Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics?

TITTONELL, PABLO; EL MUJTAR, VERONICA; FELIX, GEORGES; KEBEDE, YODIT; LABORDA, LUCIANA; LUJÁN SOTO, RAQUEL; DE VENTE, JORIS

Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems

Frontiers Media S.A.

Año: 2022 vol. 6

The answer to the rhetorical question posed in the title of this opinion piece should be definitely, no! In the first place, because there are several types of regenerative agriculture, some of which embrace social and political dimensions to some extent. And one may argue that there are politics involved, directly or indirectly, in the three forms of RA proposed here. Secondly, because agroecology is much more comprehensive than regenerative agriculture, and not just in terms of socio- political aspects. In spite of the diversity of RA definitions available, most practitioners/adopters would agree that soil health and soil restoration are at their core. Agroecology, on the other hand, encompasses social dimensions but also additional biophysical dimensions of agriculture than the proponents of regenerative agriculture claim to include, such as crop breeding, energetics, crop protection, ecology and genetics, circularity, multitrophic polycultures, etc. Although we cannot claim that we have exhausted all possible definitions and approaches to RA available, our review of the widely accessible web-based and scientific information on RA has been extensive, and the lexical analysis performed on it quite assertive.