Agroecología: experiencias comunitarias para la agricultura familiar en Colombia

Abstract

Rural territories in Colombia currently face challenges to the peace process, not only in terms of social aspects but also with regards to the agricultural and environmental conditions necessary to move toward sustainable rural development models. Objectives including achieving food sovereignty, fighting rural poverty, adapting agriculture to emergent risks and mitigating the effects of climate change, protecting natural resources especially soils, water and agrobiodiversity, assuring the benefits of ecosystem services, responding to the growing demand for food, among others, require a reconfiguration of the food system. Concurrently, social movements are increasingly promoting family agriculture as a response to the aforementioned challenges. They affirm the essential role of food production in caring for conserving the environment and call for differential political agendas that encourage a dignified social reproduction of livelihoods for family farmers. Strengthening the distinct forms of peasant, family and communal agriculture requires new scientific paradigms as well as new practices of rural development; one of these is Agroecology, the scientific focus that best recognizes the potential of family agriculture to confront present day social-environmental challenges. Since the 1980s, Colombian NGO’s and the Catholic Church, and more recently universities, have promoted agroecology. Agroecological practice has led to the emergence of solid innovations. From the perspective of sustainable agriculture, these community-based initiatives, recognized as “social-technical niches”, are established within protected spaces. Communities create and develop such innovations until they become established and successfully generate consistent changes in the livelihoods of these communities. The goal of this volume is to analyze some of the agroecological experiences developed by groups of family farmers in different areas of the country, especially those from social-technical niches that generated practices with the potential to strengthen agricultural programs for peasant, family and communal producers.