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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
