Agroecology and the ethics of innovation in agriculture

Abstract

Capitalism makes impossible ethical conviviality among all living beings. Constituted by a global power pattern —Coloniality— that acts upon race, knowing, being, nature, the capitalist institutionality is hostile to ethics for it conflicts with practices —patriarchal, racial, ethnocide, epistemicide, ecocide— that threaten of extinction life on Earth. Only a counter hegemonic institutional order can establish other livelihoods in which ethics is constitutive of conviviality in a community of life, as proposed by the science of Agroecology. Capitalism disguises itself under the idea of development to devour captive markets, abundant raw material, cheap labor, obedient minds, and disciplined bodies, while violates the human, the social, the cultural, the ecological, the spiritual, the ethical. As development = capitalism, Agroecology will fully contribute to the happiness of rural peoples and to the sustainability of their livelihoods only the ‘day after development’: when the Living Well paradigm, with its ethics of innovation, overcomes the institutionality ordered to capital by other oriented to life.