Farmers' compromises to develop autonomy through agroecological practices: revealing the lock-ins of the agrifood systems

International audienceAutonomy is a key principle of agroecology. First scientific works of Gliessman and Altieri have positioned autonomy from the markets and external forces as one of the goals of the agroecological prospect. Farmers' and peasants' organizations, firstly in Latin America, have adopted this goal to strengthen their action for the emancipation and the local self-governance of their members. Recently in France, new public policies seeking to develop agroecology include the objective of autonomy in its legal definition. The few existing studies examining farmers' ways to increase their autonomy show how they compromise this pursuit with other aims and concrete everyday realities. Among them, the lack of appropriate resources provided by the upstream operators and the difficulty to find commercial outlets for a diversity of products form crucial lock-ins. We propose to enrich the current analysis of the dominant agrifood systems' lock-ins through the examination of the concrete strategies and compromises of French farmers seeking to increase their autonomy. Indeed, in this country, the recent public policies focusing on agroecology have shed new light on a movement of farmer-led collective projects developing agroecological practices to increase autonomy, especially in relation to input sellers. To understand this phenomenon and its implications in the dominant agrifood systems, this paper presents the main results of a research-action program focusing on the development of agroecological practices by French farmers, who are member of machinery cooperatives (Cuma). These farmers seek to increase their autonomy by relying to a greater extent on local cooperation. Our work first aims at questioning the values that guide the farmers seeking to become more autonomous through cooperation and how they manage to do it. How and why do these farmers accept to become more interdependent with their peers to increase their autonomy in relation to markets? Secondly, we analyze how they compromise to enable their pursuit of autonomy. Which lock-ins and limits of the dominant agrifood systems do these compromises reveal? In the final discussion, we examine the possible ways to re-organize the local processes of territorial and community development to found new agroecological agrifood systems