THE POLITICS
OF KNOWLEDGE

The industrialized food system is one of the biggest stressors on planetary health, contributing almost a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and causing immense biodiversity loss. Furthermore, structural inequities across the food system compound the impacts on vulnerable communities. Consensus is growing: this model is no longer fit for purpose; it is failing people and the planet. Yet, key debates about how to transform food systems remain steeped in controversy. 

Agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways are pathways to sustainable food systems that remain contested. 

Some funders, researchers, and policymakers choose to distance themselves from these approaches, voicing their skepticism about viability, profitability, scalability, and the evidence available. This is despite an abundance of reports, studies, and literature reviews that showcase the ability of agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways to not only repair our relationship with nature but to build climate resilience while equitably nourishing our communities. 

The status quo is holding humanity back from transformative action.

Bringing together experts from around the world, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food set out to get to the root of what’s holding back transformative action. In a new compendium, we home in on the evidence and whose knowledge counts, and tackle the narratives and questions that undermine action and mislead the public about what’s possible.

What we’ve found is that a narrow view of what counts as evidence, coupled with an entrenched willingness to maintain the status quo, means that these transformative food systems approaches are being kept from being understood, taken up, and acted upon — even when we need them most. 

The evidence in support of agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways exists in a battleground — one of many over knowledge and power.

Questions such as “What data is available?”, “Are these solutions scalable?”, and “Who produced this evidence?” do not appear in a vacuum. 

Decisions about what type of information is collected, researched, or deserves consideration are intrinsically connected to power. Legacies of establishment thinking and colonial mindsets have entrenched hierarchies of knowledge. 

This bias is visible in the dominant tendency for funders, policymakers, and researchers to privilege Western science and English-language information in decision-making. A broad diversity of evidence is left unconsidered and unheard. Similarly, the narrow questioning of the evidence base for agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways undermines the adoption of these methods more widely by sowing seeds of doubt.

The “feed the world” narrative is underpinned by concerns about population growth, growing hunger and malnutrition, and climate change. It is frequently used in conjunction with eye-catching statistics about the need for food production increases to serve a growing global population. 

Focusing on production yields alone positions agricultural intensification and global trade as ideal solutions to feeding people. This de-emphasizes the political economy underpinning the root causes of food insecurity. It downplays social justice issues related to the right to food and the critical importance of nutrition security. 

The problem of hunger in the world is not scarcity. Distribution, poverty, lack of access, lack of power, inequality, conflict, and waste are the reasons for hunger and malnutrition in all forms. Yield-per-hectare doesn’t measure what matters.

The dominant narrative presumes agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways are marginal, effective only at small scale, and incapable of producing food at greater levels. However, the evidence on the performance and scaling potential of these approaches challenges this assumption. It also challenges limited understanding of what is meant by scaling (and at which scale farms are effective).

Replicating success is about more than just the size of farms. Scaling is a process of amplifying a new paradigm that builds sustainable food systems rooted in equity, justice, and reciprocity. 

In its truest sense, scaling refers to processes that create the conditions for more and more farmers to practice agroecology, encompassing more territories and engaging people in the processing, distribution, and consumption of agroecological and regenerative foods. 

With this new framing, the many forms of scaling can be contextualized; for example, practice uptake by larger or smaller farms over wider regions, replication in farmer-to-farmer networks, and deepening connections between farmers, social movements, community infrastructure, and enabling policies. 

Evaluating food systems transitions therefore requires not just a diversity of social and ecological indicators but also a participatory approach that gives agency to farmers and other actors.

“Agroecology will only keep farmers poor” is a well-worn narrative. 

Using this framing, agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways are seen as a way of keeping farmers locked in a perpetual state of subsistence, burdened by intensive manual labour and drudgery. This prevents farmers from climbing out of poverty and onto the path of modern agriculture as farmer entrepreneurs. 

This narrative implies that small-scale farming is inherently inefficient. It discounts the knowledge and innovations farmers and Indigenous Peoples’ leverage at this level of farming and falsely assumes that mechanization or technological innovation in small-scale farming is non-existent or actively discouraged.

Political economic systems work against and undermine small-scale farmers.

By portraying peasants, traditional rural communities, and agroecological farming as backward, low-quality, inefficient, and unproductive, those with political and/or economic power can demotivate food producers and rural communities interested in agroecology. This narrative also serves to present large producers and industrial forms of agriculture as modern, productive, tidy, entrepreneurial, and representative of so-called “good” farming — insisting it is in farmers’ (and society’s) best interests to minimize the number of people unfortunate enough to be farmers.

Farmers and food producers see it a different way. Collaborative exchanges, experimentation, co-production of knowledge, and intergenerational learning provide enriching spaces for community gathering and relationship-building. These essential components of community engagement form the basis for the rapidly increasing interest of young farmers in agroecological transitions.

With the Earth’s ecosystems degrading at an alarming rate, emergency responses that elevate silver-bullet solutions rise to the top — even when there is mounting evidence that these quick fixes don’t always work. Focusing on these short-term actions allows those with power to delay or avoid enacting the more thoughtful transformative solutions required to fully address the deep, systemic crises affecting our food systems. 

Systemic problems require systemic solutions. With elements of biophysical knowledge, scalable practices, and strong social change foundations, agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways represent some of the most viable systemic responses to emergencies and interconnected crises, such as climate change. 

The dynamism and inherent capacity of agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways enhances climate and ecological resilience. They sustain ecosystems and innovations in land and ecosystems-based adaptation and mitigation. 

Narrowly focused, technology-centric solutions and offset-trading regimes are also places where those with political and economic power derive benefits while smallholder farmers and food producers often do not. Tackling the climate emergency through single-focussed solutions — such as geo-engineering or large-scale carbon capture — aim to solve converging planetary crises, but they ultimately fail to address the underlying problems and uphold the status quo. 

The interconnectedness of the multiple crises — in their root causes and their systemic solutions — leads directly to agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways.

The Contributors to the compendium underscored the structural barriers to systems transformation, such as the absence of intellectual property rights for seeds, cheap food, the illusion of choice, export market orientation, and debt — all of which entrench corporate power and persistent false narratives, limiting options and opportunities available to farmers and citizens.

Systems transformation is therefore deeply connected with challenging deep structures of the status quo. This opens up discussion around food sovereignty and agency, highlighting the ways that governance — at all levels — plays a critical role in accelerating or hindering agroecological transitions. Rooted in agroecology and the democratization of agriculture and food, food sovereignty embodies and affirms the rights of peoples to define their food systems as well as their rights to territory and self-determination.

Agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways represent an on-the-ground articulation of food sovereignty through the practices of food producers. They are a political response and entail a shift in power and paradigm toward a new society. 

Agroecology, regenerative approaches, and Indigenous foodways are dynamic and multifunctional systems. The deep and inherent societal, ecological, economic, and health co-benefits they offer are a “way out of the trap” of multiple global crises.