A note on ‘agroecology’
Agroecology is rooted in the knowledge and practices of peasants and Indigenous Peoples, who have historically worked with nature using self-controlled resources, reciprocity, and a focus on sustaining the farm unit, family, and community.
When farmers undergo a transition from input-dependent farming to agroecology based on local resources, they are becoming “more peasant”, and peasants fundamentally grow food, not commodities. Moves away from external dependencies and towards local inter-dependencies include ‘a renewed emphasis on cooperation and strengthening rural communities.*
Re-peasantisation is therefore a foundational aspect of an agroecological transition away from capitalist agriculture.
Kombumerri philosopher Mary Graham and many other Indigenous thinkers stress the need to ‘locate’ oneself, to have a relationship with land in order to listen and learn to be a good custodian. Local, place-based solutions solve problems where they occur – hopefully before they occur. Short and direct value chains reduce emissions and increase resilience in the face of climate change and the rise of pandemics. Smallholders around the world are rebuilding value chain infrastructure and taking control back into community hands (e.g. rice and grain mills, abattoirs, dairy processing facilities). La Vía Campesina and its member organisations, such as AFSA, are helping to show the way – through horizontal knowledge exchanges, the valuing of traditional knowledges of smallholders and Indigenous Peoples, and the collectivisation of our efforts to lobby the state for legislative reform that enables an agroecological transition.
The term agroecology was coined by Russian agronomist Basil Bensin in 1930, and the practice emerged as a social movement in Mexico in the 1970s in resistance to the Green Revolution, before being taken up as a pillar of the food sovereignty movement from the 1990s onwards. There has been an explosion of publications in the last decade, coinciding with the FAO process and the series of global and regional symposia on agroecology commencing in 2014. Agroecology’s place within the concept of ‘nature’s matrix,’ in which biodiversity, conservation, food production, and food sovereignty are interconnected goals, represents a stark contrast to ‘land-sparing’ arguments that posit humans as separate from and antithetical to the health of functional ecosystems.**
Why we avoid the label ‘agroecological farmers’
While AFSA is strongly aligned with the agroecology and food sovereignty movement locally and globally, we intentionally avoid labelling people as ‘agroecological farmers.’ Agroecology is not a static identity but an ongoing process of transformation that involves all participants in the food system, including eaters, workers, seed savers, and communities. We prefer the term ‘agroecology-oriented farmers’ to signal commitment, direction, and collective action. Key reasons for this approach include:
- It risks creating categories of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ farmers, suggesting a static group rather than acknowledging agroecology as a process of transformation.
- It essentialises people, reducing agroecology to a technical method and losing sight of its political project focused on food sovereignty, collective liberation, and systemic change.
- It may exclude those still transitioning, reinforcing gatekeeping instead of inviting solidarity and transformation.
- It can professionalise and dehumanise the movement, turning collective resistance into a job category and hiding the diverse actors involved.
We therefore use ‘agroecology-oriented farmers’ to emphasise commitment over identity, signal direction and transformation, leave space for collective struggle and political education, and avoid moral purity politics. Agroecology is more than a new farming technique—it’s a movement. No one is ‘agroecology’; we are all working toward it together as part of the broader struggle for food sovereignty and system change.
* Rosset, P., & Martinez-Torres, M. E. (2013). Food sovereignty: A critical dialogue. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE YALE UNIVERSITY SEPTEMBER 14-15. 2013. Conference Paper #4. Journal of Peasant Studies. (P. 8)
** Gliessman, S. (2016). Transforming food systems with agroecology. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 40(3), 187-189; Philpott, S., Arendt, W., Armbrecht, I., Bichier, P., Diestch, T., & Gordon, C. (2008). Biodiversity loss in Latin American coffee landscapes: review of the evidence on ants, birds and trees. Conservation Biology, 22(5), 1093-1105; Perfecto, I., Vandermeer, J., & Wright, A. (2009). Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty. Longon: Routledge; Liebman, A., Jonas, T., Perfecto, I., Kelley, I., Peller, H., Engel-Diamauro, S., … Wallace, R. (2020). Can agriculture stop COVID-21, -22, and -23? Yes, but not by greenwashing agribusiness. PReP Agroecologies.
