Energy Return on Investment in Traditional and Modern Agricultures: Coffee Agroecosystems in Costa Rica from an Agroecological Perspective (1935–2010)

This chapter compares energy ¥ows in traditional and modern agrarian systems by examining the case of coffee growing in Costa Rica, a tropical crop managed typically using an agroforestry approach. This comparison evaluates the energy efciency of each style of management by means of economic and agroecological energy return on investments (EROIs). This also allows us to understand the functional change this crop underwent during the process of industrialization. The socioecological transition (SET) in agriculture, as well as altering the energy efciency of agroecosystems by incorporating technologies based on abiotic external inputs (EIs) (see also, Leach, 1976; Naredo and Campos, 1980), has had (and continues to have) another fundamental effect on agroecosystems: the change in the social and ecological functionality of the crop. Whereas in preindustrial economies, agriculture

CONTENTS

7.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 157 7.2 Methodology and Sources ............................................................................ 158 7.3 Costa Rican Coffee in the Global Coffee System ........................................ 161 7.4 Intensication of Coffee Agroecosystems .................................................... 164 7.5 Coffee as an Agroforestry System ................................................................ 167 7.6 Energy Efciency: An Agroecological Perspective ..................................... 170 7.7 Agroecological Design of Coffee Plantations in the Twenty-First Century .... 174 7.8 Conclusions ................................................................................................... 176

provided the majority of goods and services required by society, in industrial economies its functions have been increasingly determined and limited by the appearance of replacement goods, and its objective has been practically reduced to the production of saleable fruits (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007; González de Molina, 2010). Furthermore, the ecological functioning of the crop has undergone profound alteration: the internal ¥ows that sustained traditional agroecosystems have been partially replaced by external energy ¥ows, largely fossil in origin. Consequently, the environmental services provided by agroecosystems have also been altered (Guzmán and González de Molina, 2015; Tello et al., 2016). The future scenario of fossil fuel scarcity (Murray and King, 2012) requires increasingly efcient agrarian systems to be designed that are less dependent on these sources of energy. This, in turn, requires agriculture to regain its multifunctional role, reevaluating its productive potential that, in the case of coffee, goes beyond the bean (see also Haberl et al., 2011).