Therefore, leaf and other vegetative litter should be considered as potential sources of Phytophthora, including pathogenic species, whether they are found in natural streams or other surface waters. Alternatively, the suitability of local vegetation may be a determinant of what Phytophthora species become established or prominent in streams.Current farming and food systems confront and are implicated in multiple challenges and unsustainable changes, including biophysical dimensions such as climate change , environmental pollution, escalating losses of biodiversity, and deteriorating ecosystem services . Social forces and structures as well as unsustainable socioeconomic processes also strain present capacities to manage growing population pressure, unplanned urbanization, food and nutrition insecurity, dietary shifts, and health disparities associated with poverty, and growing inequality among multiple stakeholders, including women, youth, migratory workers, and indigenous peoples . Both urban and rural actors are impacted in relation to land ownership and land use change issues and drivers underpinning global industrial agriculture and connected food systems. Human activity has approached critical limits over an increasing number of the so-called Planetary Boundaries , beyond which the functioning of ecosystem services may be substantially altered, increasing the risk of destabilizing life on our planet . Agriculture and food systems are both a villain and a victim in approaching or breaching PBs, and this is already impacting the ability to farm and produce food. How can humanity sustainably grow nutritious food and return to a safe operating space within the PBs? As an alternative to this scenario,hydroponic growing supplies a growing number of studies and reports indicate significant potential gains from transitioning toward agroecological agriculture as a way of nourishing current populations sustainably while allowing for future generations to support their livelihoods .
One core quality of transitioning to agroecological farming systems is the regenerative trend of increased “outputs” per unit “input” for a more efficient agriculture for using and conserving diversity on a long-term basis, through the use and combination of different agricultural techniques in ways which restore and nourish the soil and enhance the local environment, instead of continuously degrading it. In addition, the diversification strategy makes food producing systems resilient to external shocks and influences, such as floods or droughts, using, for example, approaches built on the principles and science of agroecology . There is growing evidence that such production systems allow for lower cost and more diverse fruit and vegetable supply . Furthermore, conventional thinking about food is increasingly being challenged, shifting from being regardedonly as a commodity toward becoming acknowledged for its nourishment, social and cultural values, the links it creates between people, and its deep connectedness with ecosystems, ecosystem services, and natural resources . The current globalized industrial food system exhibits the same drivers which impact and shape farming industries and food production, and underscores the importance of focusing on how food flows into food systems, and which structures and related policies are shaped to support and reinforce current farming as well as food systems . It is not only conventional and industrial production of animal feed, genetic material, or major commodities such as wheat, rice, coffee, sugar, maize, and chicken which are controlled and shipped across continents by large trans-national corporations. Our globalized industrial food systems sometimes also include food which originates from farming systems based on organic farming regulations and principles like the IFOAM principles, calling for more coherent, equitable and holistic food systems, and applying agroecological farming methods. In other words, the intentions behind such farming systems and their contributions to agricultural and environmental sustainability are not always extended to food systems, which generally contribute to out-competing local produce, distorting prices and producing huge amounts of food waste and other waste.
This can be seen as a contradiction and emphasizes the importance of thinking of not only organic and agroecological production, but also has consequences for thinking the principles into the entire food systems. At the same time, there are many examples of organic farming and food as well as agroecology presenting alternatives to the industrial farming and food systems , and by increasing and emphasizing this, we can move toward a food system that falls within the PBs. This calls for profound analyses of how agroecological food systems function, and how they can contribute to coherent, resilient and equitable production and exchange of food, while human and social capitals are built up throughout the food systems, and resources are cycled rather than transported through, from or to disconnected parts of the systems. How can such food systems meet challenges such as losses of complex and system-oriented, context-relevant knowledge about farming and food, and how can they contribute to re-connect consumers and the food that they eat across urban-rural settings in city-region food systems? An increasing number of papers and reports link agroecology and food systems , referring to the fact that agriculture and food systems are intricately linked, and to a large extent driven by the same global structures. Given the intricate and mutually-reinforcing relations between agriculture, food, and socioeconomic systems, the present article aims to characterize and explore how the concept of agroecology stimulates the conceptualization of agroecological food systems, or perhaps even a more inclusive term like “socio-agroecological food systems.” Food systems following the principles of agroecology calling for resilience, multi-functionality , equity, and recycling of resources face particular challenges and have significant options for impacting sustainable development in city regions . This needs to be seen in a light where an increasing amount of the global population lives in urban areas, from smaller towns with a few thousand inhabitants, to mega-cities of millions of people. Urbanization has changed diets and nutrition, while food consumption has become detached from food production worldwide . Taking a systems approach to reconnecting these gaps requires major changes in consumption patterns, resource management and social responsibility, if everybody is to be nourished in agroecological food systems.
We aim to explore the connections and linkages between the concepts of agroecology and food systems, and focus particularly on how the food system framework can locate and ground the concept of agroecology within a rural– urban landscape setting. This exercise requires us to critically examine the reciprocal flows and the multiple environmental, social, and governance related connections needed for an agroecological food system transformation.A food system is a system that involves activities, social and institutional structures, and processes related to the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of food . Agricultural systems are part of food systems, integrated in ecosystems, and constituted socioecological systems . Over the past few decades, the understanding of food systems has clearly developed as result of the development of a more and more globalized food system . Ericksen compared some features of “traditional” versus “modern” food systems, and addressed the governance of different food systems, with or without support for local production, and Foran and co-authors point to the existence of different concepts of how food systems are constructed, with examples from so-called developing countries. The structure and governance of the food system clearly influences consumption patterns by providing both producers and non-food-producing consumers with options of availability. The range of social and environmental welfare outcomes stemming from food system activities were also discussed and visualized in Ericksen ,flood table and Jennings and co-authors analyzed how planned and well governed city-region food systems could contribute to different aspects of food security for different groups of citizens, stable incomes, circular economies, and resilience at various levels. Characterizing a food system can follow through its different social aspects and arrangements, like the type and degree of contact between those who grow and produce food and those who receive and eat the food without participating in the production of it, or who and how many people are involved in the cycle between the soil and the plate. Where local food systems with short supply chains have potential for involving resource feedback loops, raising collective awareness among different actors within the food system, and give possibilities for mutual learning , a larger and decoupled food system lacks the direct interaction and feedback, reduces exchange of experiences and knowledge, or the embeddedness inherent in a localized food system. A decade of research on New York’s Chinatown produce economy gives an example of the importance of this connectedness: the studies revealed that 80-plus produce markets offered an incredibly diverse assortment of lower-cost produce because they are connected to a web of nearby, independently-run small farms and wholesalers . In a food chain , a product flows through different steps, where various forms of transformation may occur, and connection and feedback loops between these different steps may not necessarily exist. In such systems, farmers or industrial food producers can risk becoming producers of “food from nowhere,” as expressed by Bové and Dufour , and later unfolded by Campbell , and “consumers” can become reduced to a non-informed and non-responsible person, only “consuming food no matter of origin,” as a contrast to so-called “food citizens” defined as a consumer who makes decisions that support a democratic, economically just and environmentally sustainable food system, with a possibility of being actively involved in the food system at different levels . The call and practice of re-localizing of food systems is similarly seen as a harbinger of rural– urban reciprocity as consumers and producers are re-embedded physically and socially in the food system while raising awareness of their respective impacts on one another .Agroecology is widely acknowledged equally as a science, a practice and a movement . Its academic roots go back nearly 100 years, drawing on the fields of agronomy, horticulture, and ecology.
Through the view of agricultural systems as ecosystems, agroecology combines these disciplines and has subsequently incorporated further disciplines of cultural, human, and social sciences in a wider systems approach. It has existed as an explicit concept since the 1930s, evolving through the 1970s by increasing awareness of practices, focusing on indigenous knowledge and emerging social movements. These tenets position agroecological paradigms as both an alternative to chemical, mono-cultural or industrial farming, and as a catalyst for conventional agriculture to adopt more sustainable approaches. Agroecological systems are considered to be built on the principles of natural ecosystems and are seen as multifunctional and functionally integrated systems of complementary and dynamic relations between living organisms and their environments. In Table 1, some well-explored key characteristics related to agroecology are listed. The functions of natural ecosystems, in terms of energy and nutrient flow, as well as the dynamics of adjusting and being resilient to constantly changing surroundings and regulating populations, clearly are different from an agroecosystem. The latter are altered by and reacting to human dominance, or at a more extreme end, are disconnected or isolated from pre-existing energy and nutrient flows . Over the past decades, many academic agroecologists have increasingly stressed the importance of considering the human and social systems as integrated parts of the agroecological system. Building complex systems involves extensive human knowledge, experience, and community collaboration. Blay-Palmer and co-authors point to how the benefits of sharing place-based knowledge and good practices can help in joining forces for transforming food systems at a wider scale. The scale of an agroecological system can be large or small, but the scope of agroecological farming activities is wide; the majority of the population of smaller-scale family farmers are often considered to be applying agroecological farming approaches, and are currently estimated to produce food nourishing 50–70% of the global population, and supply up to 80% of the food in Sub-saharan Africa and Asia . With regard to human livelihood and scale related to agroecological systems, Walter Goldschmidt found that rural communities with more, smaller farms saw higher human well being than those with fewer, larger farms in settings of North-American farming in the middle of last century. This has been questioned by modernist scholars, but has also seen numerous studies supporting its conclusions over time, and it certainly has never been strongly refuted . As the example above on research in New York’s Chinatown produce economy showed, the diversity of production was found directly related to the proximity of supply and lower cost of healthy food. Another argument for how the resilience of an agroecosystem includes environmental elements as well as social and institutional elements is raised by Gonzales De Molina who refers to Holling, Berkes, and Folke and Holt-Giménez : “The resilience of an agroecosystem does not depend solely on its productive arrangements.