During the 2nd International Agroecology Symposium in Rome from 3 to 5 April 2018, the Food and Agriculture Director-General, Jose Graziano da Silva, concluded that agroecology can contribute to healthier and more sustainable food systems.
Flora IP discusses agroecology with Dr. Julia Wright, a Senior Research Fellow in Agroecological Futures and Theme Leader, Resilient Food and Water Systems Practice at the Coventry University Research Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR).
Julia has over 30 years’ experience working on sustainable agriculture and food security applied research and development. She has institutional experience with organisations such as the World Bank, United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, as well as government and non-governmental organisations.
Julia received her doctorate in Ecological Agriculture, Knowledge Systems and Food Security in Post-Crisis Cuba, from Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands in 2005. She is currently on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, a Member of Research Advisory Board of the Permaculture Association and Council member of the UK Biodynamic Agriculture Association.
Flora IP (FI): Could you share how you originally got interested in agroecology?
Dr. Julia Wright (JW): Everyone has their own journey, it wasn’t just straight forward for me. As far as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a farmer and I still haven’t achieved that goal. But I remember as a child thinking it must be great to be a farmer and to grow your own food. I’ve always also been interested in nature and the environment so I studied Rural Environment Studies at University of Wales, and then a Masters in Sustainable Agriculture at Wye College, London University. But I found by that time, just working on a farm didn’t seem to be satisfying enough and I couldn’t afford to buy a farm in the UK because the land is expensive. I ended up going into agricultural development work internationally, eventually working for the British Government in the Department for International Development. So I got into farming from a research and development perspective.
Before I got the job with the British government, I had heard about organic farming. As soon as I heard about it, it just seemed to make sense. I was not taught organic farming in University and I couldn’t work out why. So for about 20 years after I heard about organic farming, while I thought it sounded sensible, in all the farms and all the colleges and research, everybody was saying it wasn’t feasible. So I thought, I needed to be quiet, to listen and to observe why organic farming was wrong. People gave reasons. They said you can’t feed the world with organic farming, but they never had the evidence for that. You don’t need to look very far to see that where you have good natural resources, your yields of organic can be similar to conventional. But in areas where natural resources are poor like poor water resources, organic yields are higher than industrial if it is done well.
After many years, I realised that I was right and they were wrong. Since then, I haven’t tried to fit in with the conventional sector. After my PhD, I worked for a charity, Garden Organic where I ran the international research programme on organic farming in less industrialised countries. I was instrumental in setting up the Centre for Agroecology (CAWR). Coventry University was looking to set up more research centres and they asked me to help write a business plan for one on sustainable farming. CAWR was established about 8 years ago, I have been here ever since.
My research now has taken another twist. Although organic farming and agroecology are better than industrial farming, they still don’t seem to be quite enough to me. I have a new research programme I am developing, on what I call Quantum Agriculture. Quantum Agriculture is looking at the non-material invisible dimension of agriculture. (This is very interesting! Flora IP will cover Quantum Agriculture in a separate post).
FI: What is agroecology?
JW:
On the one hand, agroecology could be identified as similar to organic farming- working in harmony with nature, avoiding agrochemicals, using natural inputs or biological inputs, that’s the farming dimension. There’s a political and social dimension to it as well, which the organic movement didn’t have because they come out of different cultures and different times.
Agroecology comes from South America. In South America, the smallholder farmers who were farming agroecologically had problems with land access. They often had no land (e.g the landless movement in Brazil). Agroecology movements were caught up with land access rights as well as the rights to food, access to water, and campaigning- which are the social and political dimensions.
At CAWR, we have 45 researchers, some looking at organic farming and soil fertility, we have other researcher activists who are supporting community groups to protest about the right to nutritious food. We work with the Land Workers Alliance to deal with food policies and food justice. CAWR reflects all the dimensions of agroecology.
Agroecology has brought new ways of thinking. I would say it is more radical than organic. It is an umbrella to draw lots of different groups together.
For example, every year, there is an agroecological conference called the Oxford Real Farming Conference in Oxford, United Kingdom. The conference hosts people from the agroecological movement, the organic movement, the biodynamic movement, the land workers alliance, as well as agricultural and environmental agencies. Agroecology is used as an umbrella to unite the alternative farming and environmental movements, which otherwise would have been working disparately. Agroecology is a really useful term because it does not have a certification system, meaning that it does not have clear boundaries. People feel that they belong to it. It is a way of unifying people or movements with similar interests.
The key message agroecology passes is farming in harmony with nature. Not doing anything to damage nature; enhancing natural processes.
For example, nature makes its own compost- when leaves fall on the ground. That is what permaculture is about, copying nature’s design systems. In addition, agroecology has the socio-political ambit, that’s where there is divergence about how far we go down the socio-political road, each culture or movement has a different perspective on this. Agroecology is about nutritious food for everybody, human rights- the rights to food, the rights to land and the rights to farm. Then of course, that has implications for the right to resist other things like the right to resist food which is coming cheaply from another country that has implications for import tariffs. It is quite complex.
FI: What role does agroecology play in topical issues of climate change, food security and sustainable agriculture?
JW: Climate change: to begin with, in discussions about climate change, people initially argued that we can halt climate change and reverse it. Quite quickly, that argument was dropped, and replaced with discussions about how we can live with climate change in terms of food and farming. It’s a pity because I think there’s a lot we can do at the local level to halt climate change. We know about carbon sequestration, we know that organic and agroecological farming sequesters carbon into the soil. There are different debates and some people say this can solve everything. We can sequester the extra carbon from the atmosphere with sustainable livestock farming, for example, grazing. The food industry and farming industries contribute to about 35% of greenhouse gases, if you include land clearance as well, which is a big contributor to climate change. Organic farming and agroecology can help to mitigate or even reverse climate change.
Food security: I advocate for optimum yield, not maximum yields. To graphically explain this, I always use the image of a donkey. If you really beat a donkey, it is going to die, if you want to pull a load you don’t beat it till it dies, you encourage it to pull the load. You are optimising the donkey, not maximising it over the short term. It is the same thing with nature. If you force nature to produce as much as possible in a short term, it is going to start to die off. We don’t want the highest yields, we want good yields. We know that we can get higher yields if we plant two crops in the same land: polycultures, that’s called the land equivalent ratio. Why do we still have monocultures?
Sustainable agriculture: following the principles of agroecology results in sustainable agriculture from environmental and social dimensions. It is only the economic dimension where we have a conflict. However, humans created economic systems. Therefore, that ought to be the easiest dimension for us to change. It is more difficult for us to change the laws of nature than to change the laws of economics. If industrial farmers were paying for cleaning up the waterways they were polluting, that would increase costs of their products. As a result, conventional products would cost more than organic products, and consumers would buy more organic. Currently, because the pollution is cleaned by taxpayers funding, the market price of conventional products is not a true reflection of its costs. We are operating in a sort of imbalanced market situation and price-value situation.
FI: Should agroecology be adopted globally?
JW: Yes. Nobody asked us to eat conventional food. When industrial food came up in the UK in the last century, especially after the Second World War, there was a big drive for increasing yields and using more pesticides. They never asked the consumers to pay more to eat food with more chemicals. Now, we say if you don’t like conventional food, you can pay more for organic food. It is more expensive to purchase organic food. I would like to see a day when farmers are obliged to produce in an agroecological way, and if they choose to use chemicals they would have to certify their food and pay for the damage/pollution they are causing, that would just reverse the status quo.
We waste about 40% of our food. Why try to use chemicals to increase yields when we can save the food that is being wasted instead. It is nonsensical to use more chemicals to increase food production without attempting to reduce food waste. It is a systems approach.
Human fear is one of the challenges to the global adoption of agroecology. During my PhD in Cuba, I interviewed lots of Cuban farmers. People thought Cuba had gone organic because they were isolated from most of the rest of the world. I went there and found out that they were not going organic. When I asked them why there weren’t, they said there were too many reasons. Psychological, they were scared of not having enough food. If they farmed without chemicals, they thought they might not have enough food. Cuba had just experienced starvation, so we can understand the fear. But it was irrational because the agroecological farms that were functioning were producing more than their conventional farms. So even though there was fear, it was an irrational fear.
They were scared that if they didn’t use chemicals that nature would invade them, they were scared of plagues and pests. Although the plagues happened, it happened on their conventional farms because they were unhealthy. We know that agroecological and organic systems don’t suffer so much from those sorts of issues. Permaculture promotes farming without chemicals, but if once every ten years, a farmer experiences unexpected plagues, chemicals may be applied. That is, in emergencies, not all the time. When I talked to the Ministry of Agriculture officials in Cuba, they were scared of farmers taking control, because Cuba is politically centralised. The officials thought that if each farmer makes a decision of how they want to run their own farms, they would have too much control, and the government won’t have control over them. There was fear of starvation and lack of control.
If you look round the world, it’s the same thing. Agribusinesses represent the industrial mind-sets; they want to make money.
I think the biggest challenge to agroecology is humans and our thinking. We can say that is a lack of connection with nature.
Twenty years ago, I was working in an international research centre which concluded that we have enough technology and know-how to triple food production already. We don’t need more innovation, because we know how to increase yields. We know the technical part, it is the human-social dimension that requires work. That is more a malaise within humans, disconnection, fear, lack of community, where are we going to get our next meals from. The western society may be encouraging disconnection from food; eating out of packets, reduction in food preparation time and city houses built without kitchens. These may sound like little things, but they are bigger than that. Although it seems like a big task to change this culture, big things have happened starting from little changes. Big companies do fall apart, you saw that with banking. So it’s not impossible to change agricultural practices.
FI: If you could share key messages about agroecology with the world, what would they be?
JW:
Be aware of what you’re eating because it does matter and it does make a difference. People say the biggest thing you can do is look at what you are eating.
We can’t even begin to know our true potential because we’ve been eating unhealthy food for decades now. We don’t really know what it will feel like to eat really nutritious mineral and vitamin-rich foods. Our potential is much greater than we’ve experienced – the clarity of minds and health of our bodies- that is an exciting thing for people to imagine.
According to Geoff Lawton, you can solve all the world’s problems in the garden. I think he meant, it’s either you get into gardening yourself and you find that your problems disappear. Or you might put two people who are in conflict in a garden and the ‘magic’ of the garden will help them work out their differences. Once you start gardening and being in nature, it changes things.
FI: What are your favourite agroecology and agriculture information resources?
JW: Anything about permaculture in general. I think everyone needs to take a permaculture design course. It is a ten-day course. Once you’ve been on that, it changes your mind and world view. Everything falls into place. Things connect. The courses are run all around the world. Once you leave it, you leave with confidence even to start your own farm. You don’t need a degree. You can also design your own life systems, it’s not just about food and agriculture. We call it a design science, it is about living- shelter, food, energy and human relations. For example, the Transition Initiative was started by someone who attended a permaculture course. I have attended one too.
Any old texts from the organic movement or alternative agriculture. For example, Masanobu Fukuoka- the One Straw Revolution, he wrote about farming in Japan. Other old texts, Rudolf Steiner- Biodynamic Farming.
FI: As Flora IP envisions a thriving agriculture sector in Nigeria, what advice would you give to generally improve agroecology in Nigeria?
JW:
Consider traditional practice. It’s not always dated, it was there for a reason. It developed out of a culture, it is locally appropriate, and then modernise that.
Self-sufficiency to some extent, because it is necessary for every country to depend less on imports. It doesn’t mean to you have to cut yourself off. Just to make sure that whatever happens in the world, communities and citizens at any scale can survive. That means saving seeds, having your own varieties, and being proud of your food culture. Don’t lose it.
For more on agroecology, see the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s agroecology & family farming resources.
