https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.298 Pimbert et al
Agroecology is increasingly viewed as an alternative to the corporate global industrial agri-food system.
Most scientists primarily focus on tweaking the industrial system by inventing “new” problem-solving approaches such as climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and sustainable agricultural intensification (SI), which are essentially “more of the same”. CSA and SI approaches selectively incorporate agroecological practices to improve efficiency in resource use in farming, while also often promoting an eclectic mix of inputs and processes. agroecological techniques end up conforming to the dominant agri-food regime and the logic of capitalist development (
In contrast , transnational social movements such as La Via Campesina, grassroot NGOs and critical agroecological scientists are mobilizing to strengthen agroecology as a process of bottom-up construction of decolonized knowledge and innovations that need to be supported—rather than led—by science and policy . They reject an agroecology promoting “input substitutions” that maintain dependency on corporate suppliers of external inputs and global commodity markets, and leave untouched the structural vulnerabilities:
Ecological: reorganizing the material basis of agri-food systems in the image of nature to reflect ecological processes and regenerate diversity (genetic, species, ecological), resilience, and sustainability—from farm plots to landscapes along the rural-urban continuum.
Economic: adopting plural forms of economic exchange (for instance, markets with and without money, basic income) to ensure care for people and nature, material security, sustainable livelihoods, and well-being in relocalized agri-food systems and territories in which economics is re-embedded in society.
Social equity and gender justice: developing ways of knowing, pedagogies, new knowledge, institutions, policies, and practices that challenge and reverse intersecting coloniality, homophobia, patriarchy, and racism.
Political: expanding people’s direct participation and inclusion in the democratic governance of agri-food systems and the territories they are rooted in. large-scale shifts to agroecology-based systems partly hinge on the development of governance that is deeply democratic, and rejects intersectional discrimination (for instance, regarding caste, gender, or race). Moreover, governance for the common good needs to have the capacity to tackle the inequitable power relations that underpin the dominant regime and “lock in” industrial food and farming as the norm