Steve Gliessman

Agroecology: The Ecology of Food Systems

ABSTRACT We present a compelling rationale for defining agroecology as the ecology of food systems. Our purpose is to provide a framework that will guide research, education, and action in the multiple and interacting facets of an increasingly complex global agriculture and food system. To accomplish such goals, it is essential to build bridges and connections among and beyond our disciplines in production agriculture, as well as beyond the farm gate into the rural landscape and community. Fields of sociology, anthropology, environmental sciences, ethics, and economics are crucial to the mix. They provide additional vantage points from which we can view the food system anew, as well as insights on how to establish valuation criteria beyond neoclassical economics. Examples from Mexico, California, and the Nordic Region are used to illustrate the successful implementation of this educational strategy in universities. Design of individual farms using principles of ecology is expanded to the levels of landscape, community, and bioregion, with emphasis on uniqueness of place and the people and other species that inhabit that place. We conclude that defining agroecology as the ecology of food systems will foster the development of broader interdisciplinary research teams and attractive systems-based courses for tomorrows best students. In contrast to the narrow focus on crop-soil interactions, this definition will help us raise higher-level research questions whose solutions will advance the development of a sustainable agriculture and food system.

We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can't End Hunger

A new a study from McGill University and the University of Minnesota published in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and 316 trials (Seufert et al. 2012). Researchers found that organic systems on average yielded 25% less than conventional, chemical-intensive systems—although this was highly variable and context specific. Embracing the current conventional wisdom, authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet “the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts” (Seufert et al. 2012, 3). Unfortunately, neither the study nor the conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger. Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2009a, 2009b) the world produces more than 1 /2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak. But the people making less than

Agroecology: Growing the Roots of Resistance

2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating un-viably small plots of land—cannot afford to buy this food. In reality, the bulk of industrially produced grain crops (most yield reduction in the study was found in grains) goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the one billion hungry. The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people. Actually, what this new study does tell us is how much smaller the yield gap is between organic and conventional farming than what critics of organic agriculture have assumed. Smil’s (2001) claim that organic farming requires twice the land base has become a conventional mantra. In fact, when we unpack the data from the Nature study, we find that for many crops and in many instances, the reported yield gap is minimal. With new advances in seed breeding for organic systems, and with the transition of commercial

Pastoral Nomadism, a Sustainable System for Grazing Land Management in Arid Areas

Agroecology today has a strong focus on bringing sustainability to food, feed, and fiber production. But there is also a larger focus on the social, economic, and political “drivers” that move food systems beyond the conditions that have created un-sustainability in modern industrial agriculture. With its ecosystem foundation, the science of agroecology has become a powerful tool for food system change when coupled with an understanding of how change occurs in society. In this article, I trace the roots of agroecology to its emergence as Agroecología in Mexico in the 1970s as a form of resistance to the Green Revolution. Agroecology has become much more than a science for developing better, safer, and more environmentally sound food production technologies. Agroecology is more than a way to practice agriculture, such as organic or ecological production. Agroecology is also a social movement with a strong ecological grounding that fosters justice, relationship, access, resilience, resistance, and sustainability. Agroecology seeks to join together the ecological and social cultures that helped human society create agriculture in the first place.

Transforming food systems with agroecology

ABSTRACT Pastoralism is reviewed as a sustainable means of natural resource use and management in dryland areas. Rather than its normal view as the aimless wandering in search of water and pasture, pastoral nomadism is presented in this paper as a complex set of practices and knowledge that has permitted the long-term maintenance of a sophisticated “triangle of sustainability” that includes plants, animals, and people. Pastoralism is presented as the integration of cropping systems, domestic animal management, natural resource conservation, and sociocultural organization. A strong case is made for the importance of such systems in the sustainable management of fragile dry or arid lands. Examples of such systems range from complex crop/animal rotations or interactions, to extensive forage and fodder systems in areas where agriculture without animals would otherwise be extremely difficult. A case is made for placing greater value on such agroecosystems as a viable and practical alternative for sustaining the landscape and the people who occupy it in strongly water-limited parts of the world.

Transforming Food Systems to Sustainability with Agroecology

Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems, from the farm to the table, with a goal of achieving ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and change-oriented research and action, agroecology links together science, practice, and movements focused on social change. But what are the steps that must be taken to transform food systems toward the ultimate goal of sustainability, and away from the mounting evidence of the negative impacts on the environment and society caused by modern industrial agriculture? In the latest edition of my agroecology textbook (Gliessman 2015b), I propose a framework for classifying “levels” of food system change. The first three levels describe the steps farmers can actually take on their farms for converting from industrial or conventional agroecosystems. Two additional levels go beyond the farm to the broader food system and the societies in which they are embedded. All five levels taken together can serve as a roadmap that outlines in an almost stepwise manner a process for transforming the entire global food system: Level 1: Increase the efficiency of industrial and conventional practices in order to reduce the use and consumption of costly, scarce, or environmentally damaging inputs. The primary goal of change at this level is to use industrial inputs more efficiently so that fewer inputs will be needed and the negative impacts of their use will also be reduced. Most conventional agricultural research has taken place at this level, through which considerable modern agricultural technologies, inputs, and practices have been developed. This research has helped farmers maintain or increase production through such practices as improved seeds, optimum planting density, more efficient pesticide and fertilizer application, and more precise use of water. So-called “precision agriculture” is a recent focus of research at Level 1. Although this kind of research has reduced some of the negative impacts of industrial agriculture, they do not help break its dependence on external human inputs and monoculture practices. Level 2: Substitute alternative practices for industrial/conventional inputs and practices. The goal of this level of transition is to replace external input-intensive and environmentally degrading products and practices with those that are more renewable, based on natural products, and more environmentally sound. Organic farming and biodynamic agriculture are examples of this approach. They employ alternative practices that include the use of nitrogen-fixing covercrops and rotations to replace synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, the use of natural controls of pests and diseases, and the use of organic composts for fertility and soil organic matter AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 2016, VOL. 40, NO. 3, 187–189 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2015.1130765

Is There Sustainability in “Sustainable Intensification”?

July 10–23, 2011, the 12th Annual International Agroecology Shortcourse took place at the University of California Santa Cruz under the auspices of the Community Agroecology Network (www.CanUnite.org). The course was titled “The Transformation of Food Systems to Sustainability: The California Model.” Representing nine countries and diverse locations in the US ranging from Florida to Alaska and Maine to California, 32 participants and multiple presenters gathered together for an intensive introduction to how agroecology can be a vital and viable approach to redesigning today’s food systems. By presenting the transformation process as a series of transition levels (see JSA vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 1–2), food system change could be seen as not only being necessary, but plausible. With its grounding in ecology and ecosystem thinking, agroecology was cast as the action and change-oriented science that many of us believe is needed to avoid what has recently been called the pending “food crisis.” Rather than rely on more of the technologies that are being billed as the new green revolution, agroecology is an information intensive way of redesigning the food production process so that diversification, interactions, and resiliency all combine to create the emergent quality of sustainability. But it was also clear in the course that farmers alone cannot transform the entire food system. It will also take the full engagement of the folks at the other end of the food chain—the people who eat the food or use other agricultural products. After decades of food system policies and development focused on high yields, aggregation, and concentration, the growers and the eaters have become so isolated and separated that both have been exploited. Growers don’t know who is consuming their products and eaters have no idea who grows their food, how it was grown, or where it was grown. By reconnecting these two most important parts of the food system, the agroecology course showed how, by redeveloping a culture of sustainability, we can complete the transformation process needed to get us there (called Level 4 in the transition process). The course included participant observations on four local organic farms operating at different scales and integration in the food system. We also heard from major food system transformation projects such as the Roots of Change, the Food Commons,

Networking the National Plan for Agroecology in Brazil

In light of human population growth, global food security is an escalating concern. To meet increasing demand for food, leading scientists have called for “sustainable intensification”, defined as the process of enhancing agricultural yields with minimal environmental impact and without expanding the existing agricultural land base. We argue that this definition is inadequate to merit the term “sustainable,” because it lacks engagement with established principles that are central to sustainability. Sustainable intensification is likely to fail in improving food security if it continues to focus narrowly on food production ahead of other equally or more important variables that influence food security. Sustainable solutions for food security must be holistic and must address issues such as food accessibility. Wider consideration of issues related to equitable distribution of food and individual empowerment in the intensification decision process (distributive and procedural justice) is needed to put meaning back into the term “sustainable intensification.”

Agroecology and Going Beyond Organic

The nearly 4,000 participants at the 8th Brazilian Congress of Agroecology reflected on the remarkable strides that have occurred since the first Congress took place 10 years ago. The capital city of the southern-most state of Brazil, Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, was an excellent venue for the congress. During December 25–28, over 1,200 (selected from the more than 2,000 submitted) oral research papers and posters were presented, along with several days of conferences from local, national, and international experts in agroecology. The Congress is the flagship activity of the Brazilian Association of Agroecology (Associaçåo Brasileira de Agroecologia—ABA), with over 40 organizations representing academia, research, extension, financial agencies, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations working in food systems and agriculture, functioning as co-organizers or co-sponsors. Under the Congress theme of “Agroecology: Caring for the Health of the Planet,” presentations covered food system themes spanning the transdisciplinary fields linking the ecological, economic, social, political, and cultural components of food system sustainability. It was obvious that a major paradigm shift was occurring, and it was frequently referred to as an agroecological transition. Intense discussions explored such change-oriented topics as research on ecologically based and organic farming practices; political agroecology and changing public policy; the challenges for researchers using participatory action methodologies; the need for alternative market strategies that link producers and consumers; the resistance to agrotoxins and transgenic crops; food sovereignty and corporate control of the food system; rural development and family farming systems; and autonomy and rural women. Transformative change and paradigm shift seemed to be the threads that wove everything together. All of the organizers and sponsors had interactive displays that highlighted their work in support of healthy food and a healthy planet. Local seed saving groups shared the incredible agrobiodiversity that thrives in small and family agriculture in Brazil. Publishers offered the wide array of books and media that have become available in the country in support of agroecology and alternative food systems. Herbal medical knowledge was on

The ecology in agroecology

Organic food must be understood at the food system level. The confusion created by the recent publication of a review of the health effects of organic and conventional foods (Smith-Spangler et al. 2012) is an example of the pitfalls of specialization when it comes to understanding the sustainability of our food system. After reviewing 237 published articles on vitamin and nutrient contents of organically raised foods, the authors were unable to statistically state that organic was any more nutritious than industrial. Despite the fact that the same authors did point out that organic food has lower pesticide levels, lower multidrug-resistant bacteria levels, and higher beneficial fat levels, they still concluded that there was no evidence that organic food was healthier. Upon hearing this, many eaters will undoubtedly question if it is worth paying more for organic food. Whom should eaters trust? What other criteria should eaters consider to make choices that benefit those who eat as well as those who grow the food, and everyone in between? The implementation of national organic standards in 2002 in the United States was a big step for organic agriculture. However, the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) organic certification based on those standards primarily regulates the kinds of inputs (such as fertilizers and pesticides) that can be used. Up until the moment, USDA organic standards also prohibit the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), sewage sludge as a fertilizer, and irradiation for food preservation. But broader environmental impacts were assumed, rather than required, such as water quality protection or biodiversity conservation. Human benefits were assumed, rather than required, such as a fair wage for workers and a better price to small farmers. Social benefits were assumed, rather than required, such as more local and direct marketing channels or support for the livelihoods of small to medium size farmers and their communities. As a result, we now have the growing dominance of what I call corporate commercial organic. We are seeing larger and larger organic monocultures in the fields managed by larger and larger farm corporations. Vertically integrated agribusiness operations move organic produce from the fields to the market and capture the majority market share of what used to be distributed to smaller farmers and their local markets. And there is no evidence that these larger systems are more sustainable than conventional farms in the broad definition.