Miguel Altieri describes agroecology as a dialogue of wisdoms between Traditional Ecological Knowledge that has stood the test of time, and modern agrarian and ecological sciences.

One of the pioneers in the field of agroecology, Altieri also emphasizes its socioeconomic and political aspects as an a more democratic alternative to the flaws of the capitalist, globalized, industrial agricultural system that prioritizes the pursuit of profit over the health of people, animals and land.

Building on the fundamental belief that food is a human right, the concept of food sovereignty–the right of people to have agency over their food system in a way that enhances the well-being and economy of local people–has central importance in an agroecological system.

The practical science of agroecology embodies a number of principles, guided by Indigenous knowledge and natural systems, that are applied in different ways depending on the ecosystem, the local culture, and scale of the farm. They consist of: recycling biomass; increasing biodiversity; building healthy soil; minimizing loss of energy, water and nutrients; diversification of species; and enhancing beneficial biological interactions.

Miguel Altieri, a professor of agroecology for over 40 years at UC Berkeley, has worked extensively with farmers in Latin America and is the author a number of books and publications on agroecology. Altieri was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers at an EcoFarm Conference.

ARTY MANGAN: You left Chile in your early 20s when Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet led a bloody coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. The coup resulted in Allende’s death and beginning of the brutal regime of Pinochet. How did that experience shape your life?

MIGUEL ALTIERI: At the time of the coup, I was finishing a degree in agronomy. My family wanted me to have a professional career. My mother wanted me to be an American doctor, my father wanted me to be a lawyer In Chile. But I was in a popular rock band called Embrujo, (which means bewitch) and that’s what I wanted to do. We were composing our own songs that had a political message.We had even made some records. But my family convinced me to get a degree. So I chose agronomy because that’s what I qualified for; I wasn’t even sure what it was.

Then the coup happened very suddenly. A lot of my friends started leaving Chile and some of them disappeared or were put in jail. My mother told me to leave the country. So, I took a bus to Colombia. There, I entered a master’s program. And that was my entry into agroecology because I became exposed to small farming, intercropping systems.

ARTY: In the book The Fatal Harvest, there’s a quote by you that has stuck in my mind. It refers to the collateral damage of industrial agriculture, such as the degradation of soil life, erosion, pollution, the list goes on and on. The quote is: “Each ecological disease is viewed as an independent problem rather than what it really is, a symptom of a poorly designed and poorly functioning system.” Would you expand on that?

MIGUEL: The French philosopher, scientist and mathematician René Descartes said that you cannot study the whole, you can only study the pieces. The sum of the parts may give you an understanding of the whole. That very reductionist Cartesian approach somehow entered into science of agronomy.

Then there was the misinterpretation of Darwin. People think that Darwin just focused on competition and that “survival of the fittest” is the main driver of evolution. Agronomists interpreted that idea to mean that anything that is not a crop has to be eliminated because it’s going to be competing. They didn’t think there could be cooperation in nature.

And finally, in the 19^th Century scientist Justus von Liebig, whose concept of the “limiting factor” greatly influenced the green revolution that came about in the 20^th Century. His theory is that there is always going to be a limiting factor, so if it’s nitrogen, you have to apply nitrogen. If it’s a pest, you have to spray. But that way of thinking does not understand that the limiting factor is a symptom of a much deeper ecological disease in the sense that if there’s no nitrogen, it’s not because there’s a lack nitrogen, it’s because the microbic relations are not active to promote the nutrient cycling, the nitrogen cycle.

Very early on, I came to understand that, especially when I was exposed to mixed farming systems in Colombia. I saw that small farmers were mixing crops, and that this theory of competition was totally wrong, that there can be a collaboration between species. I saw that you didn’t have the pest problems that exist in monocultures. It became very clear that the pest problems, or the nutrient deficiencies are just a symptom that something is not functioning well in the system, and what we need to do is go to the root causes and try to promote biodiversity that is responsible for all the processes that will lead to nutrient cycling, pest regulation, and so on.

ARTY: Are those traditional small, diversified, integrated systems, the precursor for agroecology? Were there people using that term at that point? How did that all evolve?

MIGUEL: There were a lot of writings done back in Europe, back in the early 1900s, in which they used the word agricultural ecology or crop ecology, which were trying to understand how crops adapt to the environment. So, those were good influences.

The term agroecology, as a science that tries to understand the whole farming system and interactions, came about later in the early 1970s, early ‘80s. Interestingly enough, if you look at the pioneer agroecologists of this country, like, for example, Steve Gliessman at UC  Santa Cruz or John Vandermeer at the University of Michigan, or Peter Rosset, or Chuck Francis. These are people who have worked in agroecology early on. They all had one thing in common: They all studied traditional farming systems in Latin America. Gliessman was working in Mexico and was inspired by those systems.

Basically what agroecology does is promotes a dialogue of wisdoms. On the one hand, you have the modern sciences of ecology, and studying soils, plant pathology, and topology and so on. But traditional knowledge was crystallized in systems already that stood the test of time. We’re not trying to replicate those systems, but rather to understand the principles that underline the sustainability and resilience for centuries. Drawing from traditional knowledge, we can design farming systems based on a the agroecological principles.

ARTY: In what ways does that system avoid the flaws of the industrial system?

MIGUEL: It’s unrealistic to think that we’re going to convert the industrial systems into traditional systems. But what we can do is learn from the systems, apply the principles of agroecology, and transition to those systems based on agroecological principles. Agroecology designs systems that are not based on inputs, but rather are based on processes. You develop so much biodiversity in the system that all the interactions that happen between the soil, the insects, the microbes, etc., promote necessary processes like nutrient cycling, pest relations, etc.

What’s interesting is that agroecological principles can be applied at different scales. You can do a small garden or you can do large-scale farms like 2,000-hectare farms that I’ve seen in Argentina and Brazil and places like that, where the principles are applied but the technology they use is very different from a small-scale two-hectare farm.

What we need to do is figure out ways of convincing large industrial farmers to transition. It’s in their interest because when you do the transition, there are a lot of things that happen. One is that your cost of production goes down about 40 percent because you’re based on process not on inputs. Secondly, you’re efficient. When you measure productivity, not in kilograms per hectare, but kilograms per hectare per centimeter of water or unit of energy, then they’re much more efficient. In a traditional farming system, for kilocalorie of input, you get 20 out, whereas in a modern system, for one kilocalorie of input and you only get 1.5, very low efficiency. On top of that, you have all the other benefits such as the ecological health benefits, etc.

 From a technical perspective, it is possible to transition to that kind of efficient system, but it is a political process that has to support that transition.

After the Dust Bowl, the USDA’s  Soil Conservation Service, was promoting large-scale polycultures, intercropping, for example, with rye or lettuce with the barley because they wanted to have tall crops protected from the wind, because wind erosion was the main problem. Those systems were not done by hand; they were a thousand hectares done with machinery. So it is possible to do it, it’s just the industrial system pushes farmers to become specialized by providing subsidies for a small number of crops. There’s a whole legal and economic and political structure that promotes monocultures rather than diversified farming systems.

ARTY: Traditional Indigenous foodways and economies emphasize the importance community, sharing and cooperation. Have those ethos influenced agroecology? Is there a social aspect to agroecology?

MIGUEL: One of the main objectives of agroecologists is to democratize the system. That means to realize the right to food; food should not be treated as a commodity like a TV or a car, it’s different because food is a human right. Agroecology is the basis for what is called food sovereignty, which is very different from food security. Food sovereignty means the right of the people of a community or region or country to define their own production system in order to have food self-sufficiency. That doesn’t mean that they cannot have surplus and engage in national or international marketing. But the priority is first to produce food for the local people.

In order to do that, you have to have basic access to land, to seeds, to water. So the issue of land reform becomes very important. For example, right now in Colombia, the government of President Gustavo Petro, which is the first leftist government in Colombia in a hundred years, started land reform. But doing land reform in a country where you have big landowners can be a very dangerous game. So, what he’s doing is buying land from the land owners. He bought three million hectares, paid them, and now he’s giving the land away to small farmers. The idea is that the small farmers are going to be able to beef up the production of basic foods. Colombia is one of the top countries with the most biodiversity, and yet it imports food. This is ridiculous.

There is a social and political dimension of agroecology. That means first of all to realize the right to food. To be able to promote food sovereignty, you need political changes. But the problem is that the food system is so controlled by corporations, that it’s kind of impossible to change that. So what we propose is a bypass. The large food corporations are strangling the food system. They determine what farmers are going to grow, what technology they’re going to use, etc. They are also vertically integrated so they own the supermarkets and control what people are going to eat, how much they’re going to pay for the food, the quality of the food, and so on. But if you create a bypass with the agroecological systems where you control territories, where you set up solidarity networks with consumers and producers and so on, then things can change.

I think it is possible to do. It doesn’t change the big picture, but as long as you start promoting these local changes, maybe they start spreading from one community to another and create a collective energy. And then maybe that will lead to a bigger change.

There’s many examples of this in countries like Brazil, Peru and others. Basically, we gave up the idea of trying to change the industrial system, but rather to bypass it by creating these new arrangements of local markets. These local markets are accessible to everybody. In the U.S., at least my experience has been, that organic food markets are not accessible to everybody, just to a sector of society. So how do you democratize the food system?

For example, in Brazil and Colombia, the municipalities that are strong administrative units, people elect agroecological farmers that become mayors. So they gain political power at a local level, and with that they can have their own regulations and so on to promote this.

The second thing is that both countries have a national law of agroecology. One component of national law is school lunch programs. For example, in a particular municipality, that municipality has to buy 30 percent of the food of the small farmers to serve it in the schools. That’s by law. So you have to get out of the market economy, you have to intervene in the economy and create these kinds of social arrangements in order to be able to promote this.

ARTY: Vandana Shiva did a study in India that determined that if a farmer grew at least 12 different crops, they would never have anything less than a 75 percent harvest. If one or two crops failed, the farmer would still have a decent harvest. Why is diversity important in creating resilience in an agroecological system?

MIGUEL: There’s been a lot of research done in basic ecology studying natural ecosystems that bolstered the theory that higher diversity leads to stability. What happens is you have redundancy in a system where multiple species are playing the same role. If one goes, then it’s no problem because there are other species that will compensate. If one species fails, the other continues. It’s the same in agriculture. In a system with a lot of crop diversity there are complementary interactions.

Diversity is important at different levels; microbial diversity of the soil is very important, and it’s fostered by plant diversity. The more plants you have, the more different roots they have with different exudates that recruit different microbes. So it’s all tied to plant diversity. Plant diversity is the primary producer. The more species you have of plants, the more below-ground diversity you will have, as well as above ground—more insects, more predators, more parasites, more pollinators, more everything.

I don’t know if you need to have seven species or five species—it could be two or three species, but if they are complementing each other and creating resiliency and stability, then three species are fine. The point is that diversity is very important because of the ecological roles it plays in the system. Each species is playing a different role and the roles are complementary to each other.

ARTY: A number of years ago, I met some agronomists from Peru from an organization called Pratec who studied agronomy in universities. Initially their mission was to bring the Green Revolution to peasant farmers and elevate and improve their lives. The way that they would convince farmers to abandon their traditional practices and start using hybrid seeds and agrochemicals was to gather the local farmers, and spray chemical nitrogen on a field causing rapid lush growth; a “milagro” of modern technology. Seeing that, the farmers then viewed their practice’s as antiquated and began to adopt modern techniques. But after a few years, the chemicals destroyed soil fertility and the farmers couldn’t afford to keep buying the chemicals. The systems crashed. Seeing that, the Pratec agronomists realized that had a lot to learn from these farmers and pivoted to helping farmers enhance their traditional practices that have sustained them for millennia. My question is: How is industrial agriculture a colonization of agriculture?

MIGUEL: The Rockefeller Foundation was the main promoter of the Green Revolution [ED note: the Green Revolution is the introduction of high yielding, hybridized seeds that ultimately lead to increases  in chemical fertilizer and pesticide use]. They had a bunch of agronomists from Iowa and Ohio. Among them was the Nobel Prize winner for developing the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug. They also recruited Carl Sauer, who was a geographer at Berkeley because he knew a lot about pests and agriculture, and had been studying traditional agriculture in Mexico for many years.

When they finished the tour, Sauer wrote a minority report that basically said if agronomists from Iowa and Ohio are going to push their northern varieties in Mexico, you’re going to ruin traditional farming forever. Of course, they kicked him out of the committee, and the Green Revolution proceeded. So there were red flags that were raised.

Basically the idea of the Green Revolution was to modernize agriculture, because that would open markets for the big companies. Who was behind the Green Revolution: Rockefeller, petroleum; Ford Foundation, machinery; and Kellogg, cereals. There was an agenda to raise political action to open markets for inputs, but at the same time, for produce to be sold. The Green Revolution was not as much the replacement of one variety for another,  but even more, it was the replacement of one knowledge for another. In that way, it was a colonization.

Colonization happened through the Green Revolution, and promoted through the American universities. After the Cuban revolution, money was spent to bring professors from the different faculties of agriculture to study in the United States. Different countries were distributed to different universities. A California project funded by the Ford Foundation brought hundreds of professors from Chile to UC Davis and brainwashed them. They went back and replicated the California model. Brazilian professors went to the University of North Carolina. Colombians went to Nebraska. The colonization was not just introducing a new technology, it was also brainwashing the scientists so they could replicate the model.

When I look at my own trajectory, at the beginning, in 1983 I published my first book on agroecology, Agroecology: The Scientific Basis for Alternative Agriculture, in Spanish and was trying to get it translated into English. The establishment—the universities, the faculties of agriculture, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN)—basically ignored us. They said we were a bunch of communists. But agroecology kept growing, without funding from the government, without funding from foundations.

A few years later, they started arguing against us. They couldn’t ignore us anymore, so they claimed that you cannot feed the world with agroecology. It’s not productive. But agroecology kept growing, especially in Latin America.

Now, after battling us, the FAO has co-opted agroecology. I remember being at FAO fighting with them about how they defined the principles of agroecology. A lot of people jumped on the bandwagon. But their agroecology is kind of a junk agroecology because it leaves out the social and political aspects. They don’t talk about food sovereignty, or land reform, or things of that nature.