Challenges to Sustainable Farming in Highland Ecuador

Event Start Date: April 25, 2024 12:30 PM
Event End Date: April 25, 2024 2:00 PM

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Challenges to Sustainable Farming in Highland Ecuador
Thursday, April 25 | 12:30 pm
Grinter 376

Speaker: Dr. Barry Lyons, Wayne University

The contemporary ecological crisis is in part a crisis of agriculture and food systems, a crisis that plays out locally in variable ways. Like small farmers in much of the world, mestizo landowners and sharecroppers in San Vicente, Ecuador face multiple challenges in making a living. These include low prices for their crops, declining agricultural fertility, new crop diseases, dependence on expensive agrochemicals, and disruptions to normal weather patterns associated with climate change. This presentation focuses on the local-level social and agroecological dimensions of these challenges, as observed over four decades and explored recently in a virtual ethnographic field school based in the village. A comparison with a nearby economically and ecologically more successful community highlights the importance of local social structures and ecologies.