And agribusinesses in the Global North are actively looking to agroecology to rebrand and build new markets under the banners of carbon farming and regenerative agriculture.
It is also at the centre of the food sovereignty movement, a global constellation of peasant- and Indgenous-led organizations fighting for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced in a way that is ecologically sound and socially acceptable. Food sovereignty is arguably the single largest social movement in the world.
For example, crop development through genetic modification is closed off to many by intellectual property laws, patents and the high technological competencies and equipment involved. On-farm domestication and breeding are, by contrast, democratic technologies because they necessarily open and entirely reliant on local knowledge and sharing.
Reginaldo Haslet-Marroquin, CEO of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, describes the push to define regenerative agriculture as an act of colonization. “It is fundamental for achieving a regenerative outcome to not define it,” he told me in a recent interview. “To not reduce it to our myopic understanding of things ⦠to the limitations of our colonizing minds. ⦠Rather, we seek to understand what is, and what isn’t regenerative.