It has become increasingly clear that we are living through a global, structural crisis that exposes the limits of modern civilization (1, 2). The contradiction between economic growth, as a model for organizing the economy, and the limitations imposed by resource depletion and the deterioration of environmental services is becoming ever more apparent. The scientific community warns that some red lines related to the capacity for restoring ecological dynamics on a planetary scale have been crossed (3).

In the agri-food sector, the structural nature of the crisis is even more dramatically evident. Food production, distribution, and consumption are among the main causes of global unsustainability. The globalized food system, dominated by the corporate agri-food regime (4), functions analogously to the industrial metabolic regime, being one of its essential components. This food system is responsible for 821 million people suffering from hunger and nearly two billion more being malnourished; it is responsible for chronic non-communicable diseases (cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes) surpassing infectious diseases as the leading cause of death; it has caused serious environmental impacts on ecosystems and bears the greatest responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions (5). In this sense, the agri-food sector generates the largest ecological footprint in the world, acting as the main driving force behind biophysical transformations on the planet (6, 7, 8, 9).

The development of the corporate food regime (CFR) is driven by the pursuit of profit rather than by guaranteeing the right to food (10). The structural contradictions of the CFR are manifested in the growing difficulties in continuing to increase food production volumes within increasingly degraded agroecosystems and with the use of increasingly scarce resources (oil, phosphorus, climate stability, etc.) (11). Despite this, pressures to increase production continue to be encouraged and facilitated by an institutional structure and a distribution of wealth that threatens to lead to the failure of the food regime as a whole.

The development and consolidation of the RAC (Regional Agricultural Cooperation) has taken place under the aegis of neoliberal globalization. In Latin America and the Caribbean, it has represented the consolidation of the historical pattern of export-oriented productive specialization in primary products. Although the economies and cultures of Latin American countries are very heterogeneous, the destructive effect of this process of economic re-primarization is common (12). In addition to compromising the ability of the region's peoples to feed themselves (13), it generates chain reactions on society and nature, deepening social inequalities (14), and causing serious negative impacts on public health (13), local cultures (15), and the integrity of ecosystems (16). 

The advance of the RAC (Regional Agribusiness) is also sustained, as another pillar of modernity, by perpetuating patriarchal structures of domination, extending the rationality of control, supremacy, and dispossession to nature, permeating social relations, and naturalizing a worldview that overlooks the multiple oppressions between genders. This complicates the forms of domination in territories and reveals multiple inequalities generated by the hegemonic agri-food model.

With the rapid growth of the political and economic power of transnational corporations in shaping national food production, distribution, and consumption systems, the historical dualism between peasant and indigenous family farming and the specialized production model oriented toward export markets, so characteristic of Latin American agriculture, has suffered a significant imbalance in favor of the latter model (17). However, at the same time, it is in Latin America and the Caribbean where counter-movements have emerged with force, articulating peasant and indigenous organizations with extension, research, and teaching professionals in defense of alternative patterns of social, technical, and economic organization of agri-food systems (18, 19). Although highly heterogeneous among themselves, these counter-movements are now identified with the theoretical and practical foundations of agroecology (20). Agroecology in Latin America draws on enormous biocultural wealth and is considered political because it contests the means of production, such as land, water, seeds, and knowledge, challenging the current hegemonic system (21). It seeks to rethink the current agri-food system based on biocultural diversity, while also challenging the monopolistic ownership of the means of production, reconstituting markets and links with the city, and culturally and spiritually transforming this alternative way of living in harmony with the ecological cycles and thermodynamic conditions that make life possible (22).

It is worth clarifying that Latin American social movements do not seek a coexistence where large and medium-sized agro-industrial properties, cattle ranches and forest monocultures coexist with agroecological peasant communities located on the worst lands. It is a struggle for a radical transformation of land tenure and the food system as a whole, in which agro-extractivism would be outlawed (23). This is because the “life project” proposed by Agroecology seeks to produce while caring for nature, maintaining biodiversity, allowing ecological connectivity between forested and agricultural areas, favoring pollinators and seed-dispersing fauna, and in general, preserving the ecosystem relationships that help regulate pests and diseases, conserve water and recharge aquifers, safeguard soil ecology, mitigate the effects of climate change, and resist disturbances in changing times, while protecting and conserving cultural diversity (24). In this way, Agroecology emerges as an emancipatory, identity-based, socio-political, just, and sovereign project, championed by sectors of society, both rural and urban, organized or not in social movements that construct new counter-hegemonic narratives and practices and in open This movement involves a dispute with the global agri-food system, or agribusiness, in a struggle for food and territorial sovereignty (24). These sectors of society in motion are joined by a growing, but still minority, group of academics, activists, research centers, and universities, and, in some cases, national, departmental, municipal, and local government agencies through the promotion and implementation of public policies, as well as international agencies such as the FAO (n.d.) (39, 40), ECLAC (25), and UNESCO (26), among others. This movement involves a wide variety of actors, with women and their feminist discourses and care practices, Indigenous peoples and peasant communities facing environmental injustice, and urban and rural sectors suffering the injustices of hunger, exclusion, and poverty being the most significant in the region (27, 28, 29).

According to Altieri and Toledo (2011) (50), Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing a true agroecological revolution. They state that “new scientific and technological approaches related to agroecology and Indigenous knowledge are being increasingly applied by a significant number of farmers, NGOs, governments, and academic institutions. This is enabling significant achievements in food sovereignty based on the conservation of natural resources and the local, regional, and national empowerment of farmers' organizations and movements.” In this sense, and in accordance with Gliessman (30), agroecology is a powerful tool for achieving a change in the food system by guiding a massive redesign of the productive and institutional structures that govern it.  

This practical dimension of agroecology requires politics, that is, political agroecology, which is the discipline responsible for designing and implementing institutional arrangements that enable the design and construction of sustainable food systems. The pursuit of sustainability implies transforming the dynamics of agroecosystems, a transformation that can only be achieved by social actors promoting institutional changes, which currently favor the corporate food system. This is one of the main objectives of this Working Group: to develop strategies for changing the food system in our region through the development of political agroecology, both within social movements and public policy. Furthermore, we are committed to establishing strong ties with the CLACSO Working Group on Women, Agroecology, and the Solidarity Economy, and with the Research and Training Program in Andean Agroecological Systems, as well as with the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) and the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico.   

Agroecology is political because it aspires to a different model of society, composed of multiple, diversified peasant territories interwoven with trees, mountains, and living rivers, where healthy food and other non-food goods are produced in harmony with nature, using traditional knowledge enriched by scientific dialogue, and where young people and families remain in the countryside (1, 2, 3). This beautiful utopia confronts this other model of destruction, which prioritizes profit over life, poisons territories with agrochemicals and genetically modified organisms, displaces peasant populations to cities, proletarianizes rural inhabitants, destroys soil fertility, deforests, pollutes water, creates green deserts, and generates hunger, disease, and malnutrition (4, 5, 6). Without a doubt, Latin America is the region of the world where popular struggles that challenge the hegemony of agriculture with global capitalism and large landholdings are most vividly resonating, through a great social movement that brings together many diverse social agents capable not only of changing the bias of state institutions, but also the ontological, epistemic and ethical conditions of food production (7, 8, 9).

Political agroecology is based on the premise that agricultural sustainability cannot be achieved on a large scale using only technological measures (agronomic or environmental) to redesign sustainable agroecosystems (10, 11, 12). Without profoundly changing the existing institutional framework, it will not be possible to disseminate and generalize successful agroecological experiences or structurally address the socio-ecological crisis (13, 14, 15, 16, 17). Consequently, political agroecology examines the most appropriate course of action at present and how to best utilize instruments that enable institutional change (18, 19). Such change, in a world organized around nation-states, is only possible through political mediation (20). In democratic systems, for example, this involves collective action through social movements, electoral political participation, alliances between different social forces to build majorities for change, and so on (21, 22). It requires creating strategies that are essentially political (23, 24). The two main objectives of Political Agroecology include precisely the design of institutions that favor the achievement of agricultural sustainability and the organization of agroecological movements, whose narratives and practices of creative resistance allow such public policies to be implemented in their favor, as counter-hegemonic responses to the prevailing agri-food system (25, 26, 27).

As "thought for action," Political Agroecology is a political theory of the ecosocial crisis of food systems and a socioecological theory for designing political institutions that regulate sustainable agricultural metabolisms (28, 29). Through fruitful interactions with critical perspectives from the social and environmental sciences, such as critical geography, this theoretical perspective of Agroecology opens a vast field for the development of "languages ​​of valuation" that overcome the limitations of economic productivism, a hegemonic cognitive framework in the public sphere where policies for agriculture and food are defined and evaluated (30, 31). Political Agroecology is an interdisciplinary approach of radical critique toward liberal ideology and the institutional foundation of neoclassical economics (the capitalist market) (32, 33). It also makes visible the know-how and the feeling-thinking of broad sectors of Latin American and Caribbean society, their forms of representation and organization of life, their deep and historical knowledge and practices rooted in their territories, their ways of sacralizing their worlds, all alien to the gaze and idiosyncrasy of modern-Western rationality and its unique ways of fragmenting and separating reality (34, 35).

It is necessary to consider a recentering of the world view based on other sensibilities and practices that erode the multiple mechanisms of colonial-capitalist-patriarchal domination (36) that are at the heart of the crisis (37, 38). 

We therefore believe in politics conceived from a structuring dimension. A politics that is not reduced to the modification of institutional practices, but to another way of being of “the political”, where self-organization, self-management, and the revitalization of the richness of relationships and regeneration of community spaces are the popular basis for the transformation of the agri-food system, while public policy tools, such as those mentioned, contribute as means to strengthen existing processes and to open new ones (39). We consider the confluence between institutional and instituting practices, which combine knowledge, peasant practices, scientific knowledge, with forms of popular organization of the grassroots and their pedagogical and discursive forms; the dynamism of social movements with institutions and public policies that are articulated, confronted and disputed (40).

Political agroecology is not only a research topic. It also has a practical dimension closely related to its central objective: achieving agrarian sustainability, post-development, and good living (41). Therefore, it must be understood in two ways: as an ideology, competing with others, dedicated to disseminating and establishing the organization of ecologically based and sustainable agroecosystems as the dominant system; but also as a disciplinary field responsible for the design and production of actions, institutions, and regulations to achieve agrarian sustainability (42, 43). This practical dimension of agroecology requires politics, that is, the disciplines responsible for the design and implementation of institutions that make it possible to achieve the sustainability of food systems. This pursuit implies a change in the dynamics of agroecosystems that can only come from social agents through institutional mediation (44).

However, Political Agroecology is not yet equipped with the analytical tools and criteria necessary to define strategies that can guide this change (45). Politics must be developed at the heart of Agroecology to provide agroecologists with tools for sociopolitical analysis and intervention that allow them to move beyond local experiences, encouraging their generalization and essential changes in the food system on a broad territorial scale (46). This Working Group is dedicated to developing this necessary political dimension of Agroecology and providing theoretical and methodological foundations for what should be a new field of theoretical and practical work for agroecologists: Political Agroecology.

The purpose of the Working Group is to establish a common and pluralistic framework for analyzing collective agroecological action in order to operationalize the struggles for food sustainability. It also aims to develop a narrative of the food crisis that can serve as a common framework to guide collective agroecological action (47). In short, it seeks to lay the foundations for a common agroecological strategy, encompassing the different levels at which collective action is considered and the various instruments with which it can be developed. Furthermore, one of its central objectives is to generate internal, pluralistic reflection on its theoretical and conceptual frameworks and its own praxis.

Intervention in the state's political environment is necessary, given its capacity to impose a macro-institutional order favorable to the corporate agri-food regime (CAFR), otherwise the transformative capacity of agroecological experiences will be neutralized. The state, serving the CAFR, hinders mass adoption, generating a "systemic effect of rejection." Agroecological collective action finds its most decisive level of action in the realm of the state and public policies: democratic public institutions must protect agroecological experiences and promote the mass adoption of agroecological production and consumption. The ultimate goal of government action and agroecological public policies is to shift the direction of rejection so that the behaviors, practices, and institutions typical of the CAFR are the ones rejected. This reversal of adverse sensitivity in signal and filter systems is only feasible through cooperation between multi-level collective action (movements and social actors) and the democratic state. Neither of these actors—social movements nor the State—can independently produce the institutional changes necessary for the new agri-food system to filter and reject the practices of the AGR (Agricultural Renewal) movement and the State itself. It is an essential task of this Working Group to respond to the growing demands of the Latin American agroecological movement, which is increasingly involved in areas of action that extend beyond the farm or the community, including State management.