Organic Agriculture: How Does Agroecology Contribute to Promote Sustainable Practices in a New Agricultural System?
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Agriculture".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 2944
Special Issue Editors
Interests: organic agriculture; agricultural economics and policies; rural development; social Farming; consumers’ behavior; biodiversity assessment; organic districts analysis and promotion; agroecologyers’ behavior, Biodiversity assessment, Organic districts analysis and promotion, Agroecology
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Organic farming has been continuously growing in the last three decades. Its worldwide expansion is yet not homogeneous due to different incentives, market opportunities, AKIS development and other relevant enabling or disabling factors across the globe. In such asymmetric evolution, the organic sector is exposed to a variety of implicit, internal and external challenges, such as minimising the yield gap (importance), further improving its environmental sustainability, coping to the climate chaos, winning a greater consumer and citizen confidence, struggling for priority in sectoral and horizontal policies.
In the intangible and pragmatic competition for policy and consumers attention, other farming models are claiming legitimacy in terms of sustainability, social pertinence and value-for-money, inter alia agroecology and regenerative agriculture, which sometime represent organic farming nuances or anyway solicit the organic sector to deliver more and better.
This multifaceted legitimacy competition stimulates the organic sector in reconsidering its operative, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. Moving or dismantling borders has been a constant organic movement endeavor and this special issue calls for papers on innovative technical approaches and practices, explorative market solutions, participatory territorial arrangements, courageous policy settings and any other non-conventional initiative that epitomises a reconfiguration of the organic sectors’ frontiers.
All these considerations guide the proposal of this special issue, which aims to collect studies and research, as well as theoretical contributions, which provide examples of organic farming overriding rather than sitting on the fence.
Scientific contributions will be accepted in relation to exploratory organic farming initiatives in some priority socio-technical areas, such as:
- organic agriculture and circular economy: risks and opportunities in opening the recycling pandora box;
- organic territory: organic districts, interfarming, organic farmers’ stakes representation, re-localisation of organic consumption, branding locality in organic, farm introgression of ecosystem services;
- agroecological organic practices: mixed farming strategies; intercropping/mixed/alley cropping techniques and approaches; use of genetic heterogeneous materials (i.e. evolutionary populations, cross composite populations, etc.); crop diversification systems;
- training and advisory in agroecology: achieving competences in managing complexity and socio-ecological systems;
- outside-the-box policy and administrative initiatives: framing environmental and territorial agreements/contracts levering organic farming; GPP or school meals innovative protocols.
Dr. Giovanni Dara Guccione
Dr. Luca Colombo
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- organic agriculture
- biodiversity
- sustainability
- ecosystem services
- agroecology
- consumers’ behaviour
- circular economy
