Transformations to sustainable food production in the Brazilian Cerrado: The cultural politics and potential of scaling up biodiversity-sustaining agriculture

Responding to urgent calls for scaling up low-input, biodiversity sustaining agricultural production (BSAP), the research probes: How do existing socio-cultural structures and processes in the Brazilian Cerrado create challenges and opportunities for BSAP, and what are key leverage points for encouraging it? Positing that conventional and alternative approaches to agriculture are sustained by socio-cultural, political and material factors in addition to biophysical conditions, it examines how different actors and social networks position themselves with regard to the dominant productivist paradigm in agriculture and more sustainable BSAP alternatives, and how they understand the goals of food security and socio-environmental sustainability. Using a multi-methods approach (media analysis, questionnaires, focus groups, participant-observation and semi-structured interviews), it produces insights into material, informational, political and socio-cultural factors encouraging different production systems, investigating how such insights can help overcome resistance to BSAP. Attending to these interlinked factors, not least how agricultural production systems are sustained by divergent identities and worldviews, the project aims to create new possibilities for greater public engagement and convergence in favor of BSAP in the Cerrado savanna, a threatened biodiversity “hotspot” on which Brazil’s food, water and energy security depends. This knowledge will inform a large Brazilian research project on transformations to sustainability that requires understanding of leverage points in defining trajectories towards desired future scenarios for the Cerrado. Scenarios and the trajectories for reaching them will be defined in participatory manner by stakeholders, including large and small producers, local and national decision makers and local citizens, including women and youth.