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Imagine a process in which food and farming policies were designed with social justice as the central tenet. What would such a process look like? Whose voices would be heard, and whose interests would be represented? What questions would need to be asked and how would we know that social justice had been addressed? Our recently published article speaks to these questions by looking at debates around UK food and farming policy in the post-Brexit context. We examined how and to what extent social justice was represented in the policy discourse on food and …

The murder of George Floyd has laid bare, once again, the abhorrent anti-black racism within policing in the USA. The video of the killing of George Floyd captured one instance of the racist and violent conditions that African Americans live with daily. The widespread hurt and pain of centuries of anti-blackness in policing and more broadly in society, forms the basis of sustained and powerful African American-led protests across every state in the USA.   In acts of solidarity, and in resistance to anti-blackness in the USA, and against carceral, colonial, and racist policing in many …

In December 2019, Ms. Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), was appointed as the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy to the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.  Over the last two months, a range of actors[i] have voiced their concerns over this appointment, that has been criticized for giving weight to a corporate-led, industrial and productivist development model, and reinforcing the highly problematic status quo of the current unsustainable food systems. As scholars committed to approaches to food systems that put the well-being of people and nature at the …

This special issue on Agroecology Transformations, published today in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, includes six articles sharing new insights into the process and kinds of transformations needed to enable agroecology as a model for a more just and sustainable food system. Agroecology is coming into its own as an alternative paradigm to corporate-led industrial food systems. Evidence of the advantages, benefits, impacts, and multiple functions of agroecology abounds (see: HLPE 2019 for a review). For many the evidence is clear: agroecology, together with ‘food sovereignty’, offer a pathway for more just and sustainable food …

How can we enable the scaling of agroecology from the Bottom up? What is needed for agroecology be advanced, amplified, scaled up and out? In each context, there are enabling and disabling conditions that shape the potential for agroecology to be scaled. This Food First Issue Brief identifies six ‘domains of transformation’ that are essential to consider in agroecology transformations. This brief compliments a range of publications, ideas, videos, briefs and more that we aim to inform agroecology transformations. All of these are available for you to use freely, please feel free to use …

In spite of the growing recognition of agroecology around the world, there is still a significant lack of adequate tools for the study of the economic basis of agroecosystems that are appropriate for the modes of production and livelihoods of family farmers and indigenous people. The Lume method for economic-ecological analysis of agroecosystems presented in this new publication [Click here to download] of the Reclaiming Diversity and Citizenship Series(open access, free to download) is a contribution to bridge this gap. The method was developed under coordination of the Brazilian NGO AS-PTA (www.aspta.org.br) with the …