Transformational Agroecology: The Making and Unmaking of Zero Budget Natural Farming in India

Abstract

Agroecology is increasingly seen to have the potential to transform agriculture towards sustainability and social justice. Recent studies have highlighted different characteristics and principles of such transformative agroecology. Scholars have also shown that agroecology practices can be scaled up to achieve broader transformation. However, the process of systematising approaches to transformative agroecology often creates a static vision of transformation, which could be achieved once and for all. The static view creates illusionary binaries of goods and bads of agroecology that separate the ideological scholarly view from everyday, contested and messy practices. In this article, we discuss the case of Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) in India to argue that transformational agroecology is made and unmade repeatedly at different sites, networks and practices it gets entangled in. As a result, rather than thinking of transformative agroecology as a goal or target to be achieved, it is more useful to see it as an everyday struggle requiring unwavering scrutiny with a commitment to care for the marginal concerns.