Navigating Agroecological Transitions in Latin America
Project Leads
Hannah Wittman (Principal investigator) – University of British Columbia
Funding
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, InterAmerican Foundation (USA)
About the Project
This participatory research project is co-designed with a coordinated network of agricultural organizations supporting agroecological transitions with farmers in Latin America (including Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, and Ecuador). We will pilot test an open access mobile application (LiteFarm) developed at UBC’s Centre for Sustainable Food Systems. This project will help farmers and practitioners make data-driven farm management decisions to support their livelihoods and environmental sustainability, while also collecting data on agroecological transitions across multiple geographical, social, economic, and ecological variables to inform policy and other decision-makers.
Research Questions
- What are the drivers and outcomes of sustainable agroecological transitions in Latin America?
- How do participatory guarantee networks support knowledge sharing between farmers, researchers, and policy makers?
- What policy initiatives best support the “scaling up” of agroecology?
Methods
Researchers will use a new methodological tool called LiteFarm to collect consistent data across diverse farms. LiteFarm is an open-access, mobile web application that allows farmers to observe, measure, and respond in real time to crop, climate, labour, and market variables so they can sustain their livelihoods, feed people, and contribute to ecosystem service provisioning such as biodiversity conservation. LiteFarm enables data and multiple analytical reports adapted to local contexts to be immediately available to farmers. It also provides the data in anonymized form to the research team, who will develop regional and context-specific analyses.
Expected Impact
By integrating the wide range of social and ecological variables involved in agroecological transitions, and grounding analysis in the experience of farmer-led organizations from multiple countries across Latin America, researchers will be able to assess the potential contributions of agroecology to global food security and sustainable agricultural production, and identify barriers to and pathways for agroecological transition. In addition, the results from this study will support the development of better public policies to improve the socio-economic and environmental outcomes of our global food system.
News and Publications
See a list of media publications at Cepagro.
Booklet: Agroecology, Food Sovereignty & Well-being, September 2023.
See the related study Advancing Agroecological Transitions through Visual Methodologies here and the study’s videos below: