The Growing Liberation Podcast, produced by Midwest Farmers of Color Collective with support from Real Food Media, aims to reclaim the narratives of BIPOC farmers and reveal crucial connections to the land, food, culture, political power, and economic autonomy. Growing Liberation guests come from farming backgrounds and endeavors and share their untold stories to foster a community of farmers of color by sharing stories left out of the mainstream conversation about the food system and land equity.

Learn more about Midwest Farmers of Color Collective, listen to the Growing Liberation Podcast, and look for Growing Liberation on your favorite podcast platform. 

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The world has never used as many pesticides as it does today, and the United States uses more than any other country, including some of the most dangerous pesticides that are banned in other countries. With the release of a US Edition of the Pesticide Atlas, a powerful compendium on the state of pesticide use and why it matters, leaders at prominent US civil society organizations working for common sense pesticide action, including Pesticide Action Network (PAN) North America, the Center for Biological Diversity, Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action, and Real Food Media highlight the alarmingly persistent use of toxic pesticides in the United States—and what we can do about it. 

The US edition of the Pesticide Atlas is one of five published around the world as part of the Germany-based Heinrich Boell Foundation’s series. Other editions include Germany, EU, Kenya, Italy, and Nigeria.

New chapters in the US edition include:

• A snapshot of pesticide use in the United States and the connection between pesticide production, use, and the climate crisis from Margaret Reeves and Asha Sharma of Pesticide Action Network North America;

• A look at how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to properly regulate pesticides and how this has led to the heavy use of dangerous pesticides, and subsequent devastation to biodiversity from Nathan Donley and Lori Ann Burd of the Center for Biological Diversity;
• An overview of pesticide industry PR tactics to deter and delay action on pesticides from US Edition editor, Anna Lappé, and journalist and co-founder of US Right to Know Stacy Malkan;
• A story of dedicated organizing for common sense pesticide regulation on the Hawaiian islands from Executive Director of Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action, Anne Frederick.

“Sixty years after Rachel Carson warned us of the terrible toll of overuse of pesticides here and around the world, the United States continues to use more pesticides than anywhere else on the planet, including some of the most hazardous pesticides banned in other countries. With rising rates of cancer, infertility, and metabolic disorders alongside a biodiversity crisis, taking action on pesticides has never been more important. This report arms us all with the facts, and inspiration, to do so.” — Anna Lappé, editor of the Pesticide Atlas-US Edition and author, funder, and sustainable food advocate   

“With a billion pounds of pesticides used each year in the US, the American public reasonably expects that these chemicals made to kill living things are tightly regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency. But unfortunately that’s not the case. As a result, Big Ag in the US relies on pesticides that many other nations have banned because of their severe dangers. Tragically, that regulatory failure causes the greatest harm to farmworkers and their children and our nation’s most endangered wildlife, particularly pollinators.” — Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity.   

On April 26, 2023 at 10:30amPT/1:30pmET join Anna Lappé in conversation with contributors to the US Edition of the Pesticide Atlas in a webinar to share key highlights from the Atlas and their implications. The conversation will center on how we can collectively better understand the connections between pesticide use and public health, the climate crisis, and biodiversity as well as dive deeper into how to understand the policy barriers and opportunities for action on pesticides here in the United States.  Register for the free webinar. 

Contact Info

Anna Lappé

Editor, Pesticide Atlas-US Edition

Food Sovereignty Fund Director, Panta Rhea Foundation

Founder, Strategic Advisor, Real Food Media

anna@realfoodmedia.org 

The post Launch of the US Edition of the Pesticide Atlas appeared first on Real Food Media.

The transnational corporations and business organizations that benefit from GM corn and biocides such as glyphosate are strongly pressuring the Mexican government (with support from the U.S. government) to renounce its right to food sovereignty and walk away from the international commitments assumed by the three governments in the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework,” which is the strategic plan for the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity in the period 2022-2030, intended to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. 

The demand by corporations and their lobbyists that Mexico reverse the legitimate and legal decisions made in compliance with the spirit of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), as well as international legal frameworks, to protect the world’s center of origin and diversification of maize from contamination by transgenic corn, as well as the gradual but effective elimination of highly hazardous pesticides such as the carcinogenic glyphosate (also known by its brand name RoundUp or Faena), is a true international legal absurdity and an anachronistic approach typical of the last century, contrary to the broad social demands and international commitments of the 21st century.

In December 2022, the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico, as well as the majority of governments in the world, participated in the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal. They agreed on the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework“, which establishes four goals and 23 targets. Of those, we highlight only three, which contrast with the irrationality of the corporate demands towards Mexico:

TARGET 7
Reduce pollution risks and the negative impact of pollution from all sources by 2030, to levels that are not harmful to biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, considering cumulative effects, including: reducing excess nutrients lost to the environment by at least half, including through more efficient nutrient cycling and use; reducing the overall risk from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals by at least half, including through integrated pest management, based on science, taking into account food security and livelihoods; and also preventing, reducing and working towards eliminating plastic pollution.

TARGET 9
Ensure that the management and use of wild species are sustainable, thereby providing social, economic, and environmental benefits for people, especially those in vulnerable situations and those most dependent on biodiversity, including through sustainable biodiversity-based activities, products and services that enhance biodiversity, and protecting and encouraging customary sustainable use by Indigenous peoples and local communities.

TARGET 10
Ensure that areas under agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry are managed sustainably, in particular through the sustainable use of biodiversity, including through a substantial increase of the application of biodiversity-friendly practices, such as sustainable intensification, agroecological and other innovative approaches contributing to the resilience and long-term efficiency and productivity of these production systems and to food security, conserving and restoring biodiversity and maintaining nature’s contributions to people, including ecosystem functions and services.

Our organizations, and an increasing number of members of our governments and legislative and judicial bodies, see the goal of trying to put corporate interests above the priorities of respect for Mother Nature, as well as public health, as clearly irrational. Such proposals go against the socioenvironmental needs of the region and the world. Instead, we must build alternative policies for balanced development that should be the priority, in harmony with international law.

WE REJECT PRESSURE BY TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR AGRIBUSINESS ALLIES THAT CONTROL SEEDS AND AGROCHEMICALS.

WE SUPPORT THE POLICY, IN EACH OF OUR COUNTRIES, OF ENCOURAGING THE PRODUCTION OF NON-GM MAIZE, WITHOUT GLYPHOSATE OR OTHER SIMILAR BIOCIDES, AS WELL AS THE POLICY OF FAIR AND SUSTAINABLE TRADE.

WE ENCOURAGE GOVERNMENTS TO RAISE THESE ISSUES, TO TAKE EFFECTIVE MEASURES TO COMPLY WITH THE COMMITMENTS ESTABLISHED TO PROTECT BIODIVERSITY AND TO RESPECT THE RIGHT OF PEOPLES TO STRENGTHEN THEIR SOVEREIGNTY AND FOOD SECURITY.

WE REITERATE OUR EXHORTATION TO THE GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO TO STAND FIRM IN THE FACE OF PRESSURE FROM THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AND TRANSNATIONAL INTERESTS.

Ciudad de México

MEXICO
Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio (RMALC)
Campaña Nacional Sin Maíz No hay País
Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras de Productores del Campo, A.C. (ANEC)
Red de Acción sobre Plaguicidas y Alternativas en México (RAPAM)
Movimiento Campesino, Indígena, Afromexicano, Plan de Ayala Siglo XXI. (MCIAPASXXI)
Agrónomos Democráticos.
Central de Organizaciones Campesinas y Populares (COCyP).
Unión Campesina Democrática (UCD).
Promotora de Gestión de Enlace para el Desarrollo Rural (PROGEDER).
Central Independiente de Obreros, Agrícolas y Campesinos (CIOAC-JDLD).
Sindicato de Trabajadores del INCA Rural (STINCA).
Asociación de Consumidores Orgánicos.
Fundación Semillas de Vida.
Guerreros Verdes, A.C.
FIAN México
Grupo de Estudios Ambientales (GEA)
Fundación Semillas de Vida.
Colectivo Zacahuitzco
Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT)
Tortillería Blanquita Mejía
Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo Rural Maya AC
Mercado de la Tierra Toluca
Moms Across America de EU
Grupo Moojk Kaaky, Tlahuiltotepec, Oaxaca.
Centro Agroecológico Mecayapan.
Sihuatayolme de Mecayapan.
Agroproductores de la Sierra de Santa Marta SPR de RL de CV.
Chiltik Tayol de Mecayapan.
Tianguis Agroecológico de Xalapa y red de agricultura urbana y Periurbana de Xalapa.
Colectivo Zacahuitzco
Fundación Tortilla
Organización Nacional de Licenciados en Desarrollo Sustentable, S. C.
Proyecto de Desarrollo Rural Integra V. Guerrero A.C. (Grupo V. Guerrero de Tlaxcala)
Alimento Sano Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco.
Red de Coordinación en Biodiversidad, A. C, Costa Rica
Cooperativa Despensa Solidaria – Cdmx
Alimento Sano Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco.
Centro de Derechos Humanos “Fray Francisco de Vicoria Q.P. A.C.
Observatorio del Derecho a la Salud
Centro de Capacitación en Ecología y Salud para Campesinos (CCESC)
Rebiosfera A.C.
Espacio de Encuentro de las Culturas, A.C.
Tlalpantur Coop.
Maak Raiz Artesanal S.C. de R.L. de CV
Cristianas Comprometidas-
Unión de Redes Solidarias Totoquihuatzin SC de RL de CV
Promotores de Nuestras Raíces
Agromas S.C.
Radio Huayacocotla la Voz Campesina
Comité de Derechos Humanos Sierra Norte de Veracruz
Carnaval del Maíz
Haciendo Milpa, A.C.
Centro Agroecológico Mecayapan.
Sihuatayolme de Mecayapan.
Agroproductores de la Sierra de Santa Marta SPR de RL de CV.
Chiltik Tayol de Mecayapan.
Honey Authenticity Network
Alianza Nacional Apícola
Biopakal S.A.P.I. de C.V.
Colectivo de comunidades mayas de los Chenes y
Alianza Maya por las abejas de la Península de Yucatán Kabnalo’on
Red Socio-Ambiental
Ts’atai, Mercadito y Cultura
Tianguis Alternativo de Puebla
Red Tsiri (Michoacan)
Red de Comunicadoras y Comunicadores Boca de Polen
Promotora de Gestión y Enlace para el Desarrollo Rural, A.C. (PROGEDER)
Frente en Defensa del Maíz, Colima
Mercado de productores capital verde.
Espacio de Encuentro de las Culturas Originarias, A.C.
Red de Maíz de la Ciudad de México.
Alianza por Nuestra Tortilla,
Consejo Rector de la tortilla tradicional,
Fundación tortilla.
Asociación Etnobiológica Mexicana
Sociedad Latinoamericana de Etnobiología
Sociedad Mexicana de Agroecología
Ecocomunidades, A.C.
Red Ecologista Autónoma de la Cuenca de México
Individual signers
Catherine Marielle
Alma Piñeyro Nelson
Ricardo Turrent Alonso
Tamara Circuit
Jesse Circuit
Linette Galeana
Marisa Gonzlez de la Vega
María Garate
Jimena Garate
Miguel Ángel Damián Huato
Ing. Francisco Leyva Gómez, investigador agrícola
Dr. Primo Sánchez Morales, Profesor Investigador T.C.
Dr Carlos Avila Bello
Dr. Ramón Mariaca
Agustín Bernal Inguanzo

CANADA
Canadian Biotechnology Action Network
Common Frontiers – Canada
Council of Canadians
GE Free Comox Valley
Hamilton Chapter of the Council of Canadians
Kawartha Highlands and Lakes Chapter of the Council of Canadians
National Farmers Union – Canada
Northumberland Coalition For Social Justice
Public Service Alliance of Canada
Trade Justice Group of the Northumberland Chapter of the Council of Canadians

UNITED STATES
ActionAid USA
Agricultural Justice Project
Agroecology Research Action Collective
Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Inc.
Center for Food Safety
Community Alliance for Global Justice/AGRA Watch
Community to Community Development
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Institute for Policy Studies Global Economy Program
Family Farm Defenders
Farmworker Association of Florida
Food in Neighborhoods Community Coalition
Friends of the Earth USA
Global Justice Ecology Project
Grassroots International
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
National Family Farm Coalition
Northeast Organic Farming Association-Interstate Council
Northeast Organic Farming Association-New Hampshire
Pesticide Action Network of North America
Public Citizen
Real Food Media
Rural Coalition
US Food Sovereignty Alliance

The post Trinational Communiqué on Mexico’s Right to Food Sovereignty appeared first on Real Food Media.

The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (or MST, its acronym in Portuguese) is one of the largest social movements in the world. Born in the early 1980s at the end of the country’s 21-year military dictatorship and in the midst of persistent land inequality, the movement has been at the forefront of land reform in Brazil for decades. Their work is focused on making a reality of the country’s constitutional promise that land should ‘serve a social purpose.’ Against a backdrop of great inequality – 10% of the largest farms occupy nearly three-quarters of agricultural land – the MST has been organizing families to occupy, settle, and farm throughout the country.

In the four decades since its creation, the MST has organized more than 350,000 families to create communities, cooperatives, farms, small-scale food processing enterprises, and farmers markets. An additional 90,000 families still live in informal encampments on contested land, struggling for official land title.

Education and training in sustainable agricultural practices have always been core to the movement’s work, with its commitment to agroecology deepening in 2000 when the MST identified agroecology as key to its strategy of building resilient food systems. Since then, the MST has been developing training centers for agroecology for its members, and beyond.

At the beginning of the pandemic, MST launched an ongoing national campaign to take food from the settlements to vulnerable populations in cities: this collection center organized by ELAA for people living in the outskirts of the state capital, Curitiba, offers a great variety of fresh foods. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Author Anna Lappé interviewed three members of one of the movement’s agroecology schools in southern Brazil, Escola Latino Americana de Agroecologia (ELAA) to learn more about this history and philosophy. The conversation included input from Amandha Silva Felix, management coordinator and policy director at ELAA, and Vinicius Silva Oliveira and Wellington Lenon from the school’s “pedagogic sector.”

This is the third in a series of interviews with key people leading diverse agroecology training programs around the world, view them all here. This interview was conducted by email, translated from the Portuguese, and edited for clarity.

Mongabay: Let’s start with the movement’s commitment to member education. Can you talk about that work?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Throughout its history, the MST has always had a strong commitment to education. The movement has built more than 2,000 schools in land-reform occupied encampments and settlements. In 2000, agroecology became a cross-cutting theme in all MST schools—from kindergarten to higher education. Today, many MST schools offer courses on agroecology in partnership with public universities.

ELAA launched in the fall of 2005. Together with the Latin America Agroecology Institute Paulo Freire (IALA) based in Venezuela, we launched what became IALA’s network of Via Campesina [the international peasant agricultural movement] schools to mainstream agroecological training for farmers, youth, and adults.

Since its founding, ELAA has trained nearly 200 people, offering a 3.5-year “Technologist in Agroecology” course and a four-year degree in Rural Education, Natural Sciences, and Agroecology.

Drone view of ELAA: classrooms are on the right, occupying the main building of a large estate that was expropriated by MST to settle landless farmers, which is now known as Contestado Settlement. To the left are dining halls and student housing. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: Can you describe the place itself—what is the school like?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: ELAA is located in an MST settlement called the Contestado in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil. It’s truly a movement school: founded by the movement, built by volunteers, and part of the struggle for land reform, the school has 29 acres that include animal production—pigs, cows, sheep, and chickens—a vegetable garden, agroforestry, and field crops such as beans, corn, and manioc.

Mongabay: What is your program’s philosophy?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our courses are oriented toward young people as well as adults from land reform encampments and settlements in Brazil, and from other regions around the world, including farming communities elsewhere in Latin America such as Paraguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Colombia plus Africa, including Afro-Brazilians (quilombolas) and Indigenous peoples.

The program offers on-campus learning and in-community learning; students spend a portion of their time at school and another portion in their community. During their three months on campus, students learn from teachers connected with partner institutions, including the Federal University of Parana State (UFPR) and the Federal Institute of Parana (IFPR). When students return home, they take back the practices and knowledge acquired on campus. We’ve found this allows for powerful exchange and feedback between empirical and theoretical knowledge.

Mongabay: How have the principles of agroecology informed the MST?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: The MST adopted agroecology as a core approach in February 2000. After several decades of organizing, the failures of conventional agriculture in land reform settlements were very clear to us. We also learned much about agroecology from partner movements in other countries. La Via Campesina was a particularly big influence for MST to move in this direction.

MST members in the state of Parana have been at the forefront of the process of creating agroecology schools. In 2004, the MST Coordination in Parana State defined the purpose of these schools to create spaces for learning about agroecological production, presenting concrete results to farmers and encouraging an embrace of peasant culture. Just as importantly, these schools are a place for the development of our movement’s humanist values—a place where people work together, educating themselves, learning new perspectives, and having fun!

ELAA students outside the school in early 2020. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How would you describe your Center’s learning approach?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: At ELAA we talk about our grounding in rural education or educação do campo in Portuguese. For us, the idea of rural education is based on the pedagogical and epistemological philosophies of popular education, particularly of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. These are the pillars of the pedagogical praxis of rural education, which seeks a critical awareness of the world, contributing to the transformation of social relations necessary for human development. In this sense, both form and content matter—going from the hands-on and concrete to the abstract and back again. It’s a dialectic that not only creates ownership of knowledge, but also motivates action based on that knowledge. As Paulo Freire said: “We struggle for an education that teaches us to think—not one that teaches us to obey.”

Mongabay: What are some of the key agroecology themes of your program?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our teaching covers a range of content related to agroecology, linking theory and practice, scientific and empirical knowledge. The school also covers content on class, capitalism, the role of social movements in social change as well as gender, sexuality, and more. In 2022, the MST launched the Dictionary of Education and Agroecology [PDF in Portuguese]. With contributions from 169 authors from 68 different institutions—public universities, federal institutes of education, social movements, and research institutes—it aims to act in formal and informal education, bringing conceptual bases to the field of education and agroecology. ELAA is adding this tool to its pedagogy.

Mongabay: Can you talk about your research approach and favorite examples of research coming out of the school?  

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Honestly, for us, every act of research done by our students is remarkable: These students are the sons and daughters of the land, water, and forests—the very people who have historically been denied access to education, especially college.

In terms of our research approach, we work hard at ELAA to ensure that we don’t conduct research for research’s sake, but rather ensure it is a process that gives a return to the community, region, organization, or movement to which the researcher belongs. Our students have conducted research in different areas, including agroecology, politics, gender, sexuality, social movements, and education. Specific research themes have included strategies for environmental protection, sustainable development, digital inclusion of rural families, conservation and management of agrobiodiversity, the saving and sharing of seeds, and more.

Mongabay: What’s one of the biggest challenges you face?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: We need to improve our infrastructure. We are at a moment when we need to expand the school building and improve the old ones. This is necessary to meet growing demand and offer better conditions both for students and teachers.

ELAA occupies 29 acres of land that provide practical training for students, a place for agroecology research, and gardens that supply the dining hall. This photo shows agroforestry production plots at an early stage. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How do you think about the concept of agroecology?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: When we talk about agroecology, we are not just referring to a way of producing food without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. It is much more than that. We understand agroecology as a broad project of life: We see its political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions, too.

Agroecology combines sustainable production with a dignified way of life, both for those who produce (rural workers, peasants, traditional communities) and for those who have access to healthy food. Agroecology benefits the whole of society by being based on renewable sources of energy and respecting the biodiversity of the soil, fauna, and flora.

The diversification of production through agroforestry ensures countless benefits to society and the environment: biological insect control; soil biodiversity; long-term productivity from the integrated production of crops; greater financial security for farmers; more nutritious crops; strengthening local and regional economies; preserving of water/groundwater tables to ensure the proper functioning of hydrological cycles. Agroecology is today essential for the mitigation of global warming impacts, curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, and stimulating the sequestration of carbon by biodiversity.

Mongabay: How has ELAA worked to mainstream agroecology and climate action?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: To give one example, ELAA is part of the National Plan of Planting Trees and Producing Healthy Food, launched by the MST in 2020 to plant 100 million trees in a decade. MST partners developed a mobile application called Arvoredo to monitor tree planting across the country, and the agroecology schools’ students are playing a key role in promoting the tree planting in their communities.

MST farmer delivers food to the collection center organized by ELAA for people living in the outskirts of the state capital, Curitiba. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How do you respond to the concern that agroecological farming cannot scale to meet the world’s food security needs?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our MST settlements already show that it is possible to produce healthy and abundant food using these methods. We also see how agroecology is economically more viable, because it prioritizes renewable energy and because it is appropriate for family farming, which is responsible for more than 70% of the food produced in the world. Agroecology is also socially just because it values life in the countryside while promoting the universal right to healthy food. It is culturally necessary because it is in tune with nature’s seasonality, the localization of food systems, and local food traditions. Agroecology has the commons as a core value, which requires participatory governance and the involvement of different agents of civil society and the state to be successful and expand.

Mongabay: What are the greatest hurdles to wider adoption of agroecology?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our biggest challenge is to define agroecology as the model for food production to achieve food sovereignty and to further make clear that the counterpoint—the agribusiness model, which prioritizes monoculture plantations with intensive use of pesticides, chemicals, and GMO seeds, plus the international trade of commodities—is unsustainable. To achieve this paradigm shift, we need to make progress on public policies to support agroecology, such as smallholder access to credit, and expand training in agroecology. For us, we are meeting these needs by continuing to invest in agroecological education at all educational levels, including launching the “Education and Agroecology in Rural Schools in Agrarian Reform Territories” initiative whose purpose is to expand access to education and agroecology in settlements and land reform camps all over the country.

See related: Land conflicts in Brazil break record under Bolsonaro

Beans are one of the staple foods of Brazilians, and each region has a preference for one type or another. These were harvested in the Contestado settlement and donated to MST’s food solidarity campaign. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: What inspires you the most in your work?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: What inspires us? To promote the practice of solidarity and social justice on a daily basis, enabling the families of agrarian reform workers to be agents of their own destiny through popular organization. This is the way to promote popular sovereignty in favor of human dignity and respect for fundamental rights.

Mongabay: What is it like to do this work at this particular moment in Brazil?  

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: The MST emerged decades ago at a historical moment of struggle for the democratization of Brazil. Today, to fight for land reform means to deepen the ongoing process of democratization. Agroecology is at the center of the persistent land reform debate, pointing a way to food sovereignty for those who live in the countryside and for those who live in the city. Faced with the immense recent setbacks in the country—the advance of deforestation, especially in the Amazon, and the genocide practiced by the federal government during the pandemic—the MST has reaffirmed its commitment to fight for social justice and solidarity.

The post ‘Viable, Just & Necessary’: Agroecology is a Movement in Brazil appeared first on Real Food Media.

Nestled in a verdant valley in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, about a four-hour drive southwest of Bangalore, the agroecology learning center Amrita Bhoomi is one of dozens of farmer-to-farmer training hubs around the world focused on agroecology. The center was born out of organizing efforts of the local farmers’ movement KRRS (Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha) founded by Professor Mahantha Devaru Nanjundaswamy in the early 2000s. The movement’s leadership envisioned a teaching center where farmers could share their agroecological practices, learn new techniques, and situate themselves in a Ghandian tradition of organizing for social justice.

In 2002, movement leadership purchased the land that the center still occupies today, a biodiversity haven home to 80 cultivated acres growing dozens of varieties of crops from dryland horticulture – like mangoes and jackfruit – to coconuts and bananas, modeling rainfed farming in lieu of expensive irrigation. Shortly after breaking ground, Nanjundaswamy passed away, but his daughter Chukki Nanjundaswamy, who was 22-years old at the time and having been raised in the movement, joined the center’s leadership and has been growing the organization ever since, working to create an organization that can be an inspiration for local farmers, and many more who visit from around the world.

As part of a series on agroecology for Mongabay, author and sustainable food advocate Anna Lappé had a chance to catch up with Nanjundaswamy. The two last met in person in early 2020 just before COVID-19 lockdown, when Lappé traveled to Amrita Bhoomi as part of an international learning exchange organized by the Agroecology Fund, a global collaborative of funders invested in supporting agroecology worldwide.

In this conversation, Lappé talks with Nanjundaswamy about her work bringing the movement and practice of agroecology to life. The interview was conducted by Zoom and has been edited for length and clarity.

Agroecology practitioners share views and experiences during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Let’s start with the Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre’s origin story. What was the spark?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: The idea of starting a center for farmers run by and managed by the farmers themselves was born out of the organizing of the farmers’ movement here, Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, known by its acronym, KRRS. It was sparked by the farmers’ desire to defend the right to their local seeds.

In the early 1990s, the Indian government had opened up its market for multinational corporations, including for agribusiness giants. The American company Cargill was the first to enter India’s seed sector. Cargill started selling seeds like sunflower and corn—all hybrid seeds [so farmers need to purchase them annually] and all expensive for farmers.

India has had long-held traditions of conserving and sharing seeds within the community and family. For the very first time, corporations were talking about patenting seeds and new global trade regimes like the GATT [the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs] were creating frameworks to enable them to do so, to claim intellectual property rights over seeds.

The movement here saw its organizing as part of fighting back. Dr. Vandana Shiva was very close to the farmers’ movement here and she had started a campaign to protect the farmers’ rights to neem, challenging multinational companies that were trying to patent this plant, which had been grown here for centuries. In 1993, KRRS conducted one of their biggest direct actions, ransacking Cargill’s offices in Bangalore where the company was headquartered.

I was in primary school at the time, but I still remember the action so clearly. After the Cargill demonstration, KRRS members decided to set up a center to save and share local seed varieties. KRRS was organizing to protect our sovereignty, our seeds, our agricultural systems and our biodiversity.

Mongabay: What’s the center’s pedagogical approach?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: We’ve been influenced by Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, an Indian Socialist thinker whose slogan was spade-prison-vote—where spade symbolized constructive activity, prison stood for peaceful struggle against injustice, and the vote for political action. For us in KRRS these three symbols are very important.

When we, the next generation, took over Amrita Bhoomi, we learned from agroecology schools in other parts of the world, in Cuba, for instance, and in South America. In these schools, they use a methodology of farmers teaching farmers. It’s an approach we brought to our work. We also take an intergenerational approach, because most senior farmers were farming pre-Green Revolution and we’re losing that knowledge. They’re a treasure.

For nearly two decades, we have also been a teaching center for an agroecological practice known as Zero Budget Natural Farming [ZBNF, also known as Community Managed Natural Farming or Subhash Palekar Natural Farming].

We believe one of the reasons why the farming sector is in such crisis is because our so-called agricultural universities are not doing research for the farming community here. They’re mostly funded by transnational corporations and their research benefits those transnational corporations, like Syngenta, Cargill, Bayer [which bought agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018]. Our farmers have nothing to learn from the scientists; they basically all teach Green Revolution technologies [the hyper-reliance on synthetic inputs like pesticides and fertilizers and the use of hybrid seeds.]

Agroecology practitioners share views and experiences during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Can you tell me more about your programs?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: We’ve tried different approaches over the years. The center is open for farmers to come to the land and learn. Agriculture departments and agricultural universities have run ‘exposure visits’ where researchers come to the land to learn. We also target young people who want to get into farming, and we offer a three-month course where they can come on the weekends. A few times, we have done ‘mega trainings.’ In 2015, for instance, we worked with La Via Campesina to bring 1,000 people, including several dozen from nine other countries, for a seven-day training.

Mongabay: When we visited the center with the Agroecology Fund we saw firsthand some of the techniques practiced under the banner of Zero Budget Natural Farming. Let’s dig into what that is.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: There are two schools of thought on sustainable farming methods in India. One, organic farming, emerged in the 1980s. Organic farming here had class and caste dimensions, because even though it doesn’t use synthetic fertilizer or pesticides, it does depend on external inputs—often costly ones. It is still an input-based farming system which makes farming expensive and dependent. The farmers’ movement here embraced ZBNF because it is a method that helps farmers become totally self-reliant. It’s not a recipe, there is a lot of scope for farmers to design it according to their own specific conditions, according to their own soil conditions. They don’t have to purchase anything; it’s a knowledge-based technique.

In ZBNF, we refer to fertilizer as a ‘stimulant.’ It is made with jaggery [a traditional cane sugar found in India], some protein, cow manure and urine, and a handful of soil from your own farm. Commercializing it is impossible because you need bacteria from your own farm to multiply. You can’t sell it. In this approach, Mother Earth is everything: you just have to take care of her and nurture her. We just have to give her love.

Making a farmer self-reliant is part of the Gandhian principle of Swaraj which means autonomy. Agroecology is also a fight for such agrarian autonomy.

Agroecology practitioners share views and experiences during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Mongabay: Have you done formalized research at the center?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: No, not exactly, but we consider every farmer a scientist. To give you an example: the fall armyworm is a notorious corn pest. It’s been causing chaos all over the world. Pesticide companies like Syngenta have been pushing products to deal with it. In the past couple of years, in countries in Africa, farmers who were growing corn started using pesticides for the first time to manage armyworm infestations.

But after only a couple of years of experimentation, farmers here came up with a simple technique: spray the corn with a combination of milk and jaggery in the evening. Ants, attracted by the sweet milk, are drawn to the corn where they discover, and eat, the worms. You don’t need pesticides. To me, this is a great example of a simple innovation by farmers on their own farm.

It’s amazing when you learn about what’s possible to do yourself, when big companies are making millions of dollars selling toxic fungicides or pesticides. We’re told, you can’t grow certain vegetables without pesticides. That’s just not true. We have proven it’s possible with very simple techniques, like the fall armyworm approach or using fermented buttermilk as a fungicide. We have shown you can spray it to control pests on vegetables like cabbage or cauliflower, for example. This is the kind of research we’re doing.

Mongabay: What is the response you’re seeing from farmers learning about agroecology through your center for the first time? 

Many agroecology techniques were discussed during an international learning exchange in early 2020 at Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre. Image by Anna Lappé for Mongabay.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: It takes time for farmers to change, because the majority here have become addicted to chemicals and believe it’s difficult to change. It takes time for any kind of transformation, but we believe that it’s not a choice anymore. If you want to get out of the hands of corporate agriculture and the corporate system, you have to be self-reliant. Gandhi talked about this when he spoke about what he means by autonomy: self-rule. We have to reclaim agriculture, starting by reclaiming our seeds and reclaiming our knowledge system, which has been given away to pesticide dealers. And, it means reclaiming our biodiversity, because the Green Revolution has taught that monoculture is better, economically. We have seen this is false. We have seen farmers committing suicide [due to their indebtedness from the high costs of commercial seeds and chemical inputs like fertilizer and pesticides, plus irrigation] in the areas where the Green Revolution was brought in the sixties and seventies, states like the Punjab are now totally dominated by wheat and rice.

Mongabay: One criticism of agroecology is that it’s labor-intensive and young people don’t want to go into farming.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: Agroecology is welcoming young people back to agriculture. We saw this during Covid—how young people, especially educated young people, were coming back to learn agriculture here.

Mongabay: Can you say more about what you’re seeing in terms of more support for agroecology from consumers?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: In terms of the popular support, we are finding people living in cities are very aware now about the food they’re eating. During COVID, we started doing more direct marketing of vegetables and fruits and we found there’s definitely a great consciousness about the kind of food people want to eat. They are asking for better food and want to support farmers. This is the kind consciousness rising we’ve witnessed.

Let’s talk about the Green Revolution. There’s still a belief among some foundations and governments that it is still the only farming practice that can work at scale. We’re seeing the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa, for instance, working to roll out similar practices across that continent based on that argument. What do you say to those who argue that we need Green Revolution technology in order to meet the food security needs of the world?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: Well, first, using our natural farming techniques, we have seen that you can actually double yields with local varieties and these practices. Farmers in our network are producing a variety of foods—from rice to pulses—without using any chemicals and they still have better yields. It’s clear to us that the Green Revolution is just propaganda to sell products. Unfortunately, at most agricultural universities, nobody shares the stories we’re seeing among our farmers—so we speak among ourselves. We need to create platforms where we work with scientists to build the kind of evidence, the kind of data, that is required by our opponent.

Agroecology is a global practice and movement, including in this village in Lao PDR. Image via Asian Development Bank, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Mongabay: We’ve been talking a lot about yields and food security, but biodiversity is a key element of agroecology as well. I’m curious how you see biodiversity intersect with agroecology teaching.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: Agroecology emphasizes intercropping, multi-cropping, and the symbiotic relationship between crops and the symbiotic relationship with friendly pests. You are creating an environment for your crops to grow happily and to take care of each other. It’s like a traditional, large family; it’s not a nuclear family. It’s a giant family where everyone takes care of each other. This is why biodiversity is so much a part of agroecology.

Mongabay: What’s a hope you have for the future of the center?

Chukki Nanjundaswamy: We would love to have more in-house trainers and offer a more formalized program, where we can also offer a diploma. Especially for those children of farmers who are not getting into university and who are disappointed by the kind of farming that their family has been doing—who want to try agroecology.

The post Farmer to Farmer Agroecology: Q+A with Chukki Nanjundaswamy of Amrita Bhoomi Learning Centre appeared first on Real Food Media.

Just east of Birmingham in the U.K. sits the sixth-largest university in the country, Coventry University,  home to 38,000 students and a relatively new center for the study of agroecology — a burgeoning field of social and environmental science.

Founded in 2014 and nestled on 9 hectares (22 acres) at Ryton Gardens, the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) provides an academic home to 45 full-time research staff and more than 50 Ph.D. students, nearly half hailing from outside the U.K., including Africa, Asia and Latin America. From its inception, the center has taken a transdisciplinary approach, employing the knowledge and skills of social scientists, natural scientists and artists-in-residence. More than 50 master’s students and 42 agroecology practitioners are graduates of its program, and it’s recognized internationally for its work on alternative food networks and “agroecological urbanism” — the concept of bringing agroecology principles like diversity and mimicking natural ecosystems into urban food planning — and is now at the forefront of pushing agroecology and food sovereignty forward.

Following her feature for Mongabay about agroecology as a leading solution to climate change in response to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report calling for urgent action, author and sustainable food advocate Anna Lappé is interviewing leaders in the field of agroecology education, research and extension. She begins with Michel Pimbert, founder and director of the center, to better understand Coventry University’s work bringing agroecology to much wider attention. The interview was conducted by email and has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Mongabay: Let’s start at the beginning. What’s the birth story of the center?

Michel Pimbert: In 2013, the university invited staff across the schools to pitch ideas for new areas of research. Much to my surprise, my proposal for a significant new center on agroecology and sustainable food systems was very well received! The university understood that hardly any research was going on in agroecology at the time, whether in the U.K., Europe, or beyond. Lucky for us, the vice chancellor and his team were quick to see that creating a new agroecology center would be a unique selling point for the university. This led to the birth of the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience. Since then, we’ve received significant investments to recruit staff and Ph.D. researchers, attract international talent, and build a strong global research program on agroecology and sustainable food systems. Across all this work, and from the very beginning, we’ve emphasized the need to include peoples’ knowledge in ways of knowing and the co-creation of knowledge.

Mongabay: You’ve talked about the concept of “cognitive justice.” I had never heard that phrase before I heard you use it. It’s quite provocative. Can you share what you mean by it and how it relates to your approach to teaching, learning, and knowledge dissemination?

Michel Pimbert: The term comes from our philosophy of knowledge. Unlike many mainstream institutions, we reject the idea that academic knowledge is superior to the knowledge of Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers. This is what we mean by a commitment to “cognitive justice” — and I see it as key for agroecology, which aims to combine farmers’ knowledge with ecological science. But it also matters more generally for our work on decolonizing curriculum and transforming research for a just and sustainable society.

Mongabay: “Resilience” has become quite the buzzword, but it’s always been central to your work — it’s even in your name! How do you bring a study of resilience into your programs?

Michel Pimbert: When we focus on developing agroecological practices for resilience, we mean resilience to the climate crisis and to market volatility. We focus on how building farmer and citizen knowledge to improve agroforestry, intercropping and polycultures, evolutionary plant breeding, integrating livestock in agricultural systems as well as promoting shorter food webs to link producers and food eaters are all key to such multifaceted resilience. Another research strand is community self-organization. By that, we mean a focus on how — and under what conditions — communities can collectively mobilize their knowledge and agency to respond to crises like floods, droughts, and other natural/man-made disasters, and self-organize for managing alternative food networks and local governance.

Mongabay: Right. You often emphasize how agroecology is not just about what happens on the land but what happens in power structures, too. How does that show up in the CAWR’s research?

Michel Pimbert: Yes, exploring strategies for transforming governance — for agroecology, food sovereignty, and the right to food for all — is a key priority for the center. For that reason, research at the center also focuses on local to global policy choices that are needed to tackle threats to people and nature, and to promote agroecology and sustainable food and farming systems. We also look at institutional choices such as land tenure that can support large-scale shifts towards agroecology. 

Mongabay: Can you share an example of a research project that embodies your center’s cross-disciplinary approach?

Michel Pimbert: Yes! I think the contributors from all around the world who used stories, poems, photos, and videos to create Everyday Experts: How people’s knowledge can transform the food system demonstrate well this transdisciplinary approach. It’s also a powerful showcase of how people’s knowledge can help transform the food system towards greater social and environmental justice.

Mongabay: You talk about the co-creation with movement partners for your research?

Michel Pimbert: Our partnerships grow out of conversations with social movements and peasant organizations. We are often asked to include them in funding bids or to provide research support for projects they have prioritized. One of the challenges is the typical donor approach, which does not allow open-ended, flexible, process-oriented projects of co-inquiry that social movements often require. Donors often have what I call a “log frame mentality” — one that is rigid and overemphasizes quantitative objectives.

Mongabay: In a recent Mongabay feature, I talked about how the latest IPCC report centers agroecology as a key climate solution. Are you excited by its new popularity?

Michel Pimbert: Yes, it’s exciting to see the greater acceptance and understanding of the potential of agroecology since the center was founded eight years ago. However, it’s important to stress that funding for agroecology remains pitifully small — the lion’s share of public funds continues to support industrial and “green revolution” agriculture. Agricultural policies and subsidies continue to support larger farmers and the use of agrochemicals that massively harm people and the land, and fuel runaway climate change. What’s more, I would caution that as agroecology becomes more popular, we have to resist the watering-down of ideas and cooptation; it’s important to continue to commit to an agroecology that transforms the dominant food regime rather than one that seeks to conform with it.

See more of Mongabay’s agroecology coverage here.

Mongabay: How does biodiversity intersect with teaching agroecology?

Michel Pimbert: Conserving and enhancing biodiversity — both domesticated and wild — is key for agroecology. Moving from uniformity to diversity on the farm and the wider landscape requires an emphasis on much higher levels of biodiversity. Take pest management, for instance: instead of relying on petroleum-based pesticides, agroecological solutions address on-farm pests by diversifying local ecology to enhance the abundance of natural enemies of pests and diseases. To reduce soil erosion and loss of water, these methods focus on planting diverse cover crops and terracing. To buffer against climate extremes, diversity-rich agroforestry creates micro climates, and on and on and on. Agroecological practices based on the use of greater biodiversity also enhance dietary diversity that is essential for improving health and combatting malnutrition.

Mongabay: How has the climate crisis impacted how you approach research? 

Michel Pimbert: A focus on climate change was built into the center’s program from the start. The center’s climate scientists have been modeling changes to develop better prediction for droughts, floods, and forest fires in Africa, Europe and Asia. Agroecological approaches to climate adaptation are explored in Africa and Europe as well as Central America. We also do policy research aimed at exposing corporate greenwashing and the threats posed by nature-based solutions and net-zero plans that are now promoted by post-COP26 finance for climate change.

Mongabay: From your center’s research, what are you seeing about how agroecology can scale to meet global nutritional needs?

Michel Pimbert: Agroecological practices have been shown to increase production in the developing world. By harnessing more biodiversity on the farm and in food chains, agroecology can increase dietary diversity, something that is so badly needed today, including in wealthy societies hooked on junk food and highly processed foods. However, to be clear: Agroecology should not be seen as another technical fix for hunger and malnutrition. Agroecological production that enhances the availability of a diversity of foods needs to be part of a wider societal process of transformation that prioritizes equitable access to land and other means of production, fair access to — and distribution of — food, and supports people’s agency to claim and realize the right to food for all.

See related: From traditional practice to top climate solution, agroecology gets growing attention

Mongabay: It’s clear that what you’re calling for is massive transformation. From your vantage point, what are its greatest hurdles?

Michel Pimbert: In this moment, there are two starkly contrasting models of development, each seeking to radically transform food and farming. The first focuses on modernizing and sustaining capitalism through the promotion of what is being called the fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The 4IR relies on robots, gene editing, remote sensing, big data, drones, vertical farms, cell-cultured “meat,” digital technologies, and the “internet of things” to manage plants, animals, and the wider farming environment, as well as the entire agri-food chain. The second pathway emphasizes food sovereignty and agroecology.

Mongabay: Let me guess which pathway your center promotes.  

Michel Pimbert: Clearly, food sovereignty and agroecology — and we are not alone: I’m inspired by countless programs around the world who share our vision. But the dominant discourse on modernity and progress, government policies, and funding priorities still favor the energy-intensive 4IR — and thus, frustratingly, continue to fuel the climate crisis, mass species extinction, and the economic genocide of farmers. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the financial and corporate actors who disproportionately benefit from the emerging 4IR are its biggest boosters and pose the biggest hurdles for a transformative agroecology based on diversity, decentralization, autonomy, and democracy.

Mongabay: It’s such a dark time in so many ways — from a persistent global pandemic to senseless wars and climate crisis-induced weather extremes — what inspires you amidst all this?

Michel Pimbert: Despite all the odds, I am inspired by the many people-led initiatives that are helping to reinvent food and farming for a more convivial, just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

The post Food for All: Q&A with Michel Pimbert of the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience appeared first on Real Food Media.

Too often, the environmental discourse has failed to include and uplift the very communities on the frontlines of environmental justice movements. Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as “soft”—the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization.

Too often, the environmental discourse has failed to include and uplift the very communities on the frontlines of environmental justice movements. Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as “soft”—the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization.

Here, Jessica Hernandez—Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec environmental scientist and founder of environmental agency Piña Soul—introduces and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and proposes a vision of land stewardship that heals rather than displaces, that generates rather than destroys. She breaks down the failures of Western-defined conservatism and shares alternatives, citing the restoration work of urban Indigenous people in Seattle; her family’s fight against ecoterrorism in Latin America; and holistic land management approaches of Indigenous groups across the continent.

Through case studies, historical overviews, and stories that center the voices and lived experiences of Indigenous Latin American women and land protectors, Hernandez makes the case that if we’re to recover the health of our planet—for everyone—we need to stop the eco-colonialism ravaging Indigenous lands and restore our relationship with Earth to one of harmony and respect.

The post Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé, Mongabay

The satellite imagery is staggering: an Antarctic ice shelf roughly the size of New York City collapsing into the ocean. Its demise, captured and reported by NASA scientists in mid-March, was only the latest startling news from a region where temperatures have soared up to 40° Celsius (72° Fahrenheit) above average.

From melting ice sheets to tornadoes ravaging New Orleans and wildfires sweeping Texas, it’s ever clearer that the climate crisis is here, now. In its sixth major report since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conveyed the urgency: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet,” said IPCC Working Group II co-chair Hans-Otto Pörtner. “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”

Responsible for roughly one-third of the world’s carbon emissions, the global food system is one of the key places for transformative action. Among the 3,675 pages of Working Group II’s report on climate impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities, the authors — 270 of them from 67 countries — share evidence for strategies that can be adopted rapidly to reduce the food system’s climate impacts while strengthening resilience and improving health, food security, and the well-being of food producers.

One strategy the IPCC highlights is agroecology. Defined in the report as a “holistic approach” to farming, agroecology as a practice includes techniques such as intercropping and planting cover crops, integrating livestock and trees into landscapes, and deploying organic farming methods to enhance biodiversity and soil health while eliminating dependence on external inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. It’s a nature-based solution that can “contribute to both climate mitigation and adaptation,” the IPCC stresses. It’s also a solution grounded in an embrace of the human rights of Indigenous and small-scale producers, as articulated in the 13 principles of agroecology from the United Nation’s High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition.

A science, a practice, and a movement

While its principles trace back millennia, agroecology’s roots in academia originate in the 1920s and 1930s as agronomists increasingly looked at how farming and ecosystems could be integrated. The term itself dates to Mexico in the late 1970s: It was there that a group of researchers were beginning to raise the alarm about a suite of relatively new agricultural practices being promoted there and in other key regions of the world. Dubbed the “Green Revolution” and underwritten initially by the Rockefeller Foundation, the approach centered on high-yielding hybrid seeds, whose vigor was only possible with annual seed purchases and massive investments in irrigation systems along with heavy use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers, herbicides, and other pesticides.

As Liz Carlisle, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes in Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming, Mexican scientist Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi, Mexican plant pathologist Roberto García Espinosa, and Californian ecologist Steve Gliessman were documenting how agricultural practices long embraced by Indigenous Mayan farmers in Mesoamerica were producing high yields without the financial and ecological costs of Green Revolution methods. As they spent time in the field, the colleagues “came to believe that these farmers’ approaches were far more effective than the ones being promoted by their own institution,” Carlisle writes. They decided to develop a new academic program, one that would put these farmers’ voices “front and center.”

It was the summer of 1978 when they launched a master’s degree program at the Colegio Superior de Agricultura Tropical. The focus? What they called “agroecology.” From the beginning, they grounded the concept in wisdom from Indigenous communities and in the voices of farmers themselves. Echoes of this work reverberate in the IPCC report today, whose authors stress agroecology’s roots in Indigenous and local knowledge around the world.

Agroecology proponents are quick to underscore that the concept refers not simply to these agricultural practices and the academic field that has blossomed around them, but as Maywa Montenegro, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Mongabay, “The field of agroecology includes the academy, but very importantly is not limited to it. Agroecology is a science, practice, and a movement.”

Shifting resources and local resilience

While the new IPCC report helps underscore just how much potential agroecology holds, the movement element of agroecology is critical because achieving the mitigation and adaptation potentials of agroecology will require major transformations in policy — and a substantial shift in public and private resources.

The report shows what benefits could accrue from such a shift, particularly for greater climate resilience. By building healthy soil, agroecological practices like agroforestry provide “buffers against drought,” note the IPCC authors, and “reduce soil erosion during storms.” Adopting agroforestry — integrating trees into farming landscapes — “shelters stock and crops in heat waves.” And agroecology, which emphasizes multi-cropping, leads to increased “resilience to disease and pests,” say the authors. With “high confidence,” they write, “adoption of agroecology principles and practices will be highly beneficial to maintaining healthy, productive food systems under climate change.”

Agroecology also significantly reduces food system emissions. In one study the IPCC cites, a European Union-wide shift toward agroecology would cut the region’s emissions by 47% compared with 2010 levels without affecting its food security. Another cited study echoed this finding, showing that these practices don’t just hold yields steady, but can actually increase them: Small-scale farmers adopting agroecological practices across Asia, Africa and Latin America on farms of 2 hectares (5 acres) or smaller saw their yields jump by 25%.

The resiliency benefits of agroecological practices in the face of the climate crisis have been well-documented. Perhaps nowhere has this mattered more than in the Philippines. Made up of more than 7,600 islands, the country’s geography has made it one of the most at risk from the climate crisis, but leaders in the agroecology movement there have seen the results of decades of work. Cris Panerio, the national coordinator of a food and farming NGO called MASIPAG at the forefront of that organizing, told Mongabay that their farmers have reported recovering faster after being hit by typhoons and floods — extreme weather events made worse by the climate crisis — compared with their conventional counterparts. They credit agroecological practices, including planting rice varieties their farmers have bred for adaptation to such conditions.

Through farmer-led and participatory rice-breeding projects, MASIPAG has collected and developed more than 2,000 rice varieties since 1985. “In contrast to the hybrid rice developed by IRRI [International Rice Research Institute] or PhilRice [Philippine Rice Research Institute],” Panerio explained, “seeds that need to be purchased year after year and require synthetic inputs to deliver high yields, MASIPAG varieties can be saved and shared among farmers, and flourish without pesticides or synthetic fertilizer.” Today, MASIPAG farmers are independent from the formal rice breeding sector, says Panerio, tapping their own seed banks and a central backup seed bank should they need it.

Panerio’s group fosters farmer-to-farmer learning, emphasizing rice and habitat diversity. In the rice fields of their members, Panerio describes fish ponds integrated with raised beds growing a variety of vegetables, and livestock incorporated onto farms. Native forest and fruit trees are also included whenever possible. “You can only imagine the biomass from such a farm system,” Panerio said, “with everything, except the food itself and firewood, turned into biofertilizers through composting or mulching.” All this adds up to a much smaller carbon footprint than that of a farm dependent on purchased seeds and fossil fuel-based pesticides and fertilizer.

An ‘explicit’ climate solution

The benefits of such agroecological approaches led the authors of this IPCC report to emphasize their feasibility and effectiveness as a climate solution. As Cornell University professor Rachel Bezner Kerr, a coordinating lead author on the chapter on food, fiber and ecosystem products, told Mongabay, previous IPCC reports have mentioned agroecology, “but this report is highlighting the emerging and increased evidence around agroecology as an adaptation and mitigation solution.” Indeed, agroecology is mentioned throughout the report, including in the chapter on health and, importantly, Bezner Kerr notes, it’s included in the Summary Report for Policymakers. For Bezner Kerr, this is a sign of the “deeper understanding of humanity’s dependence on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. Agroecology is one of those strategies that links people to nature in a very explicit way.”

It’s this dependency Bezner Kerr has been documenting through decades of research in partnership with farming communities, particularly in Malawi where she’s been conducting fieldwork in partnership with a local nonprofit as part of a 22-year-long research collaboration. When reached by Skype, Bezner Kerr described the work there, partnering with farmers to document food security, nutrition and biodiversity on the landscapes where farmers have adopted agroecology approaches. Bezner Kerr emphasized that this is exactly the kind of participatory learning the report lauds: “The report emphasizes the evidence that inclusive adaptation strategies are essential, and agroecology is one of those approaches that emphasizes co-knowledge production, participatory and inclusive methods. It’s not just about adding compost to soil, it’s much more than that.”

For agroecology critics, a common charge is that it cannot scale, but Bezner Kerr argues it’s quite the opposite: agroecology “lends itself to scaling out because it relies on farmer-to-farmer methodologies, local knowledge, available resources, and adaptation to local context.” Indeed, many agroecological efforts around the world operate across significant landscape scales: Panerio’s organization in the Philippines includes a network of hundreds of organizations reaching 30,000 farmers directly, and roughly three times as many through those farmers’ relationships. In another example, community managed natural farming efforts in Andhra Pradesh, India, now include 700,000 farmer participants. Globally, La Via Campesina, which was founded in the mid-1990s, now represents more than 300 million smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolks, Indigenous peoples, agricultural and food workers, landless peoples, women, youth, consumers, urban food-insecure people, and NGOs.

In his 1981 book The Gift of Good Land, U.S. farmer and poet Wendell Berry urged us to address our thorniest crises by “solving for pattern.” A poetic phrase for systems thinking, solving for pattern is a call for solutions that create a cascade of co-benefits. Agroecology is just such a solution. For those farmers in the Philippines, it has meant resilience in the face of extreme climate shocks while producing nourishing food for their own communities and achieving independence from expensive inputs. For the farmers Bezner Kerr is working with in Malawi, it means agricultural approaches that boost local biodiversity, not diminish it.

The counterpoint — what my mother Frances Moore Lappé and I called “solving by dissection” in our book Hope’s Edge — is the tactic of applying a technical fix to a discrete aspect of a crisis, without considering the whole and triggering a cascade of consequences. As Berry wrote, such a “solution” is dangerous “because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained. It acts destructively upon those patterns … because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them.”

For years, the IPCC has warned against “solve by dissection” responses to the climate crisis, and in this latest report the authors underscore the concern even more clearly. As Maarten van Aalst, a contributing lead author, noted: “We have explicitly added the notion that responses to climate change can generate significant risks of their own: maladaptation inadvertently creating or aggravating risks.”

For Bezner Kerr, a food system maladaptation would be the rush to respond to droughts by promoting irrigation, for example. “In the short term, irrigation can reduce climate risks for producers and consumers,” she said, “but if done in an area with limited groundwater and with capital-intensive irrigation, it can lead to groundwater depletion, salinization, and worsening inequalities and debt loads for small-scale producers.” In contrast, agroecology can help farmers thrive in drought conditions by using seeds bred for drought tolerance, building soil organic matter so the land can retain more water, or using swales and other techniques to capture rainfall — all of which are good for the ecosystem and for the farmer.

Panerio sees maladaptation in the promotion of glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup to reduce plowing and thus soil carbon loss. While glyphosate can reduce the need to till for weed control, Panerio has seen the consequences of widespread use of this herbicide: Setting aside its health risks which are now widely known, the introduction of genetically engineered corn and other crops resistant to glyphosate — the two are marketed together heavily — traps farmers in debt. “Corn farmers get their inputs from traders, the same people who buy the farmers’ corn,” Panerio said. “In the end, the traders profit two ways: One from the sale of inputs (engineered corn seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer) and the other for the low price of the corn.”

He also sees the ecosystem impacts: the widespread use of glyphosate causes soil erosion year-round. “In the dry season, areas sprayed with glyphosate have no vegetation and are devastated by wind erosion,” Panerio said. “In the wet seasons, the topsoil is washed away by rain after the corn is harvested.”

Mounting evidence and growing momentum

For agroecology advocates, its multiple benefits are its superpower. As this latest IPCC report documents, evidence of these benefits continues to mount. Other recent studies have pulled together evidence from the field, including “The Politics of Knowledge” from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, which emphasizes how small farmers and Indigenous peoples are co-creators and scientists in demonstrating agroecology’s impact. (Disclosure: The foundation where the writer works is a member of the network.)

Worldwide, the momentum for agroecology is growing, within the academy and beyond. Since the first academic agroecology program launched in 1978, the field has exploded. There are now dozens of agroecology schools and programs around the world. UCSC’s Montenegro notes the Sustainable Agriculture Education Association’s growing list of degree-granting programs in agroecology as well as applied student farm programs, where students learn experientially. Her own university has had a long-standing, esteemed agroecology program and recently launched a new agroecology major. Even in the United States, where the vast majority of agricultural land goes to high-input commodity production, and half of all corn is diverted to ethanol, there is “palpable excitement about the resurgent interest in agroecology,” Montenegro said.

The movement beyond the walls of the academy is growing, too. Its advocates know, however, that for agroecology to really take hold, it will require a significant transformation of how agriculture is financed and incentivized, and where research dollars go. Today, relatively little public and private funding is geared to these approaches. One study found that among European donors, less than 15% of agricultural budgets were directed toward agroecological approaches. Among philanthropies focused on climate solutions, food systems funding has historically been a tiny fraction — with agroecology representing even less. That is changing, too, with efforts like the Agroecology Fund and other networks within philanthropy promoting agroecological solutions.

“Given the very limited investment in agroecological research and implementation to date,” Bezner Kerr said, “the fact that there is such evidence points to even greater potential should it be given more investment and attention by governments and other groups interested in adaptation and mitigation solutions.” This is one of the reasons why it’s important, advocates stress, that agroecology be considered holistically: it’s not just what happens on the farm, it’s the social movements needed to move policy and shift power into the hands of farmers themselves.

Nearly half a century ago, when those researchers sought a way to describe the practices they were documenting in the fields of Indigenous farmers in rural Mexico, the term agroecology resonated. Today, it’s a concept that provides a pathway for tapping long-held local wisdom to address one of the world’s most pressing crises.

Anna Lappé is a bestselling author or co-author of three books, including Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, and a contributing author to 14 others, most recently the 50^th anniversary of Diet for a Small Planet. The founder and strategic adviser of the communications nonprofit Real Food Media, Anna also directs a food systems-focused grant making program for a family foundation.

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Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens.

In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world’s most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.

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The post Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming appeared first on Real Food Media.