Agroecology pioneer Miguel Altieri warned in a new podcast interview that his movement is being stripped of its political meaning by the institutions now embracing it.

Altieri, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke with Million Belay, general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), for episode 34 of Belay’s podcast, The Battle for African Agriculture. Altieri has spent more than four decades building agroecology into both a scientific field and a practical farming approach centered on biodiversity, traditional knowledge and farmer led movements, work that has taken him deep into Latin America and into collaboration with the international peasant movement La Via Campesina.

He told Belay the shift happened in stages. Agroecology was first ignored, then attacked, and now, he argued, risks a subtler threat: co optation. Institutions and companies swap chemical inputs for biological ones while leaving monocultures and dependency on outside inputs untouched, he said, and call it transformation when it is not. Real agroecology, in his framing, demands farmer autonomy, seed sovereignty, land reform, strong social movements and food systems built around local markets rather than export crops.

Altieri traced his own thinking back to fieldwork in Colombia, where he encountered smallholder farming systems more ecologically sophisticated than the monoculture models he had studied in Chile. That experience convinced him the core problem was never pests or soil quality alone but how agriculture had been designed from the ground up around monocultures and corporate control. He told Belay that biodiversity matters less for the number of species present than for the interactions between them, the kind that let farms regulate pests, cycle nutrients, hold water and bounce back from climate shocks, patterns he said traditional and Indigenous systems have sustained for generations through accumulated knowledge and collective organization.

He pushed back directly on the claim that agroecology cannot feed a growing world, arguing that hunger stems from poverty, unequal land access and a global system that channels land toward export markets rather than local needs, not from any shortage of food. He was also cautious about artificial intelligence, gene editing and digital agriculture, calling them new tools capable of erasing local knowledge if they end up replacing it rather than supporting it.

The episode extends a working relationship between the two men that dates back nearly a decade. Altieri co-authored a 2016 agroecology reference book with Belay and AFSA covering farming systems across nine African countries, giving this conversation roots in a longer record of shared research rather than a first encounter.

New episodes of The Battle for African Agriculture post every Friday on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and RSS, with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).