Editorial: Agroforestry, Food Sovereignty, and Value Chains for Sustainable Food Systems

Summary

All over the planet, peasants, farmers, and different organizations and social actors are actively working against biodiversity loss, socioeconomic crises, and other aspects causing environmental unsustainability associated with the expansion of monoculture and industrial agriculture (Altieri, 1992; Foley et al., 2011). In this sense, diversified food systems are essential for the sustainability of production systems (Altieri et al., 2011). As diversified systems, agroforests have an enormous potential to improve agrarian sustainability, guarantee food security, and provide non-food production, while preserving and recovering a wide range of ecosystem functions (climate maintenance, carbon sinks, etc.) (Niether et al., 2020). This way, agroforestry can be linked to concepts such as organic agriculture, healthy nutrition, and diversified and healthy food. However, with the advance of agrifood globalization, the organization of production/consumption patterns on a global scale, and the expansion of the corporative food regime, sustainability problems can no longer be addressed only from a farm-based approach (O’Rourke, 2014).