agroecologists that this system needs to change, but I would disagree with their solutions.
The food chain has many important links, starting not with the farmer, but the seed, the soil and the climate. Our variety of food cultures and diets have historically been built around what the local land could provide, long before the farmer breaks the soil. Every society has adapted their cuisine and traditions to what their farmers could grow and we needed to listen to them, rely on them and provide for them. But with globalisation, this essential bond has been broken, diets adjusted to multinational brands and global markets, large populations prospered and urbanised and most of us have lost any direct contact with the farmers, with where the food chain begins.
A Big Mac tastes the same all over the world, regardless where the ingredients were grown (or, soon, 3D printed in a lab). Farmers now have to listen to us, rely on us and our provisions. The European Commission's present Farm2Fork policy proposal is perhaps the best example of how the process has been turned on its head, with regulators imposing impossible pro-organic demands on farmers without any dialogue or understanding of the challenges facing European agriculture.
So while the IATP is correct in recognising that we need to better enable ‘those involved in the food systems to connect with each other and solve problems specific to their unique situations’, it fails to recognise how the food system begins with the farmer, the seed and the soil. While the conventional, market-driven food system imposes market forces on farmers, at least agronomists are actively trying to improve yields so farmers can survive and meet the demands. The agroecologists are much worse; they are imposing political and naturopathic ideologies on farmers, restricting their capacity to farm with no concern for the tools farmers require to do well. Worse than dictating market forces, agroecologists are systematically taking proven technological tools away from the farmers, on the basis of arbitrary, urban political beliefs imposed on the land.
Neither food system paradigm is farmer-centric – just the dictators have changed.
Agroecology is not about adopting the best farming techniques. It is not about the farmer. Rather it is about adapting farming to fit into a left-wing political ideology. Calling for more social justice, more diversity in crops, deindustrialising agriculture… is not about agriculture. Activists, with a global worldview led by their social movements, are intent on hammering every aspect of their anti-capitalist ideology into clear lines. So their views on food systems have to align with their social justice dogma (and if yields decline, farmers suffer and people go hungry, so be it). This is reminiscent of Soviet Russia's collectivisation experiment.
Is agroecology science-based?
IATP confirms that agroecology is science-based.
As a science, agroecology is: 1) the integrative study of the ecology of the entire food system, encompassing ecological, economic, social and political dimensions; 2) the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable food systems; and 3) the integration of research, education, action and change that brings sustainability to ecological, economic and social aspects of food systems.
If agroecology were to be considered a science, it would be a social science. Should it then be considered as credible as agronomy? If I have a medical illness, would I prefer to go to a doctor or a sociologist? If a farmer has a problem with a fungus or pest, should advice be sought from an agronomist or from a social justice lawyer? Of course many of the activists promoting agroecology also go to naturopaths and homeopaths when they are ill (and shun vaccines) so this analogy may be lost on them.
Agroecology relies on a series of naturopathic principles promoting many techniques established by the organic farming movement. While the IATP document tries to draw distinctions with organic and regenerative farming (and expands on that in their Crisis by Design series), the essential difference for the IATP authors is that as organic farming has grown rapidly, it is becoming more corporate, industrialised and market-driven while agroecology emphasises its political priorities.
Agroecology puts human and social values, such as dignity, equity, inclusion and justice, at its the center, in addition to its emphasis on the conservation of biological resources through diversity, synergies, efficiency, resilience and recycling.
How is this scientific?
The scientific method draws on all available information and choses the best course of action without discrimination or restriction. It continually challenges its theories, attempts to disprove or falsify them, to develop more robust and efficient principles. If agroecological practices provide the best means to grow food, protect soil and manage resources, science will not reject it on some arbitrary grounds – agroecology will become a core practice. But if using enhanced seed breeding or synthetic crop protection tools provide better, more sustainable yields and makes farmers’ lives better, then scientists will select these best practices. Agroecologists, blocked by a political bias, however, will refuse to consider these farming solutions if they are based on synthetic, industrial or non-holistic practices.
How is this scientific?
What is curious in the agroecology demand for a more integrated, holistic approach is that we already have this in our Western regulatory risk management process. Scientists perform risk assessments where the best data and technologies are gathered and developed into advice that includes farming conditions, ecology and yields. As risk managers, politicians take this advice into consideration with other social, political and economic factors. What is perhaps failing in this approach, and I would agree with the agroecologists here, is that today's Western leaders are not very good risk managers (incompetent or easily swayed by special interests). But the agroecologists’ solution of replacing the regulatory bodies with social movements (i.e. their NGOs) would likely have far worse consequences, with special interests dominating over facts and evidence and risk assessments being silenced according to arbitrary, naturopathic political dogma.
A political response to food crises
The IATP article recognises that the history of the concept of agroecology is built on crisis: the farm crisis in the US of the early 1980s; the crises of inequity in many developing countries under the GATT-WTO globalisation process; the climate change crisis; the crises of biodiversity loss, bees and soil depletion… If we only have ‘60 harvests left in our topsoil’, that is indeed a crisis. As every activist campaigner knows, a crisis demands immediate action and a fundamental shift in our paradigm and present practices.
This is a common tactic of many activist groups playing on the urgency of crises to motivate skittish policymakers to act immediately. No more discussions, no more business as usual – you must impose our (fill in specific activist campaign objectives here). But food systems have been reported to be in crisis since Malthus’ haunting predictions with a population growth of up to a billion people; since the 1930s Dust Bowl; since Ehrlich's ‘population bomb’ exploded with threats of continuous famines in the 1960s and 1970s; since the growth of development in a globalised world creating an enlarged emerging, urban middle class demanding richer diets…
But in every perceived crisis came a Norman Borlaug or a Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, whose ingenuity and commitment ensured that humanity could continue to thrive off of the limited available farmland. Each crisis was foreboding the ‘end of days’ unless we return to traditional practices. Each activist response was severely overestimating the crisis and underestimating the power of human ingenuity. After a long history of excessive scaremongering, you would think we would be better able to temper these alarm bells.
Now with the crisis of climate change and biodiversity decline, the calls for urgent change are again reaching alarmist levels. IATP moved the needle to ‘total crisis’, stating: Since 2020, food prices have been on the rise following COVID-19-related supply chain interruptions, as well as climate disasters, such as drought, frost, fires and floods in a number of countries, among other factors. In early 2022, the war in Ukraine resulted in an unprecedented spike in food prices. … These successive crises demonstrate that our food and agriculture systems are extremely vulnerable to shocks: We must invest in building resilience.
The IATP agroecology strategy document recognises that certain technologies, like gene editing, show promise to solve some of our present challenges, but feel this innovation is not going to be enough, that it is too corporate and that it will lead to further inequities. Perhaps, though, agroecologists should take a more holistic approach to all types of research and innovation going on to address the multitude of problems modern agriculture faces.
The fight against inequity
Agroecology prioritises the fight against inequity on agricultural issues. Large farms with advanced technologies will indeed yield more than smallholdings and family farms but if it moves farming toward more sustainable agricultural practices, better seeds and better soil, how is this a problem? Economies of scale and a continuous pipeline of innovations will bring prices down on improved seeds, equipment, fertilisers and pesticides. To reject technologies because they might promote inequities risks impoverishing all farmers. To protect the most vulnerable does not mean we must reduce all agricultural technologies to the lowest common denominator.
This mindset is based on the confusion of inequity with inequality. An African smallholder will never be equal to a South American rancher but each can achieve some form of equity within their respective situations. I recently visited an integrated farm in the Philippines and while the two hectare plot was using the best available technologies and offered eight people a comfortable living wage, it could not be compared, on a one-to-one level, to the onion and Belgian endive operation I had visited in the Netherlands earlier in the year.
An important question to ask is: Where do we draw the line on what inequities are too much? Clearly the advances in digital farming tools, drones and precision farming are still out of reach of most farmers and these first movers should be considered more as pioneers than farmers. But what about the building of irrigation dams (something most African smallholders are begging from their aid development officers)? Many French peasant organisations involved in promoting agroecology, like La Via Campesina, engaged in the violent protests in Sainte-Soline, France in 2022–2023 to try to stop a group of farmers from building a dam to help irrigate their crops during the dry summer months. They claimed it would create inequities affecting smaller, organic farmers. This is an example of the risks to rationality when politics and religion override sustainable, scientific solutions.
The Code
Activist organisations have a code that they must never publicly criticise other activist campaigns, even if they are outrageous or unsustainable. No agroecology groups stood up and condemned the violence in Sainte-Soline, France or the absurdity of the agroecologists attacking the construction of an agricultural irrigation dam. They preferred to turn it into a ‘right-to-water’, anti-industrial farming issue. Agroecologists won’t publicly disagree with other social activists even if their interests or strategies differ – they have had sufficient campaign communications training to know how important it is to respect The Code.
But there is a wide dispersion of thinking within the agroecology camps which makes it so difficult to have a discussion with such a chameleon (why I chose to focus on the IATP document that tried to harmonise the various positions). Two main reports on agroecology published by the main policy actors in the field came up with two very different main ‘elements’ or ‘principles’ of agroecology with only five of 13 principles being reasonably similar.
Surprisingly, the element missing from both reports is ‘inclusivity’. Unlike science, social movements are not concerned about discrepancies and internal contradictions and seeks rather to include all groups and interests. In a couple of years, there should be 25–30 key agroecology principles.
So how do the experts in the field of agroecology reconcile such differences in how they identify the key elements/principles of what they are working on? The IATP article glossed over the differences but acknowledged they were real. At the United Nations Food Systems Summit in July, 2021, the NGOs refused to sign onto the final agroecology document as they felt it was ‘too watered down’ (Russia, Brazil and the US would only support the FAO's 10 elements and not the HLPE's 13 key principles of agroecology). These differences are usually buried from public view but to see the activist disappointment at the FAO indicates there are serious problems with so many agroecology actors with intolerable differences. In five years, there will likely be multiple factions within agroecology, perhaps an ‘Agroecology 2.0’ or a ‘Real Agroecology’ movement.
Revolutions are usually lost when the revolutionaries start fighting internally for power and influence.
Transition to revolution
The latest crises are more opportunities for the activists than problems to be solved. What agroecologists desire is a political revolution toward a type of agrarian-based Marxism in an anti-corporate and post-capitalist, degrowth world. Western-funded peasant groups like La Via Campesina are funding many Marxist movements in East Africa (like the Kenyan Peasants League). The ideologues’ Western affluence, abundant food supply and technology-based comforts have given them the confidence to assume that severely disrupting generations of technological solutions to agricultural challenges will have no effect on food security, economic well-being and political stability. Revolution to overturn the capitalist system is their objective and it starts with the peasant smallholders.
This time though, according to IATP, it's being called a ‘transformation’ or ‘transition’. The word ‘transition’ has become a politically charged term. It no longer means an evolution or continuous improvement of processes but, rather, a turning away from something that has become politically intolerable by one particular faction. While it pretends to be a measured strategic movement forward in the least disruptive manner, the call for ‘transition’ is an ideological battering ram aiming to abolish any countenance of multiple approaches. It has become a euphemism for revolution.
An energy transition, for example, is the demand to move away from fossil fuels and nuclear energy as quickly as possible (forget talk of a rational energy mix, shut the reactor down now). A transition beyond economic growth is the call to abandon capitalist growth models (forget about improving present business models). So when agroecologists use the phrase: ‘A transformation or transition in our food systems’, they mean that the present direction of crop sciences is no longer tolerable. It is a call to arms … with no time to lose.
But is this ‘transition’ taking us in the right direction?
Feeding the world and sustainable intensification
One of the chief criticisms of agroecology is that its lower yield, subsistence farming approach threatens food security at a time of growing and increasingly affluent global populations demanding greater food production. Couple this with the challenges from climate stresses and the increased CO2 emissions from agriculture and many, like myself, would argue there is a need for more technology rather than less. Apart from improving social conditions of smallholders in developing countries, the argument runs, we need to concentrate on sustainable intensification in advanced agricultural regions – of using the best technologies to get higher yields from more fertile land while rewilding less productive land.
IATP addresses recent efforts at sustainable intensification of agriculture as corporatist and production-driven. While it acknowledges that tools like no-till farming and cover cropping are effective at sequestering carbon and enriching soil, the authors cannot accept it because of the use of herbicides which may harm soil and humans. So how do agroecologists address the need to produce more food more sustainably on less land? The IATP report states: While sustainable intensification starts from the premise that addressing future food security-related challenges requires an increase in productivity per unit of land in a sustainable manner, agroecology emphasizes reducing inputs and fostering diversity alongside social and political transformation. It is focused on improving ecological and human health and addressing issues of equity and governance.
While I would like to think agroecology advocates recognise they cannot compete with the conventional food system at feeding the world, the arguments are usually framed differently: we need to eat less meat, stop food waste, grow better quality food… They believe it is easier to change a population's food practices than for agroecologists to change their ideology (but isn’t part of the agroecology ideology to respect the culinary practices of local populations?).
Agroecologists don’t see the problem as one of how to increase food production (they claim there is enough food) but of equitable distribution, colonialism and access to land. The IATP report puts it bluntly: This simplistic association between agricultural output and food security has no basis in facts and ignores the fundamental reasons for world hunger: Hunger is rooted in structural inequalities: colonial experiences that have dispossessed people of their access to land, water and other resources, further exacerbated by international and national investment policies. Such structural inequalities are often enabled by authoritarian or neoliberal regimes.
Agroecologists were cited in the IATP report boldly challenging the achievements of modern agriculture with their claim that hunger still exists. They refuse to acknowledge the dramatic decline in malnutrition and famines over the last five decades, the lifting of large populations out of poverty and the increased productivity allowing for a growing urbanisation. Part of the challenge for conventional agriculture today is due to its profound success.
For agroecology to become a legitimate alternative to sustainable intensification or agriculture in questions of meeting the food security and food sovereignty goals with a growing global population, increasingly affluent and demanding richer diets amid the challenges of farming with fewer CO2 emissions and climate stresses, they will have to acknowledge the need to compromise on their dogma and accept some technological developments that will enhance yields.
Conclusion: a needed global solution or a political agenda?
This paper started with the challenge of first defining agroecology and then determining if it is the global solution its advocates have been so successfully touting in the policy arenas or a political agenda of the anti-corporate left. It established ten key points:
Agroecology is a big tent containing a myriad of different views that, rather than being reconciled, have been allowed to proliferate. It is likely that the concept of agroecology will be diluted and even more co-opted by interest groups making it impossible for policy researchers to scrutinise or for agroecologists to put forward coherent policy strategies. While it claims to be a science, the arbitrary restrictions agroecology puts on potential technologies (if they are synthetic, too corporate, not indigenous…) goes against the basic principles of the scientific method. Many of the key values political activists place on farming (diversity, inclusion, harmony, tolerance …) under the label of agroecology reflect their greater neo-Marxist ideology and have little to do with agricultural practices. Imposing general political theories on farming practices can have seriously negative consequences. Agroecologists focus more on social movements than on the needs of farmers. Their restrictions on crop technologies, open markets and rewarding farmers suffocates farmers more than the market forces imposed by capitalist systems they are so opposed to (which is, at least, providing technologies to help farmers try to keep up). With the demand to be holistic, agroecology has become a complicated soup of social activism, environmentalism, human rights and social justice interests that complicate the process of farming and bringing a harvest to market. Agronomy has become a challenge for their various political ideologies to pigeon-hole. Agroecologists do not understand how the Western regulatory risk management process already uses a holistic approach to balance ecology, human rights and social justice with the agricultural technologies and market conditions. Rather than improving the risk management process, they are calling for a revolution, replacing regulators with their social movements (NGOs) with a disregard for the negative consequences their special interests could create. Agroecologists have played down the success of agricultural technologies in solving a long history of challenges and have failed to recognise the over-estimations of alarmist predictions that have haunted Western societies since Malthus. Their latest predictions on the social and environmental consequences of modern agriculture have become even more alarmist and catastrophic. At the same time, ironically, blinded by their anti-capitalist rhetoric, agroecologists refuse to believe that hunger is an issue, growing populations a threat to global food security or that markets matter in food production. These activists are the ungrateful products of a generation of successful researchers who provided the world with an abundant food supply and economic affluence, never having to experience any large-scale famines in their lifetime. Agroecologists are driven by their social justice political dogma and are uncompromising in pursuing their agenda. While they speak of adapting to local agricultural, ecological and economic situations, as a political movement, their ideology is unrelentingly overarching. Agroecology lobbyists have planted their advocates in important positions in UN agencies, development organisations and the European Commission, creating a deep funding and policy resource they can then use to subsidise projects, buy influence in developing countries and put forward their objectives to dominate agricultural policy debates for the foreseeable future. Discrediting them on an academic or scientific level will have no impact on their strategy.
So is agroecology a solution to our global agricultural challenges or a political agenda? It is clear, from what has been published, that it is a political agenda dominated by anti-capitalist, deindustrialisation activists on the extreme left of the political spectrum. If its naturopath, social justice dogma were to be legitimately applied as its lobbyists demand, agroecology would be catastrophic for global food security, developing economies and the environment. While their social justice ideology has been communicated with a very attractive political rhetoric, policy leaders should be very careful about integrating agroecological principles into any agricultural strategy moving forward.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
