The ‘Agroecology & Food Sovereignty’ storyline in regenerative agriculture

There are nine different stories of regenerative agriculture that I identified in my PhD research. These stories impact the way people interpret, talk about and practice regenerative agriculture. They are consequently important for understanding debates about how regenerative agriculture should be defined and measured. Each story comes from a different agricultural lineage (e.g., organics, holistic management or permaculture) and subsequently emphasizes different things when defining regenerative agriculture. This blog post is an extract from my recent publication in Sustainability Science. You can read the paper here for more information: Regenerative agriculture: a potentially transformative storyline shared by nine discourses

Artwork by Hannah Cox of Nanny Potts Illustration. Agroecology and Food Sovereignty invites the community to be democratically involved in their food system. In this artwork we see a thriving local food system with people participating in different aspects of production and distribution.

In the Agroecology and Food Sovereignty storyline, regenerative agriculture is about regenerating communities and having people democratically involved in the food system

Agroecology has a unique influence on regenerative agriculture because of its connection with the global South (Rivera Ferre 2018) where peasant farmers challenged industrial agriculture and the Green Revolution (Catacora-Vargas et al. 2017). Despite their similarities, agroecology is critical of regenerative agriculture for being apolitical (Tittonell et al. 2022). Jonas (2021, p. 7) remarks that regenerative agriculture “has not developed a theory of change for an economic or social transformation and is growing a new generation of ‘experts’ and gurus who profit from teaching the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ or ‘why.’” This leaves regenerative agriculture open to “corporate capture” (Jonas 2021, p. 1).

In response, this type of regenerative agriculture does adopt a specific theory of change and political structure around food sovereignty (IPC 2015), which directly challenges the dominance of corporate power in the food system (Chaifetz and Jagger 2014). This is why agroecology resisted co-optation by agri-food companies when it was endorsed by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (de Molina et al. 2019). Participant 4 remarked that, “because I think more into the agroecology space too, regenerative agriculture is about regenerating communities and democratic participation in the food system. A regenerative food system would have people deeply and democratically involved in it.” Democratic participation through frameworks such as Community Supported Agriculture is what prevents the corporatisation of agroecology.

Soul Fire Farm has influenced regenerative agriculture by challenging food apartheid and the structural injustice of white, industrially produced food (Hughes et al. 2020; Penniman 2018; Soul-Fire-Farm 2018). This is “an Afro-Indigenous centred community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system” (Soul-Fire-Farm 2022). African American communities have had a rich agricultural history, which influenced the emergence of regenerative agriculture through George Washington Carver (Hawken 2021; White 2018). These communities focussed on developing democratic, collective and collaborative models to create self-sufficiency during a time when they were denied voting rights (White 2018). Growing food became an act of resistance in this way (White 2018). Some regenerative farmers in the USA showed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests, emphasising that, “agriculture cannot be regenerative without racial equity” (Quivira-Coalition 2021).