Championing Food Sovereignty: Agroecology and Rural Resilience with Dr. Peter Rosset

Andy

Today, we're joined by Dr Peter Rosset, an agroecologist and activist based in Central America. Peter holds a number of titles, as a Global Alternatives Associate at CENSA, the Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico. He's also the co-coordinator of the Land Research Action Network. He's a visiting research scientist at the University of Michigan, a faculty member at ECOSUR Advanced Studies and Institute in Chiapas, Mexico, and CAPES visiting professor in the Geography Department of the Universidade Federal de Cheira, the UFC, in Brazil.

Having spent the past three decades fighting for indigenous sovereignty and specifically food sovereignty, we jump into the role La Via Campesina and agroecology play in our fight against global capital and climate change. This is a really inspiring discussion and one that I think helps us frame up the recent episode on agroecology and what that looks like in practice. I highly highly recommend Peter's book and much of his writing, which highlights what ground-up, people-centered food systems can look like and gives us some tools for a way forward. Listen in and let us know what you think.

Peter, thanks so much for coming on. So you're involved in a number of different things. The big one, I think, that folks listening are probably most familiar with is La Via Campesina. Now, for folks that are unfamiliar, could you give us like a really quick rundown on the organization?

Dr. Peter Rosset

Yeah, la Via Campesina is a global social movement that's made up of mostly national organizations of family farmers, peasants, farm workers, indigenous people, rural women, rural youth and other people who live in rural areas in more than 80 countries in the world. And it's very big because those organizations, when taken together, more than 200 million rural families around the world. That means that Via Campesina, after the big religions like Christianity, islam, hinduism, buddhism La Via Campesina is like the next largest movement of human beings on planet Earth and it's people struggling together to defend our relationship with nature, to defend life in rural areas, to defend healthy food, to defend access to land for the rural poor and a number of other issues that all sort of fit together.

Andy

It's surreal how big it is, because it's so ubiquitous in so much of the world, but not here in the United States, and although I will say that in the United States, there are members of La Via Campesina.

Dr. Peter Rosset

There are several members. One of them is the National Family Farm Coalition, which is a coalition of more than 30 local and regional organizations around the country, the Rural Coalition, which is also national, with many local organizations, and the Florida Farm Workers Union. So there actually is a presence of La Via Campesina. It sort of, I think, suffers. Maybe they all collectively suffer from some kind of a media blackout or media ignoring them, which is one of the reasons it's great that this program and this podcast is going to cover some of these issues. Yeah, thank you.

Andy

When it comes to La Via Campesina, one of the frameworks of the movement is in agroecology and that's very specific because of the politics of agroecology, if you want to just give a really quick again rundown on that.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Well, I you know there's different views of agroecology and sort of the cold Western science view.

It's the science of how agricultural systems work, but it's been taken up by people's movements around the world and for people's movements, what agroecology really means is, instead of farming against nature and against people, the way that industrial agriculture and agribusiness farms in huge areas, mechanized, not a tree in sight, minimum wage with no benefits and no job security, so that's destroying the soil, destroying biodiversity, so that would be agriculture against nature.

Agroecology would be farming with nature, using the ecosystem, using diversity, mixing different crops together in the same field, mixing crops and trees and livestock, and sustainable ways where nutrients are recycled, and with a heavy dose of social justice politics as well, because it's a way for human beings to live well not to be rich, but to live well with each other and also with nature and a way to provide a better livelihood for people in rural areas. So, aside from the sort of the narrow Western science concept, agroecology is more like a social movement, or a social movement that overlaps with many other social movements, like the way it overlaps with La Via Campesina and the way La Via Campesina has taken it up.

Andy

Yeah, you mentioned this, the hard science component. I think of, like the Odum brothers, as being kind of that side of the agroecology movement.

We could talk about how that's kind of manifested over the last 50 years into something very different. I heard you talk on this in a discussion about agroecology and you described it in this way and I'm going to take a quote from you and you said "agroecology is a mass collective action and resistance to agribusiness and trying to transform rural territories from agribusiness territories into the family farming and peasant territories. And that's the end of the quote. How do you see like agroecology do this successfully in places like the United States? And then I guess, if you feel comfortable, maybe how that, what agroecology offers versus, say, organic or permaculture or something like that.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Well, I think we could ask why has agroecology and even organic farming taken off much more in countries in the global south than it has, for example, in the United States and Europe? And I think on the one side there are technical explanations, on the other side there are technical explanations and the other side there are political explanations. On the technical side, the sort of vision of organic production that dominates in the global north is a vision that's not all that different from an agribusiness, industrial agriculture, monoculture, based on purchased inputs like chemical fertilizer and pesticide and machinery and irrigation equipment. What that kind of business-oriented organic production?

The only thing that it changes in that is it takes out the chemical inputs and puts in organic biological inputs, and that's actually a very weak position for challenging dominant agribusiness, because those alternative biological inputs tend to be more expensive and less potent than the chemicals that they are placing, and so therefore, consumers end up having to pay more for organic because it's produced in the same way as industrial, conventional agriculture, with less potent and more expensive inputs, and somebody's got to pay for that and it ends up being the consumer, and that means that it pretty much goes to an elite customer base, people with high purchasing power, upper middle class, who can afford that kind of an organic diet.

Because on the technical side there's no challenge to the monoculture structure of industrial agriculture and a monoculture the way agribusiness produces, because of their need to mechanize huge areas, is incredibly unproductive per unit of area because you only have one thing being produced on each hectare only soybeans or only corn or only apple trees. And while you may have a high yield of corn or a high yield of soybeans, if you compare that to a peasant farm on the same hectare, there's no peasant in the world who would only be producing one crop.

They would have maybe nine to 15 different annual crops, 10 or 11 different tree crops, three or four different kinds of large and small livestock, perhaps a fish pond They'd be recycling. Nutrients like the waste product from the animals will be fertilizer for the crop. The part of the crop that's not for human consumption will be composted, returned to the soil as fertilizer or fed to the animals.

And so in fact, we've studied how productive per hectare, in terms of the productivity of all the products, is a small peasant plot compared to the same unit of area of a large agribusiness plot, and it turns out that, contrary to all of the myths that we get in dominant media and political discourse, the peasant agriculture would be way more productive per hectare than the industrial monoculture and unfortunately organic farming in the north pretty much leaves that intact.

Those of us who work in agroecology will say it's not even agroecologically organic production, because agroecology is more like let's take the different parts of the system and integrate them together so that they have a catalytic effect. As I mentioned, you can use the waste of animals as fertilizer for the crop. You can use crop leftovers as compost for fertilizing the soil or as feed for the animals. Industrial livestock depends on millions of hectares of corn and soybeans being grown somewhere else in the world and shipped to where the livestock are. Livestock production on family farms or peasant farms can produce all of the feed for the livestock on the same hectare where the livestock is.

So on the technical side, real agroecological farming can be much more productive and have much lower cost because you're not buying any inputs. You're using synergisms within the different systems, companion planting, so that one plant repels the pests of the other instead of buying a chemical or biological or organic pesticide, so it can have higher productivity and lower production costs. That means in theory it could actually get to the consumer cheaper than the unhealthy food that comes from agribusiness and industrial agriculture.

Yet on the technical side, we almost don't see that approach in countries in the north like the United States and Europe. And then on the political side, the whole social justice part of agroecology has not been really addressed that much in countries like the United States. So you'll find, for example, organic farmers, small scale agribusiness, hiring migrant farm workers at below minimum wage and no benefits, no health care, no housing, and so that would be completely inconceivable in the more political versions of agroecology that we see in the global south. So I feel like a lot of work has to be done to bring together a mixture of both the political and the social as well as the technical aspect of agroecology in order to give a little bit more force to the alternatives in the global north.

Of course it's not easy because there's so much lock-in for even family farmers or small farmers, just in terms of, for example, bank loans. If you had loans in the past, in order to not have the bank call in your debt and confiscate your house and your land, you have to continue to produce with more loans, and every year for your loans. You have to give the bank a business plan, and they wanna see monoculture production. And what chemicals are you gonna buy and what tractor are you gonna upgrade to in order to approve the continuation of your loans? Otherwise they'll call it all in and you're out of business. So there has to be a broad-based political struggle against all of those forms of lock-in.

Andy

You made a bunch of really good points and I think there's one thing that kind of makes the United States uniquely challenged by like engaging with agroecology in a way that you may not see so much in the South and or global South at least, is the relationship between the land and its people, right. So obviously both Americas have a history of colonialism, but the United States, because of genocide, the relationship between a majority of the population is very different, I think, than where you are, which is right now Brazil.

But you were in Mexico for a while as well and I'm curious about what your thoughts of what a land-based movement might have to look like here, where we don't maybe have that ancestral tech-informed knowledge that shapes a lot of those relationships.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Well, as you've mentioned colonialism and, I think, the fact that North America is more of what's called settler colonialism and you mentioned the word genocide it was based on stealing all of the land from indigenous people and killing them, and so that means that, as you were insinuating which is completely correct that broke any kind of what do you call it transmission of ancestral knowledge the current generations of farmers of how the grandparents or great-grandparents farmed before all this stuff was available, which is this is the kind of knowledge that's readily available in countries like Mexico, where that ancestrality is still there.

Of course it is with the, with the Native American Indigenous peoples movement in the United States, and we actually do see some very good examples of smaller scale agroecology amongst the Native American original American movement and the small territories that are left to them.

But this whole issue also of who does the land really belong to, I think casts a very dark shadow over agriculture and farming in the United States.

And you know, I have to say to our listeners that I haven't lived in the United States for about 30 or 40 years, so I feel a little bit detached from it. Of course, obviously, I was born there and grew up in the United States, but I feel I have more experience now in countries where, of course, as you say, we're also colonized, we're also conquered, also had genocide, but not as complete a genocide and not as complete a land robbing or land stealing as in the US. So, for example, Mexico, which is my home base, about 50% of the land is actually in the hands of mostly indigenous farmers and we certainly couldn't say that in the United States and here in Brazil, where I'm right now, it has a very unequal land distribution, like the US, but a very powerful movement of people who lost their land, doing land occupations to get their land back the Landless Workers Movement, or MST, which actually has now got back an area larger than the country of Italy of landless farmers who've recovered their land through land occupations and are mostly practicing agroecology on it.

Andy

That's awesome. So how did you end up in South America or Central America in the first place?

Dr. Peter Rosset

You know, I would say I've come from the Vietnam War and the Black Power Movement generation in the United States. So when I was in middle school we alternated between going to anti-war moratoriums and Black Panther rallies. So I grew up in a very politicized way. That meant that I always felt a strong appeal from third world revolutionaries. I remember in junior high and high school having a poster of Che Guevara in my bedroom. So I had this strong affinity, let's say, for Latin American struggles. And so at a certain point in my life I was active in solidarity with Latin American movements.

And the opportunity came when there was a people's revolution in the country of Nicaragua in 1979. And they asked for international technical personnel to come and help the new Ministry of Agriculture, because many of their agronomists and scientists had been reactionaries who fled when the dictatorship was overthrown and they needed support from foreign technical people while they trained up their own new generation of people, of people. And so that started a long voyage of my life where I have occasionally lived back in the United States, but mostly have lived in different countries in Latin America since then.

Andy

Latin America has been a school for me, Just living and accompanying social movements, peasant movements, indigenous people's movements. In Latin America. I've learned far more than I ever learned in the university and graduate school in the United States.

Yeah, it does offer some really good insights. And again I'm going to bring back to that question I had a minute ago about given the context of the United States, do you have any thoughts about how we could push? Like, as a white male, cis white male guy, what do I do if I don't have a podcast like this to try to you know, reinforce, live my beliefs about, like what an ethical agricultural system looks like? What should I be doing?

Dr. Peter Rosset

You know that's a difficult question, or maybe that's why I don't live in the United.

States, so I don't have to face it on a daily basis. But I think there are some principles, but all of those principles are confused by politics in the United States, I have to say. So. You know, one principle would be to try to buy food locally from local farmers, but the whole politics of rural America is very unfortunate. Equally to blame for that historically, because both parties have essentially ignored the reality of rural life and allowed repeated farm crises due to bad policies to cause the life to become incredibly precarious for everybody who lives in rural America, whether they're Latin American or Haitian farm workers, whether they're indigenous people pushed onto a reservation, or whether they're white family farmers in debt up to their ears or over their heads with with banks and stuck in the agribusiness model that's bleeding them dry and and really no governments have have done anything, and I'm not quite sure why.

Somehow the Democrats have got the blame for that in the, in the, in the mind of a lot of white people in rural America. But I'm not quite sure why. Somehow the Democrats have got the blame for that in the, in the, in the mind of a lot of white people in rural America. But I think that's unfortunate because I think that they're, that their gripe are legitimate and there has been a tremendous abandonment and allow agribusiness and banks to run roughshod over people of all colors, all ethnicities, all historical backgrounds and make them all rightfully very mad. But of course it seems like the far right has been better at exploiting that anger and that means that it's more complicated. If you want to be ethical but you don't want to support neo-Nazis, you want to support indigenous people, latinos, but Latinos don't have land, they're working as farm workers for agribusiness. It's all very complicated.

I always try to follow. You know, if the farm workers have a strike or a boycott, I try to support that. If indigenous people are demanding something on a land claim or blocking a pipeline, I try to support that. And if family farmers are demanding a different price parity policy for family farm agriculture, I support that. I try to take my cues from people's movements and I do try to buy locally to the extent that one's pocketbook can support that. And of course that goes back to the problem that I mentioned before, that unfortunately the form of organic that's taken hold so far in the North means that it's basically a product for elite consumption. It doesn't have to be. Agroecology shows that it could be more affordable than even then supermarket food, but it hasn't worked out that way yet. So there's a big struggle still ahead for people in the US.

Andy

Absolutely I wish. Unfortunately, you don't have a silver bullet, which would be really nice.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Yeah, those don't exist, unfortunately.

Andy

I also know you've been doing this a long time. You were, like you said, you're in Brazil. You spent some time in Zapatista territory and I'm curious about that time that you've spent and kind of how you've seen agroecology kind of evolve as I guess the novelty of revolution wore off and you know life just continues on right how you've seen that evolve, develop and kind of how that's moving, going into the future.

Dr. Peter Rosset

You know, I see, agroecology itself began completely alternative and so, whether whether we're talking about the northern country variants, whether we call it organic or permaculture or whatever, whether we talk about the traditional farming practices of peasants and indigenous people in the in the, for the first decades it was completely ignored by the agriculture establishment. Whether we're talking about ag schools or whether we're talking about companies or whether we're talking about government policy completely ignored as it began to gain strength. Then they began to ridicule it, as this is just kind of whacked out stuff by crazy folks on the fringe. But as the movement grew and as it actually in many countries produced a very significant amount of food and very healthy food and more and more people get involved.

Finally, the establishment, and the broadest sense of the establishment, of institutionality, has had to recognize agroecology. But now it's trying to co-opt agroecology as a sort of underpinning for green agribusiness or greenwashing of agribusiness. So agribusiness will still be based on large-scale land grabbing from family farmers and peasants, will still be monoculture, will still support giant chemical companies like like Bayer, monsanto, who will now produce biological org or get organic inputs, will still support John Deere tractors and and combines and will still be marketed through global supermarket chains, except it'll be organic. So that's the way this the green discourse in general has been appropriated.

Whether we're talking about renewable energy, we can see the same thing. It's a sort of a broad, broad co-optation of all of the green discourse by capitalism in general, but specifically in agriculture. We now have to fight for our view of agroecology, because now suddenly it's been discovered by the capitalist establishment and they're trying to now claim that it's theirs. And this is why it's fine to buy your organic food in the organic aisle in walmart and you should don't need to bother to go to a local farmer's market in order to in order to buy your, your organic food if if you're going to buy organic, and so we now are are facing a completely different situation.

We used to be fighting for legitimacy to be taken seriously, and now we're being fought to not have the whole thing stolen out from under us, the same way that the land was stolen out from under from so many small farmers around the world.

Andy

Yeah, it was just a few years ago that there was a big consortium in Africa against I believe it was the FAO about using agroecology but then stripping it of all its political background.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Right, and so that's the tendency is to take just some of the technical components of agroecology and completely ignore the politics, and that be a way to legitimize the business as usual model.

Andy

Yeah, You've been working in these regions. I'm curious about how you see the knowledge and the experiences, the lived experiences, of developing these systems and applying them places where they're at early stages of agroecology, like Rojava, where there's a very specific interest in agroecology but applying it seems to be a struggle because of the economic conditions and, in many cases, lack of resources to restore indigenous plants, the struggles of bringing back traditional foodways and all of the components of late stage capitalism being boiled down into, functionally, an area that's surrounded by a war zone. I'm interested, as somebody who's been doing this for a long time, what your thoughts are if there should be more integration between these communities, or you know anything like that.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Well, I think that that we have to see it as not just changing technical practices but as political struggle, and political struggle requires building social movements ranging from the very local to the regional, to the national, to the global and of course La Via Campesina is all about that global part.

But so many of the barriers to the growth of these processes of agroecology, of local farming, of empowering local people, so many of the barriers are more in the policy and political and economic structure sphere that we're only going to achieve real change or upscaling of these alternatives through political struggle. We have to have both. We have to have people innovating and developing alternatives at the local level and, to the extent that they can build spaces of relative autonomy you, for example, mentioned the Zapatistas in Mexico, who are famous for their autonomous territories.

That helps model the alternative society and practices that we would like to see, even on a more local scale, but that that should be synergistic with a larger political struggle that can also point to it and say look, we have examples that this works and that's why we're struggling to make these larger changes at the at the political level. So it has to be grouped together in in in larger social movements and political mobilization, and I don't see anything not centered around political mobilization that really offers any hope for changing these kind of structural elements.

Andy

Yeah, and I know you were in Cuba a few years ago and you got to see the Organopanicos. Of course, I'm never going to be able to pronounce that right, because I'm recording. Organopanicos. Yes, and you were able to see it and kind of, how did that reflect agroecology and the historical context of Cuba? And like, how did it compare to what you've experienced so far, since Cuba has been so segregated from much of the world?

Dr. Peter Rosset

Yeah, I mean the problem that Cuba faces is the US embargo, as it's called in the US, and the US blockade, as the rest of the world calls it, which is more than half a century where the US has assured that Cuba can't have any trade partners, especially after the collapse of the former socialist bloc in Europe, especially after the collapse of the former socialist bloc in Europe. And that means that Cuba long time ago had an industrial agriculture like most of the world, with tractors and large scale monoculture and imported fertilizer and pesticides. But when the US started blockading their ability to have any international trade, they would either would have had to starve to death or figure out how to produce enough food on their own without importing anything from multinationals or from no longer existing socialist countries.

So they have two very interesting lessons that, at least that I've learned from the Cuban experience. One is in the cities, with urban agriculture, and that's what you mentioned are the organoponicos are organic plots within the city and people who live in theurban area and are produced without any chemicals and generate employment and income for a lot of underemployed urban people, and all produced organically. And I think nobody's going to replicate the conditions of Cuba having a socialist revolution and being blockaded.

But it does at least on the side of showing what's possible, that you know, if we had a different policy environment, a different politics, we could have much more self-sufficient production of food and it could be much healthier. And we certainly haven't resolved the problem of underemployment or poor jobs in urban areas in the US and there's certainly a lot of abandoned land in the inner city. So it's not like it couldn't be done, but the conditions are not favorable to it. But Cuba at least shows us that it can be done.

And then in the rural area, what I really love is what they call the campesino. The campesino, or peasant to peasant or farmer to farmer model. And this is based on the idea that if we want to produce ecologically our food, we should remember that most places in the world people used to produce that way before all of these chemicals and commercial seeds and machinery came in. When it all came in that knowledge, a lot of that knowledge was broken into little pieces and dispersed in the community.

But even in the US you can't really go to a farm community without people saying, oh yeah, that crazy old lady has all of the original kind of delicious apple trees that we used to grow here before agribusiness came in. Or that old guy has the local, the local race of hogs that have way better bacon, but nobody can grow them because all of the slaughterhouses have been monopolized by the meat multinationals and you're allowed to slaughter your own meat. So the peasant idea is based on that.

Let's find those people who still know how to do things, who still have the old seeds, the old trees, the old livestock races, and let's try to create a community process where, instead of the community seeing them as crazy old folks, see them as wise people, as a source of wisdom, knowledge, heirloom seeds, local chicken, animal, pig, cow races that do much better without buying balanced animal feed from Purina but based on local forage plants.

And let's try to take that knowledge that everybody used to have before industrial agriculture came in, but then it got atomized into little pieces Through our farmer organization. Let's survey, let's find the people, let's find the knowledge, let's create workshops where they share that knowledge back into the larger community and a lot of that knowledge actually allows and Cuba really shows this allows people to solve a lot of the problems they have in their production with rediscovering these practices that have actually been proven for hundreds of years that work very well under local conditions. So that's the other great lesson from Cuba is how a farmer-to-farmer process is really much better than a top down process in terms of sharing knowledge and, through sharing knowledge, transforming agricultural practices. And then we marry that with the urban agriculture that cities could actually produce a lot of their food very healthily, and then I think we see two ways that Cuba offers very important lessons for those of us who are working on these issues and the rest of the world.

Andy

That's awesome.

Dr. Peter Rosset

I don't know if you know the old Phil Ochs song, but when they first had the US government put the travel ban on US citizens not being able to go to Cuba, the first guy to break the travel ban. His name was William Worthy and the words of the song is William Worthy isn't worthy to be an American, no more. You're living in the free world and in the free world you must stay.

Andy

He's very, very poignant.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Freedom, but you can't travel to Cuba. That's not allowed, god forbid. You see, something else.

Andy

Yeah, so you wrote a book “Agroecology, Science and Politics”. It's a great text, basically somewhere between text and just a philosophical point about how agriculture should look, in the way that it dovetails with politics, and this idea of like there's no social equity without that ecological equity and vice versa, that you cannot solve ecological problems if you don't address these social problems right. And I think it's a particularly helpful book and I'm curious about if I guess how do you envision all of this kind of playing out over the next few decades, especially with, like climate change ramping up and challenging not just our conventional agricultural system, but even like the way historical tech has been applied, if climates are fundamentally changing?

Dr. Peter Rosset

Yeah, well, I think two things. On the self-promotion side. It's a small book and it was written for a series of books called Small Books that Tell Us About the State of the art of Big Subjects, so we tried to write it in a condensed way.

Andy

It's like 120 pages, right?

Dr. Peter Rosset

Right and in an accessible language, so somebody who knows nothing about the science and politics of agroecology could get up to speed in a couple of days. Let's put it that way. That's the idea of the book. Now, climate change is a big problem. It's a great opportunity for agroecology, but it's also a great threat for agroecology, because the whole climate change has fed into this appropriation of the green discourse by global capitalism, and so we find a lot of very negative processes being justified under the green framework of addressing climate change.

So many countries that I visited around the world and I understand, for example, even sometimes happens in the US these windmill farms and offshore windmills, which completely wind turbines, which completely destroy the local environment and drive local people off the land, are sold as the alternative for renewable energy, or solar panel plantations, which are parks which raise local temperatures by six degrees, killing wildlife, killing biodiversity, making it impossible for people to live anywhere near them, and are produced by global corporations, the same ones that brought us fossil fuel.

So these are what we call fake solutions to climate change or fake solutions to the whole nexus of environmental problems that we have, and in a sense, they're a threat to things like agroecology because they're actually driving small farmers off of the land so that giant corporations can have wind turbine parks or solar parks or large scale dams or other things like that that are now being sold under the green discourse.

Yet, on the other hand and we call those, as I said, fake solutions real solutions would be to relocalize our food system and have our food be produced by local farmers, using agroecology in ways that don't emit greenhouse gases and actually address in a real way the real dimensions and underlying causes of the climate crisis, where almost half of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from the food system, from long-distance transport, from using farm chemicals, from clearing forests for large scale industrial monoculture.

A relocalized, agroecological farming system would address all of those underlying causes, so that would be in the category of what we call real solutions. So we have to visibilize the fact that we're being sold false, false solutions by governments and corporations, but in fact, we have in our hands, as people, real solutions, and so I think we have to recast the debate about climate change and about the global environmental crisis and this is something that La Via Campesina tries to do as a debate between false solutions and real solutions, and therefore, instead of the threat of the false solutions being yet another way that drives human beings off the land. Have the real solutions, a way that strengthens people's relationship to the land, access to the land and addresses in a real way the underlying causes of climate change.

Andy

Yeah, I would agree with all of that. I definitely think you've given some folks some food for thought to think about. For folks that are interested in your work, want to read more if you're writing, where can they find you? Are you on social media anywhere?

Dr. Peter Rosset

You can read my words in academic publications, scientific journals, and most of that is available on the internet. Many people don't know in the Google search engine there's something called Google Scholar, and if you put my name in Google Scholar, you'll find about a hundred different scientific articles on agroecology and then you can click through them, and some of them the actual scientific journal they were published in has a paywall, and you don't want to pay $30 for the article, believe me. But if you look around, you'll usually find somebody's posted a PDF for free of the same thing. So a lot of that is available that way.

And I'm also on Facebook not on Twitter or Instagram, but people can find me on Facebook and I put a lot of information there as well. And I highly recommend going to the website of La Via Campesina, which is viacampesina.org, and also, you know, follow some of our some of the Via Campesina member organizations in the US, for example, such as the National Family Farm Coalition, which, as I you know, I mentioned at the beginning that they're kind of blacked out from the media, but they do believe in and struggle in favor of many of these same things that we've been talking about today, and also the farm worker movement. The Latino Haitian farm worker movement also is closely related a lot of it to Via Campesina and also has very similar struggles.

Andy

Yeah, I'll definitely include those links in the show notes as well as a link to your book. I know a bunch of your articles are in the Journal of Peasant Studies, which I'd never heard of, I think, until I started reading some of your work, and it's a fantastic publication. There's a lot of really good stuff in there.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Yeah, I recommend it a lot. I read it all the time.

Andy

Yeah, so, peter, thanks so much, it's been fantastic.

Dr. Peter Rosset

Well, I enjoyed it very much as well. Thank you for the great questions and for the great conversation.