Declaration on agroecology, the global pandemic and the paths of life
The extremely serious situation that both the world and our entire Latin American region are facing responds to a complex set of pressures framed within the project of modernity, established as a dominant structure that associates manifestations of an unprecedented crisis, which goes even beyond the inequalities generated by the capitalist system and unfolds in all aspects of life, resulting in a pandemic of planetary characteristics.
In the face of a globalized society that consumes goods, services, and people, COVID-19 unmasked the drama of the modernity project within the framework of a predatory capitalist system, which today creaks under a global plague.
Global environmental change, climate change, intense transformations in land use, water pollution, extensive loss of biodiversity, the expansion of industrial agriculture, mining practiced in its most polluting form, and rampant greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with profound social, political, and consumer degradation, are revealing a civilizational crisis that is placing us all at a severe crossroads.
The Working Group on “Political Agroecology” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), made up of researchers in Agroecology from all over Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Spain, emphasizes that much of this crisis derived from the unsustainable global, local and even cultural food system has alternatives at all scales if it is reoriented towards a necessary and complete agroecological transformation.
For this reason, we find that, with models that support the environment based on agroecology, the social and solidarity economy, ecological economics, and political agroecology—disciplines that together offer a new perspective on the socio-ecological systems generated by human activities—it will be possible to rebuild what has been damaged, help those left behind by the system, improve the living conditions of society, and learn deeply from a lesson that should never have been taught.
The document that we enclose here, and whose reading and dissemination we encourage, entitled “Agroecology in times of COVID-19” (Altieri and Nicholls 2020) brings us closer to a profound reflection on the current food system, and shows us the opportunities and realities that agroecology offers for a world that, after the current pandemic, will be very different, and which may find in this a new opportunity to become greener…
March 2020
Workgroup
Political agroecology
This statement expresses the position of the Political Agroecology Working Group and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Committee
