Agroecology: Relocalizing Agriculture Accordingly to Places

The local agro-food systems (LAS), defined as innovative systems, alternative to the current global food model, are based on design, organization, management, and optimization of the complex relationships among sectors (agricultural production, transformation, distribution, and consumption) in a region. As relocalized innovative, sustainable agro-food systems aiming at optimizing local resources, rehabilitating landscapes, and requalifying labor, they represent an efficient leverage for real place-based innovative policies. This chapter describes the innovation phases, from the reductionism of the productivism of the green revolution to the holistic, system-level, place-based, sustainable, integrated approach of agroecology. A real relocalization requires to recognize that the current unsustainable paradigm of industrial agriculture must be completely overcome, and agroecology cannot be another tool to be co-opted by the industrial agriculture and industrial food system model but the future alternative. This future alternative requires to develop a new bioregionalism, in terms of proposing thought and practices evolving for reconnecting human activities to the places along a sustainable path. The chapter aims at giving food for thought, insights, and information on the main reasons of the crises of the industrial agro-food model and the chances of the sustainability paradigm requiring relocalizing and resocializing farming and agro-food systems both in geographical/economic sense and for scientific paradigm.