AgroecologyNow!

soil, individual, community and planetary health
News

Hot off the press: New Open Access Book on Transformations Towards More Just and Sustainable Food Systems

This new open access book develops a framework for advancing agroecology in transformations towards more just and sustainable food systems focusing on power, politics and governance. It explores the potential of agroecology as a sustainable and socially just alternative to today’s dominant food regime.  Agroecology Now! Transformations Towards More Just and Sustainable Food Systems – Download at No CostBy: Colin R. Anderson, Janneke Bruil, Michael Jahi Chappell, Csilla Kiss and Michel Pimbert The authors analyse the conditions that enable and disable agroecology’s potential and present six ‘domains of transformation’ where it comes into conflict with …

Long Read

Agroecology or Collapse Part III – Reclaiming the ‘archaic’, ‘anarchic’, and ‘utopian’ as the language of food system transformation

Agroecology is a struggle to overcome industrial agriculture and is simultaneously a practice, a science, and a movement. Detractors often criticize Agroecology saying it is archaic, anarchic, & utopian. Perhaps, paradoxically, this is where its potential lies.  Agroecology is archaic, anarchic, and utopian – of course it is and thank goodness! In the final post of this three-part series, Paulo Petersen and Denis Monteiro push back against the arguments often made against agroecology. They engage with the language used to critique agroecology, and reverse it to articulate these as critical resources for social transformation. …

Agroecology in Motion

Seeking New Agreements for Working with Nature through Enhancing Agricultural Biodiversity

In this first article in our new column, Agroecology in Motion: Nourishing Transformation, Patrick Mulvany, (HRF, CAWR), makes a call to radically foreground a more robust and transformative understanding of agricultural biodiversity, especially the need to enhance the agricultural biodiversity embedded within all seeds, breeds and agroecosystems, making these more heterogeneous and resilient. This approach could herald new ways of agreeing how we should work with nature, led by peasants, Indigenous Peoples and other food producers as the everyday experts, stewards and champions of agricultural biodiversity. This call to action will help tune activists, …

Agroecology in Motion

Announcing “Agroecology in Motion: Nourishing Transformation”

Articles written for Agroecology in Motion: Nourishing Transformation are written to stimulate reflection and learning, inform political-practical work on agroecology and move people to action. This first article in the column lays the groundwork for future contributions. To follow the column and other AgroecologyNow updates, Follow us on Facebook, Twitter or by filling in the form in the right column to receive email updates. Agroecology is entering a new phase. A range of circumstances have catapulted agroecology into the limelight. From the acceleration of the climate crisis, the dangerous decline of biodiversity and Covid-19 …

Events

Join in on a Range of Online Workshops with CAWR at the Oxford Real Farming Conference

This year the Oxford Real Farming Conference or ORFC is going online and global with a 7-day programme (7-13 Jan) of talks and workshops from across the world. The event  will give food and farming activists, including producers, researchers, policy-makers and NGOs the chance to come together as a movement to exchange ideas, learn from each other and form new alliances.  It will also provide space to organise ahead of the climate ministers and heads of state gathering, COP26, which the UK is hosting in Glasgow in November 2021. The team at Agroecologynow and …

Events

Shifting European Finance towards Food Systems Tranformation: A Webinar

Biovision Foundation, CIDSE, IPES-Food, AgroecologyNow! at the Center for Agroecology Water and Resilience (CAWR) of Coventry University, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Coalition Contre la Faim, DanChurchAid, are presenting a webinar on  “Shifting European Finance towards Food System Transformation”. The event will take place on the 26th of November, from 2 to 4PM CET. More info and register here. Click Here for A Running List of Publications on “Financing Agroecology” It is widely recognised that a radical transformation of food and agriculture systems is urgently needed in order to address converging social, economic, health and …

News

Call for contributions: Special Issue on Doing Participatory Action Research (PAR) in a time of COVID and Beyond

Invitation to contribute to Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems A Special Issue is currently being prepared on the topic of “Doing Participatory Action Research (PAR) in a time of COVID and Beyond” to Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems by researchers connected to AN! We encourage scholar-activists or researcher-practitioners from within social networks and scholarship to co-author work that raises important questions about how we might think about and approach our work differently. If your work engages with PAR and food systems (within the broader realms of interpretation), and you are interested/willing to be listed as potential …

Long Read

Agroecology or Collapse Part II – Democratizing Food Systems and Breaking the Bonds of Food Empires

Thinking that the agroecology movement is limited to producing organics in a “differentiated niche” is a mistake. Its focus is to redirect agriculture according to logics that oppose and subvert the capitalist market. In Part II of this three-part series, Paulo Petersen and Denis Monteiro dig deeper into articulating capitalist neoliberal food empires as the structural root of the current crises in food systems. They go on to present the case for agroecology as the alternative model to prevent the looming collapse. Part I is available here. Earlier versions of this pieces were previously …

News

Pivoting from Local Food to Just Food Systems

By: Colin Anderson, Jessica Milgroom and Michel Pimbert The COVID-19 virus has jarred many people out of the illusion that globalised, corporate food is safe and secure. Yet, many people don’t know what to do about it. Some have taken up backyard gardening and ‘buying local’, practices that are important for local food sovereignty. However, across Europe and North America, many of these responses remain couched within a market-based neoliberal paradigm. We desperately need to focus our action on breaking up corporate power in food systems and supporting long-term systemic changes. Local food initiatives …

Long Read

Agroecology or Collapse: Part 1 – From Emergency Responses to Systemic Transformations

In this first of a three-part contribution to Agroecologynow, Paulo Petersen and Denis Monteiro present the current moment as a crisis in capitalism that demands systemic and structural responses based in solidarity and feminist economics. This lays the foundations for agroecology as a new organizing paradigm for food systems that holds the key to preventing the collapse of our living systems as we know them. Earlier versions of these pieces were previously published in Portuguese. Part II available here. As we try to reimagine our world, we must look at the countryside. There we …