What could an agroecological future look like, if agroecology went to scale?

What would be the implications - on economic growth, and social inequalities? Or on employment? And what would landscapes look like?

The world’s largest agroecological transition has been under way since 2016 in Andhra Pradesh, a state in southern India with 53 million inhabitants. Encouraged by the state government, almost a million micro-farmers – primarily women –  are reported to have adopted an advanced form of agroecology known as “community-managed natural farming” (Dorin 2022, Dorin et al. 2024) including intensive diversification of crops, soil cover, use of natural biostimulants produced on site, and agroforestry.

The stated goal is to support the transition to agroecology of all 6 million agricultural households in the state. But what would the future of Andhra Pradesh look like, if this was to materialize?

Foresight processes offer structured and data-intensive methodologies to envision scenarios for the future. But many times, such exercises are conducted by academics (mostly economists), based on mainstream economic models that do not include agroecology and provide rather unimaginative pictures.

Yet, how can decision makers and stakeholders envisage transformative policies, if they are not presented with new options?

If we want futures other than those generated by current data and models, we need to think outside the box and look not just at scientific knowledge, but at other types of knowledge and aspirations.

From 2019, to accompany decision making by the local government, an unprecedented participatory foresight initiative took place in India called AgroEco2050. CIRAD, FAO and the Government of Andhra Pradesh dusted off foresight approaches, and made it broadly collaborative. The resulting collective intelligence method serves to assess future scenarios, and support the decisions to be made now.

Using a rigorous, transparent and multipartite approach, experts from different walks of agricultural life (academics from multiple disciplines, decision-makers and administrators, farmer and NGO representatives and more) have debated, quantified and compared the possible macroeconomic impacts of two contrasting scenarios for Andhra Pradesh in 2050: on the one hand, the full adoption of natural farming (100% agroecological sociotechnical regime), and on the other, an intensification of industrial food and agriculture, as per the Green Revolution model currently dominant in India and elsewhere (100% industrial sociotechnical regime).

We envisaged the performance of the two models on various aspects - such as land use, food production, employment, economic growth, and the income gap between farmers and other workers.

Our exercise relied on a new, interactive version of the Agribiom model (Dorin et Joly 2020) to support quantification by participants, and a series of workshops in India between 2020 and 2022. The process here holds as much value as the end report: the aim of such exercises is to help societies and their governments to collectively better understand, choose and configure the world in which they would like to live and work. The tool acts like a “learning machine” by hybridizing scientific knowledge with other knowledge, such as that of policymakers or farmers (Dorin et Joly 2020).

What did we find?

Provided that appropriate public policies are introduced, the natural farming scenario proved to have many advantages that had not previously been revealed in the available academic literature on agroecology.

By 2050, compared to the industrial intensification scenario, the agroecological scenario would: 

• Increase food production per inhabitant, in terms of both quantity (+1000 kcal/day) and nutritive and health value;
• Regenerate vast swathes of rainfed land left fallow by industrial farming (+2.8 million hectares) and enable to cultivate them year-round, thanks to high crop diversification, living soils and the microclimates thus created or recreated;
• Cut overall unemployment rates substantially (from 30% to 7%) thanks to jobs in agroecology (+5 million farmers);
• Increase income per farmer, primarily through significant savings on industrial inputs (lab-seeds, irrigation, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, fuel, machinery and robots) and costs of indebtment and insurance;
• Stall agrarian crises by significantly shrinking the average income gap between non-farmers and farmers (from 47% in industrial agriculture to 22% in AE);
• Boost the overall rate of growth of the economy and incomes (from +6% to +6.5%/year between 2020 and 2050).

The agroecological scenario would be even more advantageous if the billions of dollars currently spent on supporting industrial food and farming in India (fertilizer subsidies, electricity subsidies for irrigation, etc.) were replaced by some sort of payments for environmental services (PES). These could be paid to each agricultural worker (and not per hectare), according to their degree of adoption of farming practices known to be jointly beneficial on various environmental fronts (soils, water, climate, biodiversity, pollution).

Those payments would remunerate some local and global services that humanity now desperately needs, and which could be efficiently provided  by hundreds of millions of micro-agroecological farmers in the Global South who, unlike farmers in the global North in the previous century, are hindered to increase their incomes through expansion and robotization of their agricultural area (Dorin et al. 2013; Dorin, 2017). Services provided by agroecological farmers include climate change mitigation (by means of soil carbon storage), water savings and filtration, resilience to climate and economic shocks (thanks to agro-biodiversity), reduced environmental and also human health costs (under-nutrition, overweight, diabetes, cancer).

How are these findings helping?

The method and results of the AgroEco2050 retro-foresight exercise in Andhra Pradesh received a warm reception in October 2023 from the public authorities in Andhra Pradesh (state government Secretariat), and were discussed in high instances in New Delhi (Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Prime Minister’s think tank NITI Aayog). They also prompted the rollout in 2022-23 of a similar retro-prospective exercise in Senegal (AgroEco2050-Senegal), to be co-published in early 2025 by CIRAD, FAO and ISRA-BAME. These exercises helped trigger cooperation between India and Africa on agroecology, with an initial field trip to Andhra Pradesh (October 2023) by delegations from seven African countries (Benin, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, Tunisia and Zambia) organized by GIZ. Thanks to the innovations by thousands of male and female grassroots farmers in Andhra Pradesh, natural farming is gaining recognition among institutions in India and being rolled out in the agricultural curricula of a growing number of universities.

What’s next?
To fuel similar thoughts and debates elsewhere in India and across the world, the study also includes a unique set of statistical estimates covering more than half a century (from the 1960s to 2020), on three geographical scales (world, India and Andhra Pradesh), illustrating the many interconnected facets of agrifood systems and their structural transformations.

With support from the GIZ, FAO and CIRAD are now publishing a global Guidance document for decision makers and practitioners on Foresight for the transformation of agrifood systems through agroecology (FAO and CIRAD, 2025, in print), packed with practical recommendations on how foresight scenarios at various scales can better include agroecology.

The AgroEco2050 participatory foresight exercises could encourage international organizations such as the IPCC, IPBES and the World Bank to include large-scale micro-agroecology visions and practices in global models and scenarios, to make this alternative sociotechnical regime both more visible… and more likely!

Participatory foresight processes offer powerful spaces and structured methods for much needed democratic debates among agrifood system actors on sustainable agrifood systems transitions. They provide tools to build strategic thinking for decision-making by communities and policymakers, and to open up possible imaginaries with agroecology – so that actors are emboldened to build the change they want to see, today.

As Dennis Gabor, 1971 Nobel prize for physics, wrote in his 1963 book Inventing the Future: “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”

Brief “Re-thinking food systems in Andhra Pradesh, India”  https://openknowledge.fao.org/handle/20.500.14283/cd1609en

Full book “Agro-industry versus agroecology? Two macroeconomic scenarios for 2050 in Andhra Pradesh, India”https://doi.org/10.4060/cd2175en