Together for Regenerative Agrifood Ecosystems

In the context of fading ecological resilience, fragile agronomic performance and misguided paradigms of agricultural practice that over-rely on technical solutions, the current agrifood governance system produces compounding negative feedback loops, locking the current system dynamics in a path towards collapse.

EARA’s White Paper advocates for turning our governance systems into positive agents, fostering economic, social and ecological prosperity and health, by positively co-stewarding the regeneration of our agrifood ecosystems. Multiple regenerative farming operations, scientific case studies and proof of concepts developed by farmers across Europe and globally, successfully demonstrate that plenty of economically sound farming systems exist on the ground which reverse environmental damage, promoting biodiversity, soil health, plentiful nutritious food and also ecological and economic resilience.

EARA’s founding farmers are stepping up to co-steward the transformation of agrifood ecosystem governance so that economic and regulatory environments are created in order to promote on-farm, rapid and systemic regeneration based on the following Defining Principles for Stewarding Regenerative Agriculture (each with sub-principles that are outlined in the paper):

• Regeneration is a life-enhancing process, rather than a permanent state
• Regeneration is outcome-oriented regarding social, ecological and economic health
• Regeneration is context-specific
• Regeneration is systemic

Farmers cannot bear the sole responsibility for this transformation. By stewarding the transformation along these principles, rapid systemic changes are possible, which can foster an environment of trans-disciplinary and -sectoral cooperation between all levels and actors. Further, pluralism in governance and knowledge systems is required to enable up-to-date, context-specific and evidence-based policy-making, derived from on-farm research and analyses.

EARA’s Founding Farmers advocate for outcome-focused agricultural policies that remunerate agroecosystem health performance, in order to give agency, capacity and planning security back to farmers and underline their capacities to guide regenerative transformations.

Such policy schemes ought to embrace the health of living soils and agroecosystems as agronomy’s first priority, so that the policies have guiding functions for agronomic practice in the direction of regenerative agriculture. It is the prerequisite for achieving yield quantity, quality and resilience (primary productivity) as well as ecosystem services, rural development, the improvement of the livelihoods of farming communities, food and national security.

In summary, an agrifood system governance that is anchored in an outcome-oriented agricultural policy, while embracing system change and pluralism in governance and knowledge systems, holds vast potentials for a wider transformation of governance in policy-making. Such agrifood system governance serves the interests of land stewards and food security, as well as economic and ecological health, as the fundamental conditions for stewarding towards the overall health of our planet and all its inhabitants.

Read more on EARA’s history.