Political Agroecology in Senegal: Historicity and Repertoires of Collective Actions of an Emerging Social Movement

Abstract

Agroecology has become an ideological foundation for social and environmental transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. In Senegal, agroecological advocacy coalitions, made up of farmers’ organizations, scientists, NGOs, and IOs, are using agroecology as an umbrella concept for proposing policy changes at multiple scales. We describe the history of the agroecological movement in Senegal in the context of the constitution of a national advocacy coalition. We then examine the “repertoires of collective action” mobilized by the coalition. Four repertoires are identified: technical support and knowledge co-production, territorial governance, alternative food networks, and national policy dialogue. Our analysis highlights the potential that these multi-level approaches have to sustainably transform the current food systems in sub-Saharan Africa. However, our research also reveals the limited agency of farmer organizations and the limitations of a movement that is strongly dependent on NGOs and international donors, leading to a “projectorate” situation in which contradictory policy actions can overlap. We further argue that, although the central government has formally welcomed some of the principles of agroecology into their policy discourse, financial and political interests in pursuing a Green Revolution and co-opting agroecology are pending. This leads to a lack of political and financial autonomy for grassroots farmers’ organizations, limiting the development of counter-hegemonic agroecology. We discuss the conditions under which territorial approaches, and the three other repertoires of collective action, can have significant potential to transform Sub-Saharan Africa in the coming years.

Circuitos cortos de comercialización en la Zona Metropolitana de Xalapa, Veracruz, México, un análisis estructural para su fortalecimiento

“…En el ámbito externo (tabla 1), identificamos que las condiciones sociales, políticas, económicas y ambientales de los territorios donde se desarrollan los CCC recobran relevancia, por ejemplo, a partir del desarrollo de movimientos sociales y ambientales se pueden generar acciones de transformación de los sistemas alimentarios como el movimiento social en Brasil, La Marcha das Margaritas, un movimiento feminista brasileño, liderado por mujeres en el campo, quienes a partir de diversas estrategias de cabildeo, lograron establecer políticas públicas en torno a los sistemas alimentarios, como acceso a líneas de crédito para mujeres, aspectos de tenencia de la tierra rural, enfoque de género el programas gubernamentales enfocados al campo, por mencionar algunos (Borghoff y Teixeira, 2021); o el caso de Senegal, donde a partir de coaliciones sociales, se han propuesto cambios de política pública para la promoción de la agroecología, la gobernanza territorial así como el apoyo técnico y la coproducción de conocimientos (Bottazzi y Boillat, 2021).…”

“…Se debe señalar el rol de la agroecología para el mantenimiento de la agrobiodiversidad, lo cual se vincula con la diversidad en la oferta de productos locales y la revalorización de estos mismos, por ejemplo, el reconocimiento y aprovechamiento de cultivos no convencionales que se producen dentro de los cafetales de sombra(Dávila, Salas y Boucher, 2019).La gobernanza también fue identificada como variable clave, la cual puede permitir la creación de redes y conexiones entre actores para la movilización de recursos, el aprendizaje entre pares y la fijación de objetivos comunes. De hecho, algunas investigaciones resaltan la vinculación entre iniciativas agroecológicas y CCC, para fortalecer la autonomía política y financiera de los movimientos(Bottazzi y Boillat, 2021;Buenaventura et al, 2021; Medina-García, Nagarajan, Castillo-Vysokolan, Béatse yVan den Broeck, 2022;Parodi, 2018). Al respecto se observa un consenso entre los actores entrevistados sobre la necesidad de fortalecer la gobernanza, desde una manera ordenada, definiendo roles y responsabilidades específicas y garantizando espacios estables para la toma de decisiones.…”

Agroecologically-conducive policies: A review of recent advances and remaining challenges

“…Although ambitious from an environmental point of view, the plan embraced only a few measures directly related to agroecology such as reforestation, recycling initiatives and policies to reduce food waste. However, following the government statement in favour of agroecology, several social organizations, movements and networks came together in an alliance called Dynamics for an Agro-Ecological Transition in Senegal (DyTAES), which has been organizing advocacy efforts to improve the Green Plan ever since (Bottazzi and Boillat 2021).…”

“…In recent years, policies specifically designed to support agroecology have emerged in a few countries such as Argentina (Patrouilleau et al 2017), Brazil (Niederle et al 2019), France (Hubert and Couvet 2021), India (Dorin 2021), Nicaragua (Fréguin-Gresh and Sabourin 2019) and Senegal (Boillat et al 2021;Bottazzi and Boillat, 2021). There are other examples of policies that -despite not mentioning agroecology specifically -incorporate instruments to support agroecological principles or practices and therefore are supportive of agroecological transitions.…”

Food democracy as radical political agroecology: securing autonomy (alterity) by subverting the state-capital nexus

“…Thus, prominent usage of the term political agroecology to date, self-avowedly or otherwise, appears to conform to an agrarian populist approach (see for prominent examples Toledo and Barrera-Brasols, 2017;de Molina et al, 2020;Tornaghi and Dehaene, 2021). A possible exception here is that of Bottazzi and Boillat (2021) who deploy a more nuanced and differentiated categorization of the peasantry and subaltern classes than is common in the 'peasant' essentialization characteristic of agrarian populism, where 'peasant' is taken to refer to an undifferentiated corpus of small, family farms. Given this general equation of political agroecology with agrarian populism, the present paper is the first to articulate political agroecology in detail from a Marxian perspective and to employ this as a basis for identifying the shortcomings of the term when employed by agrarian populists.…”