The Restorative Promise of Agroecology: Farming for Sovereignty, Resiliency, and Decoloniality
On African food systems and my internship at an agroecology organisation in Malawi.
In late September, 2025, I found myself racing along dirt roads in northern Malawi on the back of a motorbike, with two other people packed tightly in front. I was sitting on a grid of metal bars, practically hanging off the back end of the bike, as the wheels churned up the mud and dust beneath our feet. A green sea of rice fields swept by as we weaved our way between busy motorcyclists and mothers carrying children in colourful chitenges. The lonesome Bungulu Mountain bulged out of the landscape, standing tall as we hopped off the bike to carefully cross a rickety footbridge over an irrigation canal. After some forty minutes, we finally arrived at Chombe Village, where we shook hands with the Ama Bwane.
This tiny, tranquil hamlet in Nkhata Bay District was comprised of modest mud-brick homes, straw huts, and small agricultural fields for subsistence farming; very typical for rural Malawian villages – 80% of Malawians live in rural communities, and about the same percentage are employed in agriculture (Kelly, 2023). At the heart of the village stood a thatched straw shelter supported by wooden posts. We were invited to take a seat there while the villagers gathered to sit on the floor – twelve of them in all, mostly women. Sitting to my right, Maxwell began the meeting. Max and his team had been working with the villagers at Chombe for a year, delivering a series of training workshops in the field of agroecology. After a lengthy and enthusiastic discussion, we were taken for a tour of the village by the Ama Bwane – the ‘Mother Boss’1.
The shelter under which we’d been gathered safeguarded at least 112 fruit tree seedlings, each one spurting out of little heaps of soil and compost wrapped up in tubes of soft plastic. These tree tubes were primarily made of recycled milk packets. The villagers would sell the tree seedlings grown in their agroforestry nursery for 3000 MWK each, earning 336,000 MWK for the village. Also at the shelter were two large sacks of rotting organic material – food waste, green leaves, dry grass, maize stalks, animal manure, urine, and even ash. The result was a rich, dark-brown compost ready to be applied to the fields. Max went to investigate a mound of the stuff, covered with leaves and twigs, with a long stick protruding from the top. Grabbing the stick, he pulled it out and felt the bottom, barely paying attention to the ants crawling over his hands. The stick was warm; this was good. Heat implied that the compost was developing, since the rotting process releases energy. When the stick is cool again, the compost will be ready. We went with Ama Bwane to investigate the fields, on which they had dug boxed furrows, which capture water and store it in the ground, and had covered with mulch – leftover organic materials that preserve the soil’s moisture and provide nutrients as they decompose. The villagers incorporated a system of intercropping – growing multiple crops in the same space whose biophysical traits benefit the growth of all crops in that space2. These fields had successfully produced vegetables and herbal trees on soils that were previously considered dead. Ama Bwane also showed us her urine storage at the edge of the village, which she was very enthusiastic about. There were dozens of reused plastic bottles full of villagers’ urine, which is used to make an organic, affordable fertiliser called Mbeya and is also applied to compost heaps.
After rounding up our visit, Max and I thanked the villagers for their ardent participation and joined our driver Frank on the motorbike to cross the rice paddies once again. This time, I sat on the padded seat and Max got the metal grid behind me. Max is a field officer for a small start-up based in the town of Nkhata Bay called EARTH Workshops: Environment, Agroforestry, Restoration, Topsoil, Health. The project is facilitated by Butterfly Space, a not-for-profit eco-lodge centred around sustainable tourism and free community programs in Nkhata Bay. Local professionals from the EARTH team run weekly workshops in several rural villages in the district, offering holistic training towards food and water security, resilience to changing weather patterns, improved nutrition and health, and increased and diversified incomes. I joined the project as a voluntary intern for two months to learn more about the restorative benefits of agroecology: the umbrella term for the sustainable practices (see earlier italics) advocated by EARTH and many other grassroots organisations in Malawi and the wider continent (e.g., Malawi Schools Permaculture Clubs, Never Ending Food, Ripple Africa, Tyeni, The Commonage, Permaculture Network in Malawi, Eko Djembe).
Fundamentally, agroecology treats farms as ecosystems (Moseley, 2024, p.7). It involves regenerative farming techniques that mimic nature, informed by deep knowledge about nutrient cycling, crops and agrobiodiversity, water and energy, insect and disease ecology, and local natural landscapes, while paying special attention to the social, economic, and political dynamics of agriculture (Altieri et al., 2012; Nyantakyi-Frimpong et al., 2017; Bezner Kerr et al., 2019; Anderson et al., 2020)3. Agroecology is an ‘alternative paradigm to corporate-led industrial food systems’ that works towards food security through achieving food sovereignty (Wittman, 2009; Schneider & McMichael, 2010; Bezner Kerr et al., 2019, p.3; Anderson et al., 2020, p.561; Moseley, 2024, p.8). Food security is defined as access to safe and nutritious food that supports normal growth and development for an active, healthy life (Anthem, 2025). Food sovereignty involves peoples’ right to nutritious food that is culturally appropriate, ecologically sustainable, and produced in a food system that is defined by and for themselves; the needs of food producers, distributors, and consumers are valued over the demands of markets and corporations (Bezner Kerr et al., 2019, p.1). Agroecological food systems are organised from the bottom-up, are ‘underpinned by social justice, solidarity, reciprocity and trust’, and value ‘diverse’ or ‘other’ forms of knowledge (Bezner Kerr et al., 2019, p.3; AgroecologyNow, 2020). Furthermore, William G. Moseley (2024) argues in his book ‘Decolonising African Agriculture’ that agroecology can dismantle past and present coloniality in the food systems of postcolonial African societies.
In early October, I travelled with another EARTH field officer, Thom, on an e-bike to Singo Village. When we arrived, we were greeted politely by Chief Fred, who shook my hand and welcomed us to his village. We waited a while for the villagers to gather, then Fred took us to inspect their compost heap, which was very large and making good progress. Thom took the temperature stick, which was cold, and revealed the maggots crawling around beneath the foliage4. This meant that the heap’s material was ready to be turned around, and the compost would soon be ready. Thom added more water and urine from a watering can, mixed the material again, and re-covered the heap with vegetation. As an experienced agroecologist, Thom expertly reminded the villagers of the necessary steps of compost creation.
Afterwards, one man got to work grinding down pig manure for our demonstration on Mbeya fertiliser. I got involved with a group sieving the manure into a bucket using a mosquito net. Other villagers introduced a bag of chicken manure, followed by maize grain, and they mixed the materials together with a shovel. They then sieved charcoal to produce ash and added it to the mixture. Urine was then added from a watering can, and Thom began to mix it all together. I took over as he explained the reasoning for adding such ingredients: their fermentation process enriches the soil with natural nutrients, enhancing soil structure and, ultimately, crop growth. Together, the villagers produced a 50l sack of Mbeya fertiliser, along with an equally-sized bag of ‘boosted’ artificial fertiliser which included 10l of water and purchased artificial fertiliser in place of urine. Mbeya reduces villagers’ dependency on these expensive artificial fertilisers since they need less to produce enough food. The goal is to become completely sustained by Mbeya, which is free to make and the ingredients for which can be sourced entirely from within village communities using ecologically sustainable, recycled materials otherwise considered ‘waste.’ This is food sovereignty at work – communities building a sustainable food system that doesn’t rely on expensive external inputs.
This system of regenerative, farmer-first, ecologically-sound agriculture is prospected to address some of the largest challenges to food security and resiliency to climate change in Malawi and the African continent. Research has shown that, including in semi-humid tropical climates like that of Malawi, agroecology has ‘strong implications for improved food security’ through its focus on diversifying crops and diets and increasing farming access and autonomy for the poorest smallholders (Nyantakyi-Frimpong et al., 2017, p.42; Moseley, 2024, p.9). In Malawi, diversified cropping systems would incorporate indigenous cereals such as sorghum and finger millet as well as a variety of vegetables and leguminous foods, often intercropped to reap the benefits of inter-species interaction (Bezner Kerr, 2014; Nyantakyi-Frimpong et al., 2017). These crops are more resilient to climate shocks like droughts and floods – which are projected to grow in frequency and intensity in Malawi – and provide backup income options when climate disasters strike and common crops like maize fail (Bezner Kerr, 2014, p.591; World Bank Group, 2022).
Agroecological techniques are among the most environmentally sustainable methods for addressing food insecurity and offer promising climate change adaptation and mitigation pathways (Rusinamhodzi et al., 2012; Nyantakyi-Frimpong et al., 2017). Such systems support weed suppression, help break pest life-cycles, and provide essential ecosystem services like soil enhancement, nitrogen fixation, and carbon sequestration (Cong et al., 2015; Nyantakyi-Frimpong et al., 2017). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has determined that agroecological food systems not only create opportunities for food security, but ‘also benefit land-based ecosystems, water, poverty and livelihoods, and human well-being’ (Schipper et al., 2022, p.2724). Research has suggested that such approaches help restore equitable community, family, and gender relations, encourage dignity in farm work by recognising local specialised knowledge, and establish new power relations through its participatory methods that put producers first (Rosset et al., 2011, pp.183-4; Bezner Kerr et al., 2019). On gender, the IPCC has stressed that agroecology strengthens adaptive capacities and enables ‘more resilient food systems by increasing leadership for women and their participation in decision making’ (Schipper et al., 2022, p.2702).
The agroecological way is not, however, ubiquitous in Malawi, nor in Africa. In fact, the food system is dominated by massive, corporate-led agribusiness, which aims to ‘modernise’ African agriculture through industrial, high-output monocultures; hybridised or genetically modified seeds provided by multinational corporations; investments in digital technology; and government subsidies for fertilisers and agrichemicals, which are often fossil-fuel-based (Malkan, 2020; Wise, 2020, p.27; Jakobsen & Westengen, 2022, p.551; Moseley, 2024, p.23). Mainstream giants include the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), among others (Woodward 2016; Malkan, 2020). Such organisations involve governments, large multinational agribusinesses such as Monsanto and Corteva Agriscience, and philanthrocapitalist enterprises such as the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, who have funded the organisations to the tune of upwards of a billion dollars (Wise, 2020, p.2). The organisations promote a new ‘Green Revolution’ in African agriculture with the purported objectives of ‘building resilience, and enhancing market and sector competitiveness’ along with increasing the export of target crops for economic growth through agricultural intensification (AGRA, 2025, p.23). This aligns with the World Bank’s emphasis on the importance of overall economic development, which it says ‘provides a strong basis for strengthening resilience’ and is ‘one of the most powerful forms of adaptation’ to the impacts of climate change (World Bank Group, 2022, p.12; Chimbali & van Leggelo-Padilla, 2022).
In its Vision 2063 action plan, the Malawian government has set out to achieve an annual GDP growth rate of 6%, aiming to make Malawi an upper-middle-income country by 2063. Its primary driver of this growth involves a ‘productive, commercialised, and diversified agricultural sector’, along with infrastructure improvements across the country (World Bank Group, 2022, p.11). Initiatives on broader economic and infrastructural development and ‘market-based instruments’ to build resilience to climate challenges in Malawi have been encouraged by the World Bank (ibid., p.15). Green Revolution organisations such as AGRA are heavily involved in Malawian agricultural policy, with ‘productivity and market access’ being AGRA’s ‘strategic focus’ in the country (AGRA, 2025, p.21). Malawi has pushed for industrialised agriculture, state subsidies for commercial fertilisers and hybridised seeds, and high rates of maize production as principal solutions to the aforementioned challenges (Chinsinga, 2011; Bezner Kerr et al., 2019). In fact, Malawi’s political economy has been described as a technocratically-driven ‘politics of maize,’ with state legitimacy predicated on its ‘ability to make maize... available to the people’, a system that has its roots in Malawi’s colonial era (Chinsinga, 2012, p.2; Jakobsen & Westengen, 2022). Maize is embedded in Malawi’s ‘dietary, cultural and economic patterns’ and has long been the country’s most-produced food crop, representing about 90% of cereal production and 50% of calories consumed by Malawians (ibid., p.543). Consequently, Malawi has consistently produced surplus maize above its annual food requirements of about 2.1 million metric tonnes (Chinsinga, 2012, p.2).
But despite this largely top-down drive to ramp up economic growth and commercial agricultural production (primarily of maize), 4 million Malawians were expected to face ‘crisis’ levels of acute food insecurity between October 2025 and March 2026 (FAO, 2025, p.2), while 2 million Malawians are at risk from falling into poverty due to climate shocks over the ten years from 2022 (World Bank Group, 2022, p.12). An extreme reliance on intensified maize production – despite the surpluses – has not led to substantial improvements in food security or climate resiliency in Malawi. Furthermore, while economic and infrastructural development is crucial for building climate resiliency generally, the conversation has remained fixated on commercial productivity and industrialised agriculture in the pursuit of economic growth. Agroecological approaches focusing on soil health, diversified cropping systems, and regenerative, sustainable practice are largely ignored, or are even worked against (Bezner Kerr, 2014, p.591). While the World Bank (2022) has recognised the importance of immediately addressing climate impacts with low-cost and high-impact methods, including land restoration through practices such as agroforestry and community conservation5, the words agroecology or even ecology do not feature in its latest Country Climate and Development Report for Malawi. The same is true for AGRA’s recent annual report, while countless references to economic growth were made (AGRA, 2025). In sum, agroecological methods are among the most accessible, affordable, and impactful ways to address climate and food insecurities – including land degradation6 – yet they are sidelined by mainstream actors involved in Malawi’s climate and agricultural development.
Proponents of the intensification of the production of selected crops argue that the strategy has successfully increased the availability of food and has improved caloric intake in the countries that have incorporated such industrialised systems, such as in Rwanda (Wise, 2020, pp.25-6; Malkan, 2020). Indeed, AGRA’s president, Agnes Kalibata, has suggested that caloric intake is of principal importance when in comes to food security, going as far as calling dietary diversity a ‘luxury’ for the world’s hungry (ibid.). In other words – let them eat cake. Former assistant director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jomo Kwame Sundaram, lamented this approach as addressing ‘malnutrition with food insecurity’, pointing to the ‘hidden hunger’ and plethora of health problems associated with macronutrient deficiencies which are otherwise directly ‘addressed by dietary diversity, supported by crop diversity in farming’ (ibid.; Sundaram, 2020). The focus on caloric intake has failed to substantially lower food insecurity in AGRA’s target countries, with undernourishment actually increasing by 30% between 2006 and 2018 (ibid.; Wise, 2020, p.21). In Malawi, which is ‘cited as a Green Revolution success story’, the national poverty rate increased in the same period, and despite fairly high yield growth, the country achieved ‘only a small reduction in undernourishment’ (ibid., pp.22-5). By 2020, as much as 82% of Malawians were still experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity (ibid., p.22; Bassermann et al., 2020, p.24).
Million Belay (2020), general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), as well as Mariam Mayet (cited in Malkan, 2020), executive director of the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), denounce the Green Revolution’s ‘neocolonial logic.’ Belay (2020) argues that commercial ‘outside actors’ are putting a ‘knee on the neck of Africa’, defining agricultural policy that suits their needs by ‘creating a market for themselves’ at the expense of family farmers – who, globally, produce 80% of the world’s food (Malkan, 2020). Mayet (cited in Malkan, 2020) similarly condemns the approach as designed for the ‘profits of mostly Northern multinational corporations.’ Indeed, research has suggested that Green Revolution technologies are too expensive for smallholder farmers to adopt on their own, and many have become dependent on government subsidies to afford them, which puts serious strains on government budgets (Bassermann et al., 2020, p.17). In Malawi, as ACB estimated, commercial seeds and fertilisers cost three times what farmers could earn from a small yield increase in maize production (ibid.). All the while, Malawi has devoted up to 60% of its agricultural budget on its Farm Input Subsidy Programme (ibid., p.16). The problem is compounded by the environmental damage to soil health and biodiversity caused by synthetic fertilisers and monocultures over time, which only augments the cost of farm inputs since increasing amounts are needed by smallholders to maintain consistent productivity levels (ibid.; Sundaram, 2020).
Under these circumstances, the Green Revolution’s ambitions for poverty reduction are unrealistic and unattainable. The prevailing view is that poverty alleviation will be achieved via ‘trickle-down effects from an agricultural boom’ and wider economic growth (Dawson, Martin & Sikor, 2016, p.205). Yet for the majority of smallholder households, the system has exacerbated poverty, disrupted subsistence practices, impaired local knowledge, trade, and labor, and curtailed land tenure and autonomy (ibid., p.204). This has been described as ‘imposed innovation’, whereby local traditional polyculture and knowledge systems are undermined in favour of modernised technological and industrial practices (ibid., pp.204-7). In Malawi’s Northern Region in particular, indigenous knowledge about the importance of polyculture and the benefits of particular crops has ‘faded’ from collective memory (Bezner Kerr, 2014, p.590).
The sidelining of local knowledge in favour of technocratic, top-down decision-making underscores the neocolonial logic of the Green Revolution’s modernisation campaign; as Raj Patel (cited in Malkan, 2020), author of the book ‘Stuffed and Starved’, explains, the ‘production of knowledge’ is central to neocolonialism, whereby power must ‘dominate in the field of ideas as well as in dominance of the land.’ Technocratic approaches contrast with the increasing calls pointing to agroecology as a restorative, more inclusive, and decolonial solution to food and climate insecurities, including from AFSA, ACB, AgroecologyNow, the international peasant and indigenous movement La Vía Campesina, and countless grassroots movements across the globe (Malkan, 2020; Anderson et al., 2020; Kelly, 2023; Moseley, 2024). This supports Moseley’s (2024, pp.7-8) claim that agroecology is a ‘decolonial paradigm’ for reimagining African agriculture by working ‘across the formal-informal knowledge divide’, with researchers working alongside ‘farmers and their experiential knowledge’ (see also Nyantakyi-Frimpong et al., 2017). Agroecology helps to reverse patterns of neocolonialism by reintroducing indigenous specialised knowledges, revaluing traditional farming practices, and restoring dignity in farm work through championing community participation (Bezner Kerr et al., 2019). At EARTH, the team of local experts in agroecology are helping to reintroduce once-prevalent practices of intercropping and polyculture to Northern Malawi, while re-incorporating indigenous legumes, vegetables, and cereals into local diets and growing patterns for nutritional diversity and climate resiliency.
Agroecology has begun to gain traction in the mainstream as a viable alternative paradigm to the ‘corporate food regime’, including in the FAO and the IPCC (McMichael, 2013; Loconto & Fouillieux, 2019; HLPE, 2019; Wise, 2020, p.3; Schipper et al., 2022; Moseley, 2024, p.8). Growing grassroots organisations across Malawi and the continent, like EARTH, along with regional and international civil society groups, are testaments to the restorative promise of agroecology. Corporate groups have launched backlash against the tide with mounting public relations and marketing campaigns to discredit, and even defame, the agroecology movement, while dressing up their own narratives in ‘nice sounding language’, as Belay (2020) conveys (Malkan, 2020). Mayet (cited in Malkan, 2020), however, sees this as ‘evidence of desperation’, while she affirms that the solutions, as an increasing number of farmers and researchers identify, ‘lie with people on the continent and the world that are building systems grounded in justice, and human and ecological wellbeing.’
Thomas Shivers
Bibliography & Further Reading:
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In Chombe, the chief was an elder woman, contrary to the norm of patrilineal inheritance in northern Malawi, whereby men more often inherit land and lead communities (Bezner Kerr, 2014, p.580).
This is a form of multicropping, where different crops are grown in the same space over a year.
Bezner Kerr (2014, p.579) defines agrobiodiversity as ‘the variety of living organisms that contribute to food and agriculture.’
Maggots create small tunnels for airflow that deliver essential oxygen to the compost.
These are tenets of agroecology, as we’ve seen, but a commitment to the full plurality of agroecological practices is avoided, despite the obvious benefits.
Malawi has alarming levels of land degradation and deforestation (IFPRI, 2023; Bandsom, 2023). The IPCC has suggested that ‘drought-resilient ecologically appropriate plants, agroforestry and other agroecological and ecosystem-based adaptation practices’ can effectively restore degraded lands (Schipper et al., 2022, p.2692).