Agroecology and the Food System

Abstract

On a global scale agriculture and food will face key challenges of properly feeding a population of nine billion individuals in 2050, while preserving the ecosystems from which other services are also expected, such as bioenergy production, biodiversity use and conservation, carbon storage and climate regulation. To develop future sustainable agricultural production and food systems, agronomic, ecological, economic and social challenges have to simultaneously be taken into account. The framework of agroecology applied on the food system could be a useful concept to support this development. Although the scale and dimension of scientific research in agroecology has been enlarged in the last years towards the food system approach, it is still difficult to outline clear concepts, new models and new methods that specify it. In using two contrasted research case studies, we evaluate benefits and challenges using the framework of agroecology applied on the food system.

The first case study illustrates research questions around water quality and management of shallow lakes with fish production, biodiversity of the lakes, agricultural land use on the surrounding land, and local fish products and its marketing strategies. It shows that research was initiated by an ecologist working at the lake scale, but implementing quite quickly a systems approach in integrating the disciplines ecology, agronomy, geography, socio-economy and sociology with a food systems approach. The second case study illustrates research questions around organic wheat production and food chain. It shows the evolution of a research program where research objectives and methodology have been slowly turned from technical questions on nitrogen management of organic wheat, supported by agronomist, applied at field scale, to overall agroecological questions around organic grain producers, raised by economists, sociologists, agronomists and food technologists, focussing on the wheat-flour food chain, applied at farm and food system scales.

This chapter underlines the importance of the articulation between disciplines such as agronomy, ecology and social science. In using the food system approach, the indispensable interdisciplinary research is carried out automatically by integrating other disciplines such as sociology, socio-economy and geography supporting the disciplines of agronomy and ecology. This chapter also shows that in combining already existing research methods from different disciplines, and applying them to different scales, a concept for agroecological analyses of the food system already exists. In conclusion, we propose necessary prerequisites for agroecological research with the food system approach: ex-ante impact anticipation of expected results when starting research, multi-scale and interdisciplinary research as well as scale related impact assessment of proposed recommendations. In considering these prerequisites, quality of agricultural research will substantially improve in the future, and thus contributing in search for more sustainable food systems.