Barcelona Metropolis

Since the mid-20^th century, agriculture has undergone more transformations than in the last ten thousand years. It has gone from being a common good to becoming a commodity. Intensive farming is increasingly on the rise and rural areas are becoming depopulated. The solution will emerge from the dialogue between the scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge of agroecology.

The cultivation of food, in other words, agriculture, is a centuries-old activity that has allowed humanity to ensure its very reproduction, among other things. It has also facilitated exchange between the world’s different regions and has laid the foundations for what we know today as development. Nevertheless, in the last 60 years – especially since the introduction of the agricultural market into the rules of free trade – agriculture has undergone more transformations than in the previous ten thousand years. These transformations are the outcome of multiple processes, but attention is drawn to two key processes in this article: on the one hand, the advent of industrial society, which would not have been possible without other previous transformations that allowed “primitive accumulation”, as described by Karl Marx: the enclosure of communal lands for agricultural use and their subsequent privatisation and commercialisation; and, on the other hand, the role that scientific knowledge has played in an industrialised society in which progress is identified with technological advances and the human being – in particular “man” – is deemed capable of controlling nature by means of an absolutely anthropocentric and androcentric approach; a society that dismisses other knowledge that exists alongside scientific knowledge, considering it backward, and which is the one that has allowed us to evolve, up to the present day, in tune with nature.

The latest report issued by the United Nations High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE, 2021) warns of this issue. Young people leave rural areas, there is no handover, and those who want to take up the occupation come up against serious problems, the most pressing, perhaps, being access to land. The countryside is abandoned, the rural environment is depopulated and us people crowd into cities, a space with an unsustainable social and ecological metabolism, a predator of resources, highly dependent on the rural environment and natural resources, but revered by our society as the image of progress. Politics contributes to this, benefiting cities to the detriment of rural areas.

Technological block

The technological challenges facing agriculture are manifold, but perhaps the greatest is related to the approach. Our civilisation, as we said in previous paragraphs, understands that progress and scientific advancement will solve all our problems, problems that, let’s not forget, we have generated ourselves using a scientific approach based on productivity and the supremacy of “man”.

Against this backdrop, the future of agriculture undergoes digitisation and new technological developments. But if we learn from what has happened in recent decades, and I hope that human beings learn from their mistakes, the approach of more modernisation has contributed to the environmental and social challenges raised above. When we talk about more technology and digitisation, we should ask ourselves who these technologies benefit, whether they are necessary, whether practices, operations and systems already exist to solve such problems, whether they are another element generating farmers’ dependencies or whether, on the contrary, they increase their dependence on other actors or their alienation by this highly unsustainable productivist agriculture.

Therefore, it is worth considering whether science itself, at least in the agricultural context, needs to reinvent itself. In fact, scientific evidence itself warns us of the need to recover, respect, assess and develop solutions to problems based on the dialogue between scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge, a dialogue that is the pillar on which agroecology is built. The challenge is that, in our context, this traditional knowledge – the one that developed the local varieties and breeds we know today (and which are disappearing) and guaranteed an evolution in balance with our territories – is in danger of extinction. The people who possess this knowledge are very old and, without their wisdom, we will miss out on future options.

Political block

Throughout this context, what we see is that there is a problem of political legitimisation of agriculture and food, at different levels. For example, the Community Agricultural Policy (CAP), considered by some authors to be one of the main causes of the decapitalisation of the European countryside, is questioned not only by society (who need an explanation in each new reform as to why it is one of the European policies with the biggest budget), but also by farmers themselves. They wonder why the large landowners and corporate agents are the ones who take most of the CAP subsidies, or why the CAP is the cause of the low prices they receive, which generates dependency dynamics from which they cannot escape.

All over the world, other processes of delegitimisation can be noted. An example would be that of the United Nations Food Security Summit scheduled for autumn 2021. According to some civil society organisations and farming organisations, it is being co-opted by large corporations, which replace legitimate parties to act at this level, such as the United Nations Committee on Food Security or the FAO itself (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations).

In short, these are the challenges posed by internationalisation, industrialisation and the concentration of power in a handful of agriculture and food actors, and which stem, in turn, from the transformation of food into a commodity. In a recent article (Jackson et al., 2021), we showed the importance of approaches and narratives in policy development, particularly in the European Union’s farm-to-table strategy. While policies in recent years have been developed on the basis of a productivist narrative in which food is considered a commodity, now there is a need to focus on food as a human right or a common good (SAPEA, 2020). Thus, considering it a human right implies developing policies that guarantee access to land, particularly for young people, or guaranteeing that people with limited resources can access healthy and sustainable food. And the common good approach calls for the development of governance models that guarantee the participation of all actors, particularly those marginalised and subordinated by the industrialised food system itself, small-scale producers and consumers.^[1]