Oldal 200 [200]
198 DOROTTYA MENDLY — MELINDA MIHÁLY
participating in these forums to criticize the FAO’s food security narrative
(Carlile et al. 2021).
According to the food security narrative, the main objective of the food industry
is to satisfy the needs of each country irrespective of where, how and by whom
food is produced (Balazs 2020; Martinez-Torres — Rosset 2014). Under this
narrative, efficiency, productivity, an economy of scale, the liberalization of trade,
and free markets are necessary for “feeding the world” and for achieving food
security (Borlaug 2007). In contrast, the narrative of food sovereignty represented
by small-scale farmers and members of the agricultural movement stresses the
importance of ecologically sustainable and socially just, locally organized food
production and consumption (Balazs 2020; Martinez-Torres — Rosset 2014).
With the expansion of the movement, the concept of food sovereignty also
became more comprehensive and extended. The food sovereignty definition
accepted at the International Forum of La Via Campesina in Nyéléni, Mali in
2007 is so-far the broadest in its scope. The Nyéléni declaration claims that people
have the right to produce healthy food with ecologically sound and sustainable
methods and to define their own food and agricultural systems (Nyéléni 2007).
This movement promotes a food system in which small-scale family farms and
peasants grow food with agroecological methods for local consumption (Carlile
et al. 2021). Food sovereignty is thus the broader framework in which agroecology
and permaculture can be interpreted.
Agroecology
Agroecology is simultaneously (1) a social movement, (2) a set of practices seeking
an alternative to industrial agriculture, and (3) a field of scholarship. Since the
1970s, agroecologists have been working on making agriculture more sustainable,
focusing their research on smallholders’ pragmatic agroecological knowledge (Altieri
— Nicholls 2017).
This concept first appeared in the late 1920s and originally meant the application
of ecological methods in agronomy (Wezel et al. 2009). When the unexpected health
and ecological consequences of the Green Revolution became visible in the 1970s, the
focus of agroecology was extended to the social sciences (anthropology, ethno-ecology,
rural sociology, development studies, and ecological economics) (Altieri — Nicholls
2017). It was applied at first on the scale of plots of land and fields, then that of farms
and later on that of the entire agro-ecosystem. Now, having left concrete spatial scales
behind, it studies the entire food system across all scales (Wezel et al. 2009: 513). The
interpretation of agroecology as a holistic, interdisciplinary field of scholarship is not
widespread in Hungary (Balazs — Balogh — Réthy 2021). Its scope includes only the
interactions within the agro-ecosystems without integrating social or cultural
perspectives such as employment or food security (see e.g. Wezel et al. 2009).
In the 1980s and 90s, several farmers’ organizations, researchers and civil bodies
popularizing agroecology joined forces against neoliberalism and began combining
agroecology with national and global political campaigns wishing to change policies
of trade and agriculture (Carlile - Garnett 2021). In Hungary, the National Society
of Conservationists, the Hungarian member of the international organization
Friends of the Earth (Magyar Természetvédők Szövetsége és Föld Barátai Európa