Through the view of agricultural systems as ecosystems, agroecology combines these disciplines and has subsequently incorporated further disciplines of cultural, human, and social sciences in a wider systems approach. It has existed as an explicit concept since the 1930s, evolving through the 1970s by increasing awareness of practices, focusing on indigenous knowledge and emerging social movements. These tenets position agroecological paradigms as both an alternative to chemical, mono-cultural or industrial farming, and as a catalyst for conventional agriculture to adopt more sustainable approaches. Agroecological systems are considered to be built on the principles of natural ecosystems and are seen as multifunctional and functionally integrated systems of complementary and dynamic relations between livingorganisms and their environments. In Table 1, some well-explored key characteristics related to agroecology are listed. The functions of natural ecosystems, in terms of energy and nutrient flow, as well as the dynamics of adjusting and being resilient to constantly changing surroundings and regulating populations,dutch bucket for tomatoes clearly are different from an agroecosystem.
The latter are altered by and reacting to human dominance, or at a more extreme end, are disconnected or isolated from pre-existing energy and nutrient flows. Over the past decades, many academic agroecologists have increasingly stressed the importance of considering the human and social systems as integrated parts of the agroecological system. Building complex systems involves extensive human knowledge, experience, and community collaboration. Blay-Palmer and co-authors point to how the benefits of sharing place-based knowledge and good practices can help in joining forces for transforming food systems at a wider scale. The scale of an agroecological system can be large or small, but the scope of agroecological farming activities is wide; the majority of the population of smaller-scale family farmers are often considered to be applying agroecological farming approaches, and are currently estimated to produce food nourishing 50–70% of the global population, and supply up to 80% of the food in Sub-saharan Africa and Asia. With regard to human livelihood and scale related to agroecological systems, Walter Goldschmidt found that rural communities with more, smaller farms saw higher human well being than those with fewer, larger farms in settings of North-American farming in the middle of last century. This has been questioned by modernist scholars, but has also seen numerous studies supporting its conclusions over time, and it certainly has never been strongly refuted. As the example above on research in New York’s Chinatown produce economy showed, the diversity of production was found directly related to the proximity of supply and lower cost of healthy food.
Another argument for how the resilience of an agroecosystem includes environmental elements as well as social and institutional elements is raised by Gonzales De Molina who refers to Holling, Berkes, and Folke and Holt-Giménez : “The resilience of an agroecosystem does not depend solely on its productive arrangements. State institutions, responsible for managing natural and socioeconomic disasters, can create favorable or adverse conditions for the recovery of the productive capacity of an agroecosystem. In this respect, there are institutions that favor the resilience of an agroecosystem more than others. In contrast to private or simply state property, communal forms of ownership, characteristic of traditional rural cultures, result in management approaches that adapt more easily to surprises or changes experienced by ecosystems.”This emphasis on institutions and the resilience dimension suggests stronger links between agroecology and fundamental environmental, ethical, political, and governance related questions and issues about the right and access to land and other natural resources and ecosystem services, such as water, soil, forests, and pollinators. It also underlines the importance of wider disciplinary and practical perspectives, such as landscape agroecology and the process of landscape planning in rural as well as linked rural–urban settings. Wezel and co-authors emphasize the relevance of working with “agroecology territories” in a more holistic framework combining sustainable agriculture and food systems as well as addressing biodiversity conservation, as places actively engaging in transition to sustainable farming and food systems.The agroecosystem concept and the science of agroecology provide a foundation for examining and understanding the interactions and relationships among the diverse components of the food system.
How can a food system be characterized as agroecological? There is a clear and undisputable link between how food is produced and how it goes into the food system. Stassart and co-authors emphasized ways in which agroecological systems could expand to a broader level, suggesting greater valorization of agrobiodiversity and the underlying diversity of knowledge found in both farming and food system, while providing broader perspectives of agroecology both in farming and food systems. Logically, food cannot be claimed to be “sustainable,” even when being produced in a “sustainable way,” if it feeds into and contributes to food systems which are fundamentally unsustainable, for example, are contradicted by the use of huge amounts of fossil fuels or packaging material, or increase social inequity, or are wasteful of other tangible and intangible resources.The linkages between agroecology and food sovereignty receive wide acknowledgement and detailed explanation by agroecological and food sovereignty movements , viewing agroecology as a major catalyst for enabling the realization of the agrarian reform called for by the food sovereignty movements. These movements focus upon principles of low-input use, resilience,blueberry grow pot sustainability as well as its prioritization of smallholders or peasant farmers. Food sovereignty and agroecology are also strongly united through their agency for and common defense of what are claimed as the common inheritances of humanity in terms of natural resources. Altieri and Nicholls demonstrate how different dimensions of sovereignty including food, energy, and technological sovereignties are all critical to agroecology and contribute to its resiliency. Table 1 suggests how linkages between key features of agroecology on a wider scale can be brought into important functions and structures of entire food systems. Multi-functionality and resilience are highlighted by numerous agroecological scholars and address agroecological systems’ capacities and aims. These scholars assess system properties such as ability to absorb shocks, and other inherent capacities to undergo relevant transformations, transitions, and processes of stabilization under changing and new conditions through feedback loops and iterative development processes. Resilience is a relevant key concept which potentially informs the design and maintenance of an agroecological food system, which can build upon local structures of markets, linking reciprocal flows, for example, between urban and rural landscapes, preserving food cultures and nourishment, and opening new possibilities for processing, storing, and retailing. In an agroeco logical farming system, “health” is crucial at all levels of the system. This holistic understanding of health and the importance of maintaining a high-immunitylevel is also relevant for food systems, where the juxtaposition of feedback loops, like immune system response, are imagined to help regulate the resource flows and stimulate the social connectedness in the food system, and emphasize the nourishment aspect of the food which is produced, exchanged and eaten in the food system.Potentials in the agriculture and food systems that link urban and rural areas need to be maximized as a normal part of a balanced development process.
In this article, we understand a city-region context for food systems as a landscape which includes rural, urban, and peri-urban areas, the two latter varying from a few thousand persons to many million people , which of course will call for widely different place-based and context relevant solutions. The increasing and partly unplanned urbanization has led to significant changes in diets, consumption patterns, and food trade , and in many urban areas, food markets are detached from local or domestic food production. In addition,huge amounts of so-called waste are produced, both in terms of food waste from processing and ensuring availability of a wide range of food at all times for eaters, as well as waste based on non-renewable resources. The fact that we talk about “waste” underlines the detachment from food production and farming, soil management, animal keeping, and resource cycles which were not present just 100 years ago These issues are addressed by the first two points in Table 1, which are strongly interlinked and enforce minimal external inputs and recycling of resources and biomass. In a city-region context, this clearly calls for a reorganization of resource cycles and avoidance of losses of energy, water, and nutrients in a combined rural–urban landscape. Where the linkages between rural and urban areas in some cases are facilitated by local governance systems in terms of markets linking, for example, smallholder farmers with urban markets , creation of full resource cycles including, for examples, compost material from cities to the soil and the rural areas, seem to be rarely addressed. Such cycles could involve human food waste being converted into animal feed and compost, energy in terms of biofuels produced from what normally would be considered as organic waste, minimization of plastic and packaging, and systems involving human urine and feces being composted and/or recycled in safe and responsible ways. Indeed, such agro-waste-recycling systems enabled Paris to rely on its local foodshed for over 1,000 years. The system boundaries in a city-region food system cannot be clearly defined, and a “completely closed food system” would be unlikely, even a contextualized food system, shaped, and iteratively co-created by multiple involved actors, and based on recycling and closed loops principles. Referring to the four-dimensional sustainability concept including environmental, social, economic, and institutional levels, as described by Valentin and Spangenberg , Spangenberg and FAO , an agroecological food system in a city-region context will consist of a complex web of smaller food systems, for example, involving CSAs, urban, and peri-urban farming and a number of different supply chains and levels of organization, which interact and overlap internally as well as with surrounding landscapes and food systems. Most likely, products from other geographic and climatic zones, for example, coffee and spices, will be involved, and inclusion of surrounding marine or other landscape elements further blur apparently clear systems boundaries. Furthermore, vulnerability to local shocks raises the general idea of crisis-preparedness and will always call for a certain ability of all food systems to step in and assist others, in case of failing harvests or natural disasters, and make wider connections between food systems desirable. Trade and transport between different food systems can be organized in ways which are equitable and environmentally not burdening, and can supplement local food systems rather than displace local produce. These aspects need to be considered if the aims and characteristics of agroecological food systems are to be taken seriously. Mendéz and co-authors discussed transformative agroecology and stated that agroecology is explicitly committed to a more just and sustainable future by reshaping power relations from farm to table. In our contextualiza tion of agroecological food systems, we see the need to explore how the food system can be connected in whole cycles, that is, from table to farm as well. As mentioned above, Gliessman discusses what “our food system” would look like, if transformed so that it follows the basic thinking of agroecology. This is envisioned as the unfolding across five potential levels of transformation, where the first three address agroecosystem changes, and levels four and five target formation of more local and global food systems, respectively. Level four targets the local level food systems and creation of the above mentioned “food citizenship,” where food is grounded in a direct relationship between eaters and growers. Level 5, however, targets a wider change: “… build a new global food system, based on equity, participation, democracy, and justice, that is not only sustainable, but helps restore and protects earth’s life support systems upon which we all depend”. This vision for integrating webs of different food systems – whilst emphasizing the importance of fairness throughout the systems – becomes of high relevance in complex and multifunctional city-region food systems.There is much evidence of severe negative long-term environmental and social effects of our current globalized food system, for example, the feed and livestock production as one example. The ideas of agroecological food systems present alternatives to this, among others by contributing to local economic and resource circulation and inclusive, equitable food systems. Such systems should perhaps be described as “socio-agroecological food systems,” emphasizing the closely woven social, agroecological, and ecological interactions, for example, in terms of networks involving both farmers and non-farmers and between actors in the regions, no matter whether we talk ecological or political zones.