Agroecological production methods strengthen farmers’ autonomy and adaptive capacity. When expanding agroecological systems, greater societal benefits depend on closer relationships between producers and consumers.   Connecting producers to more equitable and sustainable markets through short food supply chains can increase producers’ income, at the same time as maintaining a fair price for consumers. Recent research from Brazil brings novel insights on how to construct short supply chains and adapt them to new contexts.

The findings presented in this document come from the project ‘’Research Partnership for an Agroecology-Based Solidarity Economy in Bolivia and Brazil (AgroEcos)’’,  funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC),  Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).

Through solidarity relationships, agroecological producers, conscientious consumers, or both have carried out collective marketing together in Brazil.   Various forms include farmers’ markets, weekly baskets, institutional purchases (especially school meals), community-based tourism, swaps of surplus products, etc.  These short supply chains seek to enhance social reciprocity, producers’ income, access to healthy food, nutritional quality, nature conservation, and sociocultural benefits.  

Projeto AgroEcos

In Latin America, there have been increasing overlaps between social movements promoting agroecology and a solidarity economy, where short chains are called ''circuitos cortos''. 

After the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the continent since March 2020, new hygiene requirements caused difficulties for those arrangements, especially for farmers’ markets. Nevertheless, many solidarity networks overcame the difficulties by creatively adapting or innovating circuitos cortos. 

Through participatory action research, the AgroEcos project has facilitated and studied those efforts with agroecological producers’ cooperatives in Brazil and Bolivia.   During the pandemic their strategies have included: restructuring (or relocating) farmers’ markets,  establishing online orders, engaging with solidarity delivery systems, supplying vulnerable individuals as solidarity actions, swapping surplus products, gaining new institutional sales, etc.    

These efforts build an ‘economy of proximity’, based firstly on proximate aims. These include democratic self-management, mutual aid, socioeconomic inclusion, respect for the environment, gender equality, etc.   Such proximate aims help to activate other forms of proximity, e.g. organizational, institutional, cultural, and geographical.   

Fórum de Economia Solidária da Baixada Santista (FESBS) Solidarity Economy Forum of Baixada Santista 

Circuitos cortos depend on collective capacities to build and link the various forms of proximity.  Those multiple ‘’proximities’’ have been promoted by Brazil's Solidarity Economy Forum of Baixada Santista (FESBS). Several cooperatives and solidarity networks involved in the AgroEcos project exemplify this general model.  Applying such a perspective can help agroecological initiatives and their networks to plan strategies that are more effective and replicable in other contexts, once tailored to local needs. The short name of the project ‘’AgroEcos’’ indeed indicates that the initiatives have many echoes, thus being reproduced across space and time.

For an overview of three case studies in Brazil and Bolivia, see the Second Newsletter of AgroEcos available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.