After the 2016 coup in Brazil and the rise of the ultra-conservative right in 2018, official spaces for participatory governance at the federal level were dismantled. In this hostile political scenario, the National Articulation of Agroecology (ANA) movement sought to reposition itself politically in an effort to maintain a proactive role in the field of public policies. ANA took a strategic decision in 2020 to focus its agroecology advocacy on the local level. This laid the groundwork for an effective campaign around the 2022 state and federal elections. Here, ANA shares some of its lessons learnt.
Mapping existing local policies
The starting point for any campaign in ANA is often the systematisation of what is already there. So in 2020, ANA identified existing municipal and state policies that supported agroecology and promoted food and nutrition sovereignty and security. The aim was to encourage the exchange of experiences about how these subnational policies were created and implemented, to reflect on their results and challenges, and to stimulate local advocacy.
This was very relevant; despite an abundance of proposals, negotiations and implementation experience related to local policies there was no systematic exchange of knowledge between these initiatives. Based on this inventory, ANA developed the ‘Agroecology in the Elections’ campaign in 2020. This included a survey and involved 34 researchers in each of Brazil’s 26 states with links to state-level agroecology networks.
Through the survey, more than 700 diverse public policies affecting various parts of the food system were uncovered in 531 municipalities: from the protection of territorial rights (including a municipal agrarian reform programme and initiatives to recover Creole varieties of traditional crops on Indigenous lands) to production (for example supporting women’s production groups), processing (such as programmes for compliance with health legislation and the structuring of food storage and processing spaces), distribution (including support for fairs, institutional purchasing programmes, and social currencies and vouchers), and disposal (ecological sanitation systems and waste collection and composting programmes, for example).
Based on this national survey, ANA published Agroecological Municipalities and Policies for the Future, which provides a summary of the main results and details of some of the policies. Subsequently, a model letter of commitment was drafted, which presented 36 policy proposals organised into 13 thematic fields and presented in an interactive map.
Local ANA organisers were active in 39 municipalities across the country's 26 states
This document was presented and debated with mayors and city council candidates across the country. Through a nationwide effort, signatures of support were collected from 1,238 candidates for the 2020 municipal elections (14.4% of whom were in fact elected). Several of these candidates included proposals in their programmes, revealing the pedagogical dimension of this process.
Drafting municipal policies after the elections
In May 2021, ANA launched a 10-month advocacy campaign to ensure that the commitments made during the electoral period were fulfilled. Local ANA organisers were active in 39 municipalities spread across the country’s 26 states. A team of regional communicators gave this work national visibility, and national online meetings were held every two months to monitor results and share learnings.
One direct result was the drafting of ten municipal agroecology policies, plans or similar legal instruments. For example, in the Borborema region of the state of Paraíba, connections were made between different municipal agriculture departments regarding the acquisition of creole seeds to distribute to farming families. Although the approval of this and many other laws does not guarantee their implementation, it does demonstrate progress in opening up channels for dialogue between civil society and municipalities.
At the end of the campaign, a new online map highlighting 59 municipal-level policies at some stage in the cycle of drafting, implementing, monitoring and evaluation was launched, as a way to share lessons and inspiration for policy advocacy. Various other communication tools, such as educational booklets and animated videos, were also created and disseminated.
Success in the municipal campaigns motivated organisations to undertake a new campaign for the 2022 state and federal elections
These successful campaigns in turn motivated organisations and networks from all over the country to undertake a new political advocacy campaign for the 2022 state and federal elections. At the federal level, there was hope that Lula would be re-elected as president and that progressives would be voted into the federal Congress and Senate. The same challenge was posed in the states. ANA made good use of this strategic opportunity to project the agroecology agenda from the local into the national electoral debate.
Agroecology in the 2022 state and federal elections
ANA launched its ‘Agroecology in the 2022 Elections’ campaign in a context of widespread polarisation in Brazilian society. The first step was to target state and federal candidates with a new proposed letter of commitment. Drawn up with contributions from ANA working groups and collectives and regional agroecology networks, this document presents a set of policy proposals for agroecology. The list of candidates committing to these proposals was updated weekly on the ANA website.
On the federal policy front, ANA established partnerships with universities in Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin to carry out research for a joint publication on the establishment and subsequent dismantling of federal policies to support agroecology and food and nutrition sovereignty and security.
In the area of state policies, a research and mobilisation team carried out a survey of actions, policies, programmes and legislation addressing agroecology and food and nutrition sovereignty and security in all of the country’s 26 states. Over the course of two months, 487 state policies were identified and summarised on a new online map. The survey also gave rise to a series of communication materials (including articles, podcasts and social media cards) and a publication analysing the state policies in the context of ANA’s letter of commitment.
The next step in the campaign involved direct advocacy actions with state candidates. To this end, a wide range of local organisations held public events and activities with progressive candidates: agroecological fairs, lunches, stalls, public debates, walks, caravans and other creative live and virtual actions. Local actors were mobilised to organise these events, which served to strengthen agroecology networks in many states.
Over 10 per cent of the elected candidates committed explicitly to strengthening agroecology
As a direct result of these combined actions, 694 signatures for the ANA’s letter of commitment were collected for the 2022 elections. Of the candidates who signed, 156 were elected in the federal district and in 21 states: one senator and 64 federal deputies at the federal level and five governors and 86 deputies at the state level. This means that over 10 per cent of the elected candidates signed a commitment to strengthening agroecology, an impressive result of ANA’s advocacy work.
Lessons and challenges
ANA has learnt many lessons from these experiences. For one, the importance of identifying existing local policies and making them visible. This strategy helped to create an agenda with proposals consisting of viable measures that had already been successfully tried out somewhere in Brazil.
The national exchange of local strategies and actions brought immense benefits in terms of sharing learnings and inspiration. For the organising teams, analysis provided by the advocacy campaign was also an important resource for monitoring and evaluating the results of their actions. This analysis also played a fundamental role in democratising and broadening the reach of the learnings generated within the networks and organisations within the agroecological movement.
The promotion of communication from the territories that gave national visibility to local and very concrete examples, initiatives and realities has been very powerful. ANA’s rooted communication strategy played an important role in disseminating knowledge about the reality of agroecology, its challenges and proposals to ever wider audiences. In this way, ANA contributes to confronting the ideological hegemony of agribusiness.
However, many challenges remain. One is related to the scale and reach of ANA’s work and the size of Brazil, which has more than 5,000 municipalities. On the one hand, actions in pilot municipalities have the potential to generate references, learnings and inspiration; on the other hand, we have limited capacity to reach more significant segments of the population with our proposals and to influence election outcomes more robustly.
Despite the great efforts and important results of the campaign, parliamentarians and policy makers committed to agroecology still constitute a small minority in the country. Overcoming this challenge would require far greater resources than ANA has been able to secure. Large gatherings and the movement of teams across different territories, for example, are strategies that could enhance the reach of the agroecological movement and strengthen popular mobilisation in defense of its proposals. Considering the size of Brazil, however, these activities are prohibitively expensive.
Another challenge is that ANA’s political advocacy has primarily relied on communicators in civil society organisations, which are currently suffering from budget constraints that impact hiring. It is obviously very difficult to contest narratives if there are insufficient resources to develop and project alternatives.
Visions for the future
With the election of President Lula for a third term and the restoration of a democratic environment in Brazil, the institutional dialogue spaces between the state and civil society have been reestablished. ANA has sought to occupy these spaces and to resume active political advocacy at the federal level.
However, it must be said that these spaces are in constant contention, and the policies we fight for often do not advance at the pace we would like. It is important to consider that in the same elections where Lula prevailed, the country also elected the most conservative federal parliament in decades. Furthermore, Brazil has the largest agribusiness caucus in history, committed to serving the interests of agribusiness and large landholdings. This evidently impacts progressive agendas.
This situation reinforces the importance of grassroots, decentralised action in territories and municipalities. In this regard, ANA has been striving to keep local mobilisations alive. 2024 is a year of municipal elections in Brazil, and a new edition of the ‘Agroecology in the Elections’ initiative has been launched, with actions taking place in the runup to the October elections.
Among the most important challenges for this new phase is our need to conduct advocacy actions in a coordinated and synergistic manner, stimulating information flows and integration between levels, in order to increase the effectiveness of our policy advocacy.
Authors: Flavia Londres, Viviane Brochardt and Morgana Maselli are members of the Executive Secretariat of the Brazilian National Articulation of Agroecology (ANA). Contact: flondres@gmail.com
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This article is part of Issue 1-2024: Policies for Agroecology
