Our global food system is largely based on unsustainable industrial
agricultural practices, is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions,
is controlled by a handful of large corporations and produces unhealthy
food. Agroecology is a solution to these increasingly urgent problems.
After decades of being dismissed by mainstream institutions and defended
in obscurity by grassroots movements and farmers, agroecology is
suddenly in fashion. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization,
government ministries and even corporations are jumping on the
bandwagon. But, are they pushing the same agroecology as developed by
pioneering farmers and scientists and pushed for by peasant social
movements, or are they seeking to co-opt the concept and give it
different content?
Rosset and Altieri, two of the world's leading agroecologists, outline
the principles, history and currents of agroecological thought, the
scientific evidence for agroecology, the social aspects of bringing
agroecology to scale and the contemporary politics of agroecology.