Congratulations on an excellent first draft that does an admirable job reviewing existing literature and providing novel frameworks.
It was great to see an emerging and pressing issue like Fall Army Worm addressed so prominently at the beginning of the document. This helps to ameliorate the perception among some that agroecology is not especially relevant to farmers' concerns.
Some comments/ suggestions:
The design of Figure 1 can make it seem like the boxes are supposed to match up at certain points, which I don’t think was the intention.
Agroecology in a wider context:
The lack of discussion of conventional agriculture in the first third of the paper, and not including it as an approach to be compared and contrasted with the others seems like an oversight. Table 5 on page 63 and Box 10 start to get at this kind of comparison, but it feels like it should come earlier or first, before getting into the sub-approaches in order to pull in a more general audience.
Box 4 could benefit from a principle on valuing heterogeneity and context and not looking for silver bullets or recipes. I was surprised that the idea of conventional/ green revolution agriculture being based on homogenization while agroecology was based more on a principle of embracing heterogeneity wasn’t explored.
The history of agroecology and green revolution type agriculture could be better summarized. It is mentioned, I think, that agroecology has been the norm for most of the 10,000 years of agriculture, and that most of the world’s farmers probably are fairly agroecological, but some of the graphics could reflect these ideas better like Figure 2 and Table 5.
The classifications in Table 1 seem too arbitrary to be insightful. For each classification I could think of many examples of it working at different scales and having the opposite impact on food security.
The first mention of traditional vs. scientific knowledge (lines 10-20 on pg. 29) seems like a missed opportunity to discuss the interplay of the local and the global and the idea that traditional knowledge is often good at defining the “what” (local practice that works) and scientific, at its best, is good at explaining the why (global principles, like nitrogen fixation). This could easily segue into the section about farmer research networks/ citizen science and how that helps with both local adaptation and identify larger patterns (lines 1-9 on page 32). Section 3.2.3 is great, but should be foreshadowed more in the first section. Lines 36-38 on page 80: “The bridging of the knowledge gap between informal indigenous knowledge and practices and the more formal science that underpins industrial agriculture will be required” seems like an unfortunate phrasing, there is a lot more to “science”, which of course is not just agronomy but includes transdisciplinary work spanning anthropology, archeology, history, geography, economics, sociology, biology, ecology, chemistry etc than what was done in the name of industrial agriculture.
Including “Nutrition sensitive agriculture” as one of the approaches could be stretching the definition of an agriculture approach, however I do think it expands our thinking in a good way. I cannot say the same for Agroforestry, which clearly seems like a practice to me, one that is part of many/ all of the other approaches. Using sustainable food value chains instead of Local Food Systems also seems odd, it is my perception that there is much more literature and energy behind the latter. A chain is basically the opposite of a system and runs counter to the AE ethos.
Table 3: organic agriculture mentions meat consumption? And is the only one?
In 3.1.2 I think urban migration needs to be mentioned specifically.
Table 6: I find this really interesting and thought-provoking.
I was very impressed with an article based on a book by Charles Mann (link below) that used C4 breeding and perennials as two promising but fundamentally different types of research pathways to providing food in the future. I wonder if these two research areas might be illustrative to touch on in this paper.
I also thought the IDDRI paper (link below) did a great job of messaging some very important levers of an AE transition, which your paper mentions but does not highlight: increasing non-crop landscape features and some diet modification:
Congratulations on an excellent first draft that does an admirable job reviewing existing literature and providing novel frameworks.
It was great to see an emerging and pressing issue like Fall Army Worm addressed so prominently at the beginning of the document. This helps to ameliorate the perception among some that agroecology is not especially relevant to farmers' concerns.
Some comments/ suggestions:
The design of Figure 1 can make it seem like the boxes are supposed to match up at certain points, which I don’t think was the intention.
Agroecology in a wider context:
The classifications in Table 1 seem too arbitrary to be insightful. For each classification I could think of many examples of it working at different scales and having the opposite impact on food security.
The first mention of traditional vs. scientific knowledge (lines 10-20 on pg. 29) seems like a missed opportunity to discuss the interplay of the local and the global and the idea that traditional knowledge is often good at defining the “what” (local practice that works) and scientific, at its best, is good at explaining the why (global principles, like nitrogen fixation). This could easily segue into the section about farmer research networks/ citizen science and how that helps with both local adaptation and identify larger patterns (lines 1-9 on page 32). Section 3.2.3 is great, but should be foreshadowed more in the first section. Lines 36-38 on page 80: “The bridging of the knowledge gap between informal indigenous knowledge and practices and the more formal science that underpins industrial agriculture will be required” seems like an unfortunate phrasing, there is a lot more to “science”, which of course is not just agronomy but includes transdisciplinary work spanning anthropology, archeology, history, geography, economics, sociology, biology, ecology, chemistry etc than what was done in the name of industrial agriculture.
Including “Nutrition sensitive agriculture” as one of the approaches could be stretching the definition of an agriculture approach, however I do think it expands our thinking in a good way. I cannot say the same for Agroforestry, which clearly seems like a practice to me, one that is part of many/ all of the other approaches. Using sustainable food value chains instead of Local Food Systems also seems odd, it is my perception that there is much more literature and energy behind the latter. A chain is basically the opposite of a system and runs counter to the AE ethos.
Table 3: organic agriculture mentions meat consumption? And is the only one?
In 3.1.2 I think urban migration needs to be mentioned specifically.
Table 6: I find this really interesting and thought-provoking.
I was very impressed with an article based on a book by Charles Mann (link below) that used C4 breeding and perennials as two promising but fundamentally different types of research pathways to providing food in the future. I wonder if these two research areas might be illustrative to touch on in this paper.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/charles-mann-can-planet-earth-feed-10-billion-people/550928/
I also thought the IDDRI paper (link below) did a great job of messaging some very important levers of an AE transition, which your paper mentions but does not highlight: increasing non-crop landscape features and some diet modification:
https://www.iddri.org/en/publications-and-events/issue-brief/agro-ecological-europe-desirable-credible-option-address-food