ABSTRACT
While agroecology prioritizes democratic land control along with food securing and ecologically sustainable farming practices, there are cases where these three objectives are assumed, though not in the context of an agroecology framework. Borras and Franco (2012a) sketch a possible set of dilemmas that may arise from the intersection of these three core elements of food sovereignty. In situations where the combination is indeed grounded in agroecology-based production, the task of food sovereignty movements is to consolidate and expand such ideal conditions. But these situations are rare. Much more common are situations where various combinations of these three elements are present. For instance, small farms with democratic land control by peasants may exist, and they may be producing maximum possible output from a given land area without using agroecological practices, employing instead inputs such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified (GM) seeds. In other cases, peasants following agroecological practices might not have enough land to produce sufficient food (or other farm outputs to enable them to buy enough food) or might be making inadequate use of the land and other resources they control. The existence of such varied and less-than-ideal agro-food systems contributes to highly differentiated food sovereignty movements (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011).
