Technological Approaches to Sustainable Agriculture at a Crossroads: An Agroecological Perspective

By M. Altieri, C. Nicholls, René Montalba. 2017

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most efforts to improve agricultural production remain focused on practices driven by an intensification agenda and not by an agroecological one. Agroecology transcends the reformist notion of organic agriculture and sustainable intensification proponents who contend that changes can be achieved within the dominant agroindustrial system with minor adjustments or “greening” of the current neoliberal agricultural model. In the technological realm, merely modifying practices to reduce input use is a step in the right direction but does not necessarily lead to the redesign of a more self sufficient and autonomous farming system. A true agroecological technological conversion calls into question monoculture and the dependency on external inputs. Traditional farming systems provide models that promote biodiversity, thrive without agrochemicals, and sustain year-round yields. Conversion of conventional agriculture also requires major social and political changes which are beyond the scope of this paper.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c3bb24b3db00f065d527bef7cac9bd07848b54c

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Citations in the corpus

The Future of Smallholder Farming in India: Some Sustainability Considerations (2020, background): “Traditional farming systems have been reported to provide models that promote biodiversity, thrive without agrochemicals, and sustain year-round yields [4].”
Traditional agriculture in transition: examining the impacts of agricultural modernization on smallholder farming in Ghana under the new Green Revolution (2018, background): “…an understanding of the actual impacts of contemporary agrarian change is mostly lost in the seemingly unending debate about whether mechanized or ecological agriculture is the ultimate pathway to food security for smallholder farmers (see Lotter 2015; Conceição et al. 2016; Altieri et al. 2017).”