Innovations for Sustainable Food Systems: Focusing on Agroecology and Participatory Guarantee Systems

Abstract

While organic agriculture has created a set of institutions that allow producers to know which practices provide “organic” quality and allow consumers to recognize it via an on-package label, the landscape of agroecological products is quite fluid and diverse. Often, products are traded directly between producers and consumers and quality is conveyed verbally. However, there has been a general increase in the use of private labels to claim that products are agroecological or “more than organic”. This article explores these recent innovations by asking: How does agroecology become a product quality claim in innovative forms of quality control? To answer this question, data on labels claiming to be “agroecological” and related assurance systems were gathered through internet research, market monitoring and semi-structured interviews in the European Union. In this article we explore the range of claims, and control networks, used to characterize the so-called “agroecological” labels and confront them with FAO’s 10 principles of agroecology. This 27-country comparison offers interesting insights into the overlaps and boundaries between agroecology and organic agriculture in terms of the markets that are created.