The debate on the environmental and social sustentainability of quinoa in its area of major world production (southern highlands of Bolivia) revived with the acceptance by the United Nations of the Bolivian proposal to declare in 2013 as the Year of the Quinoa. Public debate focused on local impacts of quinoa expansion in the Southern highlands of Bolivia, denouncing several negative impacts of quinoa culture such as land degradation, socioeconomic disrupts and biodiversity loss. However, the global or at least the international implications of the expanding quinoa market were less debated and often in caricature, varying between culpability and ingenuity among consumers, while Andean producers were described as trapped by poverty or short sighted greed. If researchers are to make a relevant contribution to the debate on the impact of quinoa expansion on the social and environmental sustainability of the Andean agriculture, is it necessary to re-evaluate present knowledge and ignorance about local Andean production systems integrated with links at the global scales, taking into account local-global interactions.In the present paper are revisited some major ill-founded assertions commonly expressed in this debate and three lines of arguments are used to support the need for a more cautious and ethical approach to quinoa related issues. Key words: debate, biodiversity, socioecological.
RESUMEN
El objetivo de este trabajo es determinar los niveles de resiliencia/vulnerabilidad de seis iniciativas agroecológicas urbanas del suroeste andaluz. La investigación se llevó a cabo mediante la adaptación del esquema metodológico desarrollado por REDAGRES. Se aplicó una encuesta semiestructurada a los integrantes de cada iniciativa y mediante grupos focales se establecieron los rangos de valoración. Se calculó la moda a la información levantada para facilitar la presentación de los resultados, los que arrojan altos niveles de resiliencia para los indicadores grado de implicación en redes agroecológicas, grado de interacción entre socios, aplicación de conocimientos aprendidos, fuentes de financiación, uso de abonos y fertilizantes, procedencia de semillas, planificación, asociación y rotación de cultivos, así como en cobertura de suelos.
Agroecology has proven to be successful in responding to the demands and needs of a collective due to the relevance of its approach and proposals, which are built collaboratively between all the actors under a specific context that focuses on the actions developed. This is facilitated when spaces of horizontal interaction are generated through dialogues between different perspectives and experiences. In this perspective, agroecological training in higher education, i.e., university level, requires structural changes that go beyond the incorporation of technical content. Based on a critical documentary analysis of the records generated in the implementation of teaching innovation projects, the learning itinerary in agroecology is presented, consisting of four certifications based on transformational learning and supported by active methodologies. The potentialities, including marketing potential, of the proposed learning itinerary relate to curricular design, the articulation of the itinerary, the suitability of the learning methodologies used, the performance of the teachers, and the participation of the students. It is concluded that the implementation of flexible itineraries allows for addressing the transformation processes necessary for an agroecological transition in which we see a convergence of students’ skills, the learning objectives, and the requirements of the various actors with which they interact.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.