Emancipatory Agroecologies: Transforming Power Structures, Decolonizing Territories, and Strengthening Peasant Autonomies

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, agroecology has become fashionable in institutional spaces. This represents an opportunity but also a threat of cooptation and/or distortion of agroecology by agribusiness, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which often promote agroecology within the constraints of conventional developmentalism. In this new scenario, agroecology has become a territory in dispute, between what might be called “agroecologies from above”—emanating from agribusiness, big NGOs, and government policies—and “agroecologies from below”, from the movements and organizations of peasants, family farmers, indigenous peoples, the landless, peasant women, and peasant youth themselves, and, in the case of urban agroecologies, of the urban poor.

The agroecologies from above conform to and reinforce the entrenched structures of power that dominate our food system and subjugate peasants to the logics of dependency on value chains, political clientelism, and epistemic colonization by external expert knowledge. On the other hand, “agroecologies from below” are part of the resistance to, and struggles to transform, dominant structures of power. Rather than reinforcing dependency, they strengthen the autonomy of peasants and communities. They are typically based on recovering traditional, ancestral, and peoples’ wisdom, knowledge and farming practices, along with local seeds, native tree species, and local livestock breeds and races. They are part of broader struggles for human emancipation, are often anti-capitalist, require collective action, and go hand in hand with struggles to transform the food system by building food sovereignty, and with struggles for agrarian reform and the defense of land, territory, and ways of life. Horizontal forms of organization, processes, and pedagogies all play key roles in these emancipatory agroecologies.

For this Special Issue, we seek examples that speak to the scenario of dispute between different agroecologies. Articles can focus on concrete cases of emancipatory processes led by peasant organizations or other popular sectors, or on specific cases that critically exemplify how agroecology is being appropriated and distorted by agribusiness, opportunistic NGOs, and public policies of governments. Please contact the editors of this Special Issue if you are interested in contributing a paper, and we will send you our overview essay on emancipatory agroecologies to serve as an initial framework for dialogue.

Dr. Peter Rosset
Dr. Omar Felipe Giraldo
Guest Editors

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• social movements
• agroecology
• cooptation
• agribusiness
• public policy
• emancipation
• peasant autonomy