New Dispatch from Pandemic Research from the People
Co-authored by the PReP Agroecologies group, including ASFA president Tammi Jonas, this piece explores the impacts of COVID-19 after nearly a year of the pandemic, which has highlighted injustices and system failures in healthcare, food production and distribution, workers’ rights, and social safety nets. It traces the roots of the pandemic and other problems to an extractive, capitalist system, and explores why agroecology must be the pathway forward to address the political, social, and ecological changes we need.
“These injustices aren’t just reflected in the pandemic’s damage. They are also the outbreak’s
cause. Pathogens repeatedly are emerging out of a global agrifood system rooted in inequality,
labor exploitation, and unfettered extractivism by which communities are robbed of their natural
and social resources. A crisis-prone economic system that prioritizes production for profit over
meeting human needs and ecological preservation is organized around the intense monocultural
production that, along the way, allows the deadliest of diseases to emerge.
The PReP Agroecologies working group we’re introducing here with this dispatch will be
focusing on how agriculture might be reimagined as the kind of community-wide intervention that
could stop coronaviruses and other pathogens from emerging in the first place. We finish up here by introducing agroecology, an environmentalism of the peasantry, the poor, and Indigenous, long in practice, that treats agriculture as a part of the ecology out of which
humanity grows its food.
Read the dispatch here.