Agroecology
Can agroforestry chocolate help save the world’s most endangered rainforest?
In Ecuador’s Jama-Coaque Reserve (JCR), nearly every surface is encased with life: moss, ferns, epiphytes and orchids — a color wheel of green in three dimensions. Amid the green, chestnut-headed oropendola nests hang like woven teardrops from towering trees, troops of howler monkeys shout their boundaries and hummingbirds dive-bomb from branch to blossom. JCR protects […]
DRC food sovereignty summit yields support for agroecology, local land rights
“The last 20 years have taken their toll on our forests, with increased deforestation and the sale of our land by government decision-makers cutting us off from our main means of subsistence,” said Polydor Musafiri, an Indigenous Murega from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Musafiri’s community’s struggle for subsistence illustrates challenges that he and […]
How manure blew up the Netherlands
This is the first story in a three-part Mongabay miniseries on the Dutch nitrogen crisis and farmer protests of 2022: How the Dutch food revolution became an ecological time bomb. Read Part Two and Part Three. OTTERLO, Netherlands — On a bright afternoon in May, Annemieke Visser-Winterink trudged through the Dutch underbrush, dead leaves crackling under […]
Farmers in Brazil’s Cerrado cotton on to the benefits of agroecology
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 46 cotton-farming families in Brazil’s Minas Gerais began practicing agroecology, a sustainable farming approach that works with nature.