Political Agroecology in Syracuse: Local Understandings, Possibilities, and Barriers to Food System Transformation

In recent years, agroecology has begun to receive increasing attention from international institutions such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO). For some, this is seen as a valuable case of up-scaling agroecology which will lead to greater institutional support for the framework. However, critical agroecologists have raised concerns that such institutional adoption is rather a form of co-optation where the social and political elements of agroecology are omitted to facilitate the integration of the framework into a wider program of food system reform. As a result, there is ongoing contestation over the framework between these co-opted agroecologies, which support and reproduce the corporate food regime, and political agroecologies which seek to advance radical anti-capitalist transformative change. Framed within this contestation, this thesis explores how agroecology exists and is understood within Syracuse, NY in order to build greater understanding of how political agroecology can be advanced in urban US contexts. Through a critical review of the literature and interviews with food movement actors in Syracuse, I argue that there are deep incompatibilities between the radical politics of political agroecology and the current US political landscape. While research participants thought highly of agroecology generally, they tended to view the social and political elements of the framework as untenable within the Syracuse context, running the risk of advancing a depoliticized, co-opted agroecology. To avoid this co-optation and enable the advancement of political agroecology in the US, further scholarship is needed, particularly that which employs participatory methods to support the co-creation of politically engaged understandings of agroecology within existing US food movements.