Scenarios for an agroecological transition of smallholder family farmers: a case study in Guadeloupe

Abstract

In Guadeloupe, a French overseas region, civil society is calling for an agroecological transition (AET) to obtain access to healthy agricultural products following a major ecological scandal caused by a persistent pesticide that contaminated water and agricultural soils. To support such a transition, we tested a five-step methodological framework designed to enable farmers to describe and explore scenarios in farming systems, socio-technical systems, and social-ecological systems. This is one of the first operational methodological tools to build scenarios and action plans for an AET taking into account simultaneous changes in these three systems. We first surveyed 63 farmers and positioned their farming systems along an AET gradient using the Efficiency-Substitution-Redesign framework. In the second step, a sub-sample of 18 farmers, who represented diverse farming system types, individually defined AET scenarios at the level of their own farms. We then applied a farm simulation model to evaluate the technical and economic performance of each scenario. The third step involved analyzing the types of social networks used by 45 farmers to share information and promote technical, commercial, and social exchanges to implement agroecological practices in their territory. In the fourth step, we worked with a group of 15 farmers and 10 researchers in a participatory workshop to characterize the natural resources, their associated services and disservices, and the actors involved. In the last step, the farmers and researchers defined an action plan for the AET in their territory. Our results suggest that AET is understood by farmers to be a gradual and multiscale process involving the co-creation of knowledge, technical solutions, and organizational changes. An initial outcome of the process tested was a shift in the stance of researchers. Their focus shifted from experiments conducted on-station toward experiments managed by farmers to co-produce knowledge on the viability of agroecological practices under their own specific conditions, triggering discussions between stakeholders (such as advisers, policy makers, smallholders, and larger farmers) in the territory.