ABOUT A THIRD of the world’s population is involved in family farming, working on 500 million smallholder farms. Tragically, of the nearly 800 million people in the world who currently suffer from hunger, the majority are family farmers and food producers in the global South. They often farm under extremely challenging conditions, from the mountainsides of Central America to the African Sahel. What strategies can help them to produce more food and income, in sustainable ways adapted to local conditions?
“Agroecology” is farming using ecological principles. Since the inception of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, farmers have always been about learning from and innovating with nature. Agroecology draws on this wisdom and knowledge, rooted in each place, ecosystem, and culture, combined with modern science. Today, it continues to support farmer-centered innovation to meet evolving conditions. Farmer-centered agroecology fosters human agency, community solidarity, the spreading of knowledge farmer-to-farmer, and the stewardship of the natural resources on which we all depend. Unfortunately, many agricultural policies and programs remain locked in the logic of industrialized agriculture and chemical inputs.
As a global community, we are challenged to overcome hunger, poverty, climate change, and environmental degradation. But the world’s family farmers, and their creative capacity to work productively and sustainably with nature instead of against it, are showing the way forward.
Lankoande Francois is one of those family farmers showing the way. I recently visited his farm in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Like millions in West Africa’s Sahel region, his family has faced a crisis of collapsing soil fertility and growing hunger. But Francois showed me how, in four years, his family had regenerated six acres of what had been barren, cement-like land into productive farmland. They experimented with techniques to conserve soil, capture rainwater, integrate trees into their farm, and restore organic matter to soils. He now grows enough food for his family for the year, with a surplus to sell for income. He is also a farmer-to-farmer teacher, part of a local movement spreading these practices to 100 villages.
Francois is creating positive changes where he lives. If we invest in the dignity and creative capacity of hundreds of millions of family farmers like him to innovate with nature and spread practices that work, we can create a global agriculture and food system that is healthier for people and our planet.
Steve Brescia is executive director of Groundswell International and editor of Fertile Ground: Scalling Agroecology from the Ground Up (Food First Books, 2017).
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