Agroecology: Ending Hunger and Building Food Sovereignty
Since the beginning, agriculture had one goal: healthy food for the people. The fundamental mission of agroecology is healthy food for all peoples on the planet with food produced in ways that respect Mother Earth, as well as for future generations to have healthy food and an environment that ensures life.
In today’s world, there is rampant land grabbing to develop industrial plantations for agricultural exports and agrofuels, mega tourism and mining projects, and so on. Families and entire communities caught in this process of recolonization are displaced or turned into slaves, and the toxic agribusiness and biotech companies are making billions of dollars from it.
The current context in Haiti is hostile. 70% of the country is rural, yet there is more hunger in the countryside than in the cities. A huge rural exodus
is occurring because the majority of people don’t receive basic services from the state. Young people are looking for every way to leave the rural areas for other countries or at least for Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, but there is nothing for them to do there. Toxic agribusinesses like Monsanto continue to try to take over our agriculture, and the government tries to deceive us by telling farmers they still have to use chemicals even when they cannot afford them. It is outrageous to promote industrial agriculture, tractors, and chemical fertilizers in a country where farmers are in the mountains.
The corporations defend and promote industrial agriculture by claiming that it feeds people. But the aim of industrial agriculture is not feeding the world’s population — it is profit. On the contrary, the goal of agroecology is to feed all nations with healthy food while caring for Mother Earth and attempting to solve the climate crisis. Agroecology is the only way to solve the problems of hunger and the climate crisis. That is to say that agroecology can feed more than seven billion people in the world and simultaneously cool the planet.
Big business is working to change and distort the meaning of the concept of agroecology. Corporations have to destroy peasant agriculture and combat agroecology to continue their destructive practices. It is important to be wary of discourses of governments in industrialized countries. Be careful of the scientists in the service of capital that talk about combining agroecology with industrial agriculture. It is clear that these two models cannot be combined. This is a ploy to kill agroecological peasant agriculture.