Global food systems are . Not only are they responsible for roughly of global greenhouse gas emissions, they are also the top contributors to and .
On top of that, many aspects of our food systems are extremely vulnerable to disruptions from and other shocks, as we saw in .
Agroecology — an approach to farming long practised by and around the world — could transform our food systems for the better. And agribusinesses in the Global North are actively looking to agroecology to under the banners of .
But, a relentless focus on single outcomes, such as , coupled with industry’s instinct to define and standardize, threatens the transformative potential of agroecology.
Win-win food systems
In addition to their immense ecological costs, our food systems are also . As many as experience moderate or severe food insecurity. The global expansion of industrial agriculture a vehicle for the violent spread of colonialism.
Agroecology offers the promise of a , where people nourish themselves while .
It is also at the centre of the , a global constellation of peasant- and Indgenous-led organizations fighting for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced in a way that is ecologically sound and socially acceptable. Food sovereignty is arguably the single in the world.
La Via Campesina, the movement’s largest organization, represents over in 70 countries. And the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, which operates , is the largest civil society movement on the continent.
Agroecology aligns with the food sovereignty movement because it is . Where industrial food production emphasizes scalability and proprietary technology, consolidating and controlling power and wealth, agroecological practices require wealth and power to be held locally. Producers must have the freedom, flexibility and resources to in communities and among the people and the land.
For example, crop development through genetic modification by intellectual property laws, patents and the high technological competencies and equipment involved. On-farm domestication and breeding are, by contrast, democratic technologies because they necessarily open and entirely reliant on local knowledge and sharing.
Colonizing agroecology
Corporate plans to invest in regenerative agriculture appear to be mere appropriations of agroecological practices, for supporting broad societal transformation.
Agroecological systems are networks of relationships, not collections of practices. They cannot be easily rendered into a set of definitions, standards or technological principles.
For example, Indigenous agroforestry, , played an essential role in establishing the rich biodiversity of . For the practitioners, chagra cannot be distinguished from the forest itself.
Reginaldo Haslet-Marroquin, CEO of the , describes the push to define regenerative agriculture as an act of colonization. “It is fundamental for achieving a regenerative outcome to not define it,” . “To not reduce it to our myopic understanding of things … to the limitations of our colonizing minds. … Rather, we seek to understand what is, and what isn’t regenerative.”
To put it another way, regenerative is not a technological claim but an ethical one related to how we link knowledge and wisdom in relation to one another and to the land.
An ethical space
Standards and definitions can help expose , but they can also have unintended consequences. My research on Alaska fisheries, for example, offered about how focusing only on the environmental dimensions of sustainability can perpetuate or even worsen social inequities.
The Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) certification, which is the largest framework for fishery sustainability, has also been critiqued along similar lines. in fisheries and created new ways for businesses to profit from fisheries, but it has also and created and .
Agroecological systems are as the people practising them and the places where they are practised. in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are a world away from the system of ranching known as in the Burren of Ireland. But they share an ethical landscape defined by a commitment to .
There is no doubt that regenerative agriculture and other agroecological practices can help address climate change, including by . But, at a time when innovation and diffusion of new ideas are urgently needed, fostering an ethical agroecological space where people can and is a more promising theory of change than creating mechanisms to enforce uniformity and exclusion.
Agribusiness has an opportunity to be part of a global transition to more ecologically sound and socially just food systems. That will require the sector to set aside narrow understandings of the problem and abandon the imperative to colonize the spaces of innovation long-held by Indigenous Peoples and other racialized people around the world.
Philip A Loring receives funding from the Arrell Food Institute, from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of sa国际传媒, and from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of sa国际传媒
