ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the process by which a feminist approach to agroecology emerged as a political agenda in Brazil, opposing its own vision of the production and consumption of food to the established agricultural order and claiming its share in public policies. Based on a genealogical analysis and on qualitative research with a local network of women farmers, the chapter argues that this process relies inseparably on collective economic practice and on political organization, but that these two dimensions have different logics and that there are gaps between them. The first part of the chapter traces the constitution of feminist agroecology as a political subject in Brazil; the second part analyses women farmers’ economic practices. The political logic reflects a radical anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal ideology, born of the conflicts between feminist activists with both the agribusiness lobby and agroecological activists hostile to a gender approach. The economic logic is more complex and sometimes ambivalent, because it is subject to a requirement for efficiency and it reflects multiple subjectivities, including a market subjectivity. The possibility of a new kind of food politics, which embraces the questions of production, ecology and gender, rests on this complex connection between political process and economic practice.
