Farming For The Future is dedicated to the education of environmental and social impacts that come with sustainable agriculture, and how food insecurity affects us all.
Agroecology is much more than an environmental intervention. It’s a social movement; one that helps to build, defend, and strengthen our complex food and agricultural systems in the process.
Approximately 619 million people globally suffer from severe food insecurity. And amid the global pandemic, things are only getting worse. While the solution to solving food insecurity definitely has a strong environmental component from an agricultural perspective, no solution will truly be successful without addressing the specific socioeconomic constraints on our global food security.
Poverty Alleviation
The majority of the world’s impoverished populations live in rural areas and rely mainly on agriculture to make a living. Rural communities often experience social marginalization due to a lack of access to resources, information, and limited bargaining power.
The lack of adequate and nutritious food that is so common in rural populations consequently has adverse effects on children’s development, undermining their potential, and further contributing to intergenerational poverty. Failing to address this intergenerational transmission of undernutrition among children has had severe negative impacts on economic growth and poverty reduction.
But studies have found that agroecology has been shown to reduce the inequalities of poverty.
An agroecological project conducted in Mali trained two thousand adults to adopt improved techniques for water and soil conservation. This resulted in improved soil quality, crop stabilization, and livestock productivity, where crop yields multiplied six times over, increased participants’ monthly income, and ensured more equitable access to food in the district.
It’s no secret that family and small-scale farmers play an incredibly crucial role in our international food systems. Unfortunately, the irony here is that these farmers are often the ones that suffer from high levels of food insecurity and poverty.
This issue has created the need for further investment in agriculture innovation, but, there hasn’t been a lot of consensus on what should be done for these farmers to secure “sufficient food production, improve[d] ecosystem balance and achiev[able] sustainable development in an era of climate change.”
Agroecology is unique in its approach because of its focus on the application of ecological processes, use of local farmer knowledge, and innovation, rather than the constrained assortment of methods and technologies that are often showcased in industrialized agriculture.
Women’s Empowerment
Women produce between 60% and 80% of the food in most developing countries and are responsible for half of the world’s food production. While farmers in these countries often do not have access to proper resources, such as agricultural technology or equipment, women are more so limited due to cultural, traditional, and sociological factors that directly constrain them into a subordinate role.
Despite their crucial role as primary food providers and significant contributors to household food security, women experience extra difficulties “in gaining access to resources such as land, credit and productivity-enhancing inputs and services” which are essential to improving agricultural productivity, mainly in developing countries.
In fact, a study published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies on the role of women in improving food security in Sudan confirmed this. Women with sufficient means of access to food production sources, sources of income, and control of the nutritional wellbeing of their household were better able to improve household food security.
This is exactly where agroecology comes in. Agroecology has been shown to create better opportunities for women on several levels.
Socially, farmer-to-farmer sharing and learning are at the heart of agroecology, and the pursuit of agroecological methods provides opportunities for exchanges that build social cohesion. This includes the creation of women-only spaces that strengthen unity and autonomy, which are incredibly important for achieving gender equality.
Economically, characterized by simple and effective production techniques and stable yields over time, agroecology is significantly less risky and more affordable and accessible for women as opposed to other alternatives such as industrial agriculture.
Additionally, agroecology supports the health of both agriculture workers and consumers by eliminating the need for harmful synthetic chemicals and pesticides, which have had a disproportionately negative impact on women’s long-term health. In Mexico, agroecological practices centered around “creating ecologically efficient production systems” allowed farmers to minimize waste and “manage local agro-ecosystems,” effectively abolishing the use of chemical inputs.
Ultimately, case studies show that agroecology creates a sustainable system that helps reduce gender inequalities. In places like Senegal, when women received training in agroecological practices, they improved their food production, enabling them to organize themselves and increase their monthly income and access to land.
Agroecology aims to make farmers stronger and more self-sufficient as a community, by preserving rural and Indigenous farming knowledge through its bottom-up approaches. The possibilities and dimensions of empowerment that come from agroecology are not external effects of this movement, but rather one of its objectives.
Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty as a global movement combines ecologically sustainable farming methods with the positive social impacts of these methods we have discussed so far. Initiated originally by the peasant movement La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”
The main mission of food sovereignty is to localize food systems and put control over production completely in the hands of consumers. Often this is where agroecology comes into play. The complexity of the global food system and the social and environmental abuses that often happen at every level of production and distribution can often be mitigated through the implementation of more sustainable methods of production.
For example, within the current U.S. agriculture system 2.4 million farmworkers — the bulk of whom are migrant workers that do not own or rent the land they work on — perform two-thirds of production labor in increasingly dangerous conditions for insufficient wages. Extreme heat and changing weather patterns exacerbated by climate change create more dangerous working conditions, making farm work unstable and leaving employees vulnerable.
The food sovereignty movement addresses these abuses of impoverished populations within the food system by putting production back into their hands. Localization of agriculture allows for regenerative techniques to be employed and agroecological tactics to be used in order to mitigate the current danger of food production. For example, agroecological systems might use a flowering island method to attract natural enemies of pests thus eliminating the need for chemical pesticide use. Or the farmer may opt for using a push-pull system of agriculture. The point is it’s all up to the producer!
In this way, agroecology is an effective means of returning control to the consumer to produce their food in a safe and sustainable manner!
Agroecology and COVID-19
Perhaps the biggest problem we’ve faced is COVID-19 and the global pandemic.
The challenge to increase food production has become more urgent than ever and the COVID-19 crisis has exposed serious faults in our global food system, reiterating the need for drastic changes if we hope to secure the health of future generations. If anything this pandemic has made the global food crisis worse than it already is, bringing a brand new relevance to agroecology.
Agroecology could provide a pathway to rebuild a post-COVID-19 international food system; “one that is able to avoid widespread disruptions of food supplies in the future by territorializing food production and consumption.”
There are already 815 million people around the world that experience high levels of food insecurity. These people cannot afford any additional disturbances to their food security, but unfortunately, that’s what COVID-19 seems to be doing. It is estimated that about 14 million to 22 million people globally could slip into extreme poverty and as COVID-19 “leads to widespread income losses, an increasing number of consumers may not be able to afford food, enhancing the food security crisis.”
It is unmistakable that COVID-19 has exposed the socio-ecological fragility of our global food systems. The impacts of the COVID crisis on industrialized food chains heighten anxieties about “widespread food shortages and price spikes.” Thus, an agricultural shift to a more socially just, ecologically resilient, and localized food system is needed.
Agroecological innovations that encourage farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchanges, and merge science with indigenous agricultural knowledge, enhance producer autonomy, ultimately empowering farmers and local communities as key agents of reform. From supporting regional farmers to forming communities of producers and consumers, agroecology creates food networks based on the immediate link between the growers and eaters. While an estimated 25% of global food production is currently being wasted from farm to market, agroecology would shorten the food supply chain, so we can distribute to those in need and reduce our global food waste.
Access to food is a fundamental human right, not a privilege. COVID-19 is forcing us to rethink our food systems short-term but we should be using this opportunity to establish long-term change and develop sustainability in all parts of our food systems now. We cannot and should not wait for the next global pandemic to happen.
Rectifying Past Mistakes
In the fight against food insecurity, it is important that we understand the significance of reforming socioeconomic inequalities that still exist all over the world. As the effects of climate change worsen, and food security is increasingly threatened, we will not only need to transform the global agricultural sector but establish strong foundations in sustainable and localized food systems that give power back to the consumers.
There is no one singular solution to sustainable agriculture and farming, but agroecology is one that encompasses a whole range of factors, preserving our environment and directly affecting those who need it most.