According to Koohafkan et al in “Green Agriculture: Foundations for Biodiverse, Resilient and Productive Agricultural Systems” (2011), there are many interpretations as to how sustainable agriculture would be able to provide enough food in an age of climate change, increasing energy costs, social unrest, financial instability and increasing environmental degradation. Food security is a complex issue that warrants a creative solution through innovation and cooperation. Permaculture is one such solution. But it remains in the fringes of major topics in the academe in spite of its appeal and novelty. Permaculture’s ‘novelty production’ is highly dependent on dynamic learning processes that are being enabled by the cooperation of social networks as discussed by Charao-Marques et al. in “Constructing Sociotechnical Transitions Toward Sustainable Agriculture: Lessons from Ecological Production of Medicinal Plants in Southern Brazil” (2010). It is not only the methods of design that are worth studying but also the people who practice it. What are their motivations? How were they able to grasp a concept such as permaculture and integrate it into their lives? Food security is not just about producing more food. At the end of the day, it is all about collective action, or community action, to be more precise. It is a situation wherein people are sharing and working together, caring for one another and protecting the Earth.
The issue of food security in permaculture is akin to the concept of food sovereignty according to Peeters in “Permaculture as Alternative Agriculture” (2011). It is commonly understood by many as the ability to provide food for one’s family and the community by growing your own food in your own backyard. In 1996, La Via Campesina defined the concept of food sovereignty as “the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Fernandez et al., 2012). Supplying the Earth’s growing population with a sufficient amount of food is often viewed as a challenge for the agriculture sector. True enough, farmers are indeed the managers of global useable lands that shape the Earth’s landscape today and in the next several decades to come (Lovell, et al., 2010).
Agricultural activities all over the world will continue to impact the environment and the ecosystems services that it provides at varying scales according to Lovell, et al. in “Integrating Agroecology and Landscape Multifunctionality in Vermont: An Evolving Framework to Evaluate the Design of Agroecosystems” (2010). Dogliotti et al. reports in “Designing sustainable agricultural production systems for a changing world: Methods and applications. Agricultural Systems” (2014) that in the next 40 years, the agriculture industry needs to increase food production by at least 70 percent on the same arable lands. Food security is often viewed as an issue of production. Though the agriculture sector’s current production schemes are efficient at producing food, it places the natural and social environments under a lot of stress as a consequence. Given this scenario, it is necessary to try new alternatives without compromising the health of these ecosystems. Currently, small-scale farming market systems compete with the high labor productivity of specialized and mechanized industrial farming systems according to a study by Ferguson and Lovell entitled, “Livelihoods and production diversity on U.S. permaculture farms” (2017). As a worldview shared in the grassroots movement, permaculture connects food insecurity to the current food production systems’ downplaying of innovation by smallholder farmers as described by Millner in “The Right to Food is Nature too: Food Justice and Everyday Environmental Expertise in the Salvadoran Permaculture Movement” (2016) and even backyard and small-scale gardeners.
It is important to remember that food security is not simply an issue of production—of who produces more and of better quality. It is also a political issue that deals with deciding which system of production is prioritized. Sustainable food systems follow a bottom-up approach and yet the top-down agrarian development programs for farmers run in conflict with their strategy (Millner, 2016). There is an existing dichotomy in the system today that labels one side as ‘knowers and innovators’ while the other is marginalized simply as ‘passive recipients’ (Millner, 2016) referring to the smallholder farmers and backyard food growers. Food security is a complicated issue entangled in the intricacies of politics, the complexities of the unpredictable bio-physical environment, and the beauty of the natural world. Nonetheless, steps have to be taken for a paradigm shift or what Ferguson and Lovell calls as a “transition to agroecological production” in their study, “Diversification and Labor Productivity on US Permaculture Farms” (2013).
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