Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

levins
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A Whole-System View of Agriculture, People,
and the Rest of Nature
Richard Levins
My comments are influenced by three sets of experiences. First, as an ecologist
working in public health and agricultural science, I am struck by the similarities
between them. Agriculture is like medicine: both depend on natural and social
phenomena, both have vital roles in promoting human welfare, and both receive
generous public support. Their underpinnings combine traditional and modern
scientific knowledge. Both are increasingly commodified, turned into objects for
buying and selling for profit in our economy. Both show a pattern of successes and
failures that is not dictated by nature but by the way knowledge is created.
Secondly, I have had the privilege of being a participant/observer in three different
kinds of society: as a scientist in the most modern United States capitalism; as a
farmer, organizer, and biologist in the colonial capitalism of Puerto Rico; and as a scientific
advisor in socialist Cuba. When we compare conditions in different places,
there are advantages and disadvantages to comparing places that are very similar or
places that are very different. When I compare Massachusetts with Rhode Island, or
the U.S. and Canada, they are similar insofar that it is relatively easy to pick out the
causes for their different health conditions. When we compare very different places,
it is harder to separate individual factors because they differ in so many ways, but the
comparisons challenge our assumptions as to what is a constant, and it unveils alternatives.
Cuba is especially interesting because it is a poor country and yet its health
status matches that of Sweden, and it has adopted an ecological pathway of development
based on equity and education. It is not even that the Cubans have made better
decisions about health and the environment, but that they have social arrangements
that favor using quite different rules for decision-making and different criteria for
effectiveness.
Finally, I will draw on the exciting presentations and discussions of this international
workshop, with its wide geographic representation and combination of academic
and community-based knowledge.
I will attempt to apply these sources of ideas to several issues.
yale school of forestry & environmental studies