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Enabling extension and advisory services to promote agroecology

Year of publication 2022

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 4p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) The global impacts of the climate crisis are becoming ever clearer, and natural resources and ecosystems are being depleted. Despite some progress, hunger and poverty persist, and inequalities are deepening. The world is realizing that unsustainable high external inputs and resource-intensive industrialized systems pose a real danger of biodiversity loss, increased greenhouse gas emissions, shortages of healthy food, and the impoverishment of dispossessed peasants around the world. There is global consensus on the urgent need for a transition to agri-food systems that ensure food and nutrition security, social and economic equity, and sustain the ecosystem on which all these elements depend. Agroecology provides a crucial pathway towards this objective. Making extension and advisory services (EAS) demand-driven is not an end in itself but a means to improving their relevance and impact.

Language English

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    Advances in agribusiness imply social, environmental, and economic impacts on the governance of rural spaces through alteration of large-scale land use. The forestry companies have as a strategy the increased productivity through the large-scale monoculture of exotic species. This strategy implies impacts on the landscape that require agreements on the expansion limits of their activities and not only the remediation of their impacts but, mostly, that can promote positive externalities to sustainable rural development. In the South and Extreme South regions of Bahia, the production per cubic meter of wood for the pulp and paper industry increased by more than 1,300% between the 1990s and 2000s. The increase in the total and per capita GDP of the municipalities after the implantation and expansion of forestry is remarkable. However, social development issues have not accompanied this economic growth. It should be highlighted that, for example, the values of the Human Development Index (HDI) of the region, which measures education, longevity, and income is below than the state and the national average, which indicates that the investments and profits generated with forestry were not enough to benefit the region’s population, in view of the generated expectations. In this scenario, social movements who fight for land organized a series of local occupations, which ended up involving peasants, forestry companies, and the government – counting with mediation and support from the University of São Paulo –, and that is when the Agroecological Settlements Project was born. In view of this context, the article discusses the role of University Extension Programs in promoting sustainable territories with the development of researches, facilitation of processes, improvement of rural life quality, and agroecological, agroforestry technical and scientific guidance. Keywords: Agroecology; Agrarian reform; University extension; Land conflict management; MST. ID: 3623848
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