Food as Right, Farming as Knowledge: Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in the Andes and Amazon

What are the strategies and practices that farmers in Ecuador are implementing to deal with the agri-food crisis and socioeconomic and climate change challenges? In this program we will focus on understanding agroecological (or permacultural) and traditional farming systems. Traditional agri-food systems based on agroecology claim a central role for campesino agriculture in food production (campo means field, or rural area, and ino derives from Latin as ‘ownership’ or ‘relationship to’; a campesino is someone who cultivates and has a sense of belonging to the land). Agro-ecology emphasizes autonomy, the ability to decide what to produce and how to do it. The demands of rural peoples based on food sovereignty are based on agroecology, on the recovery of food as a right and the promotion of food culture and social organization. This program aims to observe, describe, and analyze agri-food systems based on ancestral knowledge, agroecology and food sovereignty, as well as the resilience that these systems provide in the face of global and local challenges. The program will be based on field visits to different farmers in Andean and Amazonian locations in Ecuador to learn from their traditional farming practices and resilience strategies.