Agroecology remains marginalized within the agricultural industry despite on-the-ground evidence supporting its value and potential. According to Moeller, this is because “we’re locked into the existing system” of industrial food production.
“There is a vast infrastructure that is in place, which makes it so much easier and so much more convenient for all actors to just continue with business as usual,” says Moeller.
Frison says that large multinational corporations controlling the global seed, fertilizer, pesticide, and grain trade have a heavy influence on agricultural policy, “and they have an interest in maintaining the current system because it’s what serves their needs.”
And according to Lili Balogh, Farmer and President of Agroecology Europe, agrarian education teaches mostly about the benefits of industrial agriculture, further strengthening this model.
“The big corporations are mostly financing these institutions and research centers,” says Balogh. “They portray agroecology as an idealistic and unreal narrative that is not productive enough, when in reality it is quite the opposite as real evidence and scientific data shows.”
To overcome these systemic barriers, Moeller says that it’s critical to expand the industry’s understanding of what counts as evidence. This means valuing not only qualitative data but also evidence from the ground—from farmers, Indigenous peoples, and social movements as well as researchers and policymakers working in agroecology.
“This evidence is abundant,” says Moeller, “but it is marginalized in decisionmaking processes … power dynamics determine much of what is understood and disseminated as evidence.”
The solution is these multinational agriculture corporations have to be completely destroyed as institutions the continued influence of private interests can’t be tolerated. Business as usual has to be torn asunder and put to a total stop so our agricultural system can be rebuilt on new foundations. The modern private actors must be ruthlessly crushed while new forces are mobilized to radically reorganize agrarian production as their replacement. The needs of private businesses stand in contradiction to the needs of the collective whole of the rest of humanity and so their rulership must be overthrown.