Agroecology and Public Policy in Latin America: The case of Brazil

Abstract

Despite the hegemony of the agricultural production model based on the industrialization of agriculture, strategies for agricultural and rural development in Brazil have been incorporating, in recent decades, a number of initiatives that go against the dominant logic. These initiatives are expressed through practical experiences of peasant family farming and the action of the growing agroecological movement, which now has the participation of important sectors from the academic and technical-scientific communities. Innovative initiatives are expressed by the emergence of the Joint National Agroecology (ANA) and the Brazilian Association of Agroecology (ABA-Agroecology). In response, the Brazilian state has opened up the possibility of implementing policy innovation niches, which have difficulties in expanding due to the incipient struggle taking place in Brazilian society related to the direction of rural development. Moreover, civil society and especially the movements of peasants and family farmers, still lack the protection of the references Agroecology as a structural axis of its patterns of political negotiation with governments. Thus, it can be affirmed that the country lacks a national project to guide the search for more sustainable development strategies, since the set of policies for rural areas remains guided by productivist and mercantilist logic that shaped the modernization project driven from the 1960s. Moreover, since the Agricultural Agreement of World Trade Organization in the mid1990s, successive Brazilian governments have acted decisively in order to reposition the country as an exporter of agricultural commodities to contribute the results to the balance of payments. Also from this period, the segment of family farms began to receive increasing financial and political attention of the state, although the investment made in this direction was mainly aimed at modernizing production facilities based on Green Revolution technologies and the growing integration of production chains dominated by transnational corporations. In this context, it is notable that public policies do not reveal an intent to pursue greater sustainability; instead, socio-environmental innovations appear only sporadically in government initiatives. These, however, are important in that they signal the possibility of establishing a national project that can contribute decisively to the Agroecology transition, understood as a fundamental requirement for reorienting the model of rural development and agriculture in search of more economic, environmental and social sustainability.