Exploring Agroecology Transition Scenarios: A Pfaundler’s Spectrum Assessment on the Relocation of Agri-Food Flows

In response to the climate emergency and other dimensions of the current global environmental crisis, the world is facing an agroecology transition aimed at scaling up the best sustainable ways of farming into circular agri-food territories. No one knows, however, in advance, how they will perform. To explore several feasible, viable, and desirable future scenarios for these agroecological territories, we have developed a nonlinear programming model called Sustainable Agroecological Farm Reproductive Analysis as a bottom-up deliberative tool. In this article, we use it to explore the sustainable degrees of trade openness of these bio-economically circular territories by evaluating the advantages and limitations of conceiving them from an interdependent network of basically self-sufficient areas rather than as autarkic islands. Using SAFRA optimizations in a Catalan case study, applied as a preliminary test, we found that autarkic self-sufficiency would reduce the food supply capacity of the studied territory by one-third. At the same time, however, up to a point, trade openness would face growing problems and barriers to maintaining a circular replenishment of soil nutrients, as well as the landscape diversity required to house enough farm-associated biodiversity needed for other supporting and regulating ecosystem services. These results confirm the conceptual approach of the issue developed by Leopold Pfaundler in 1902, and call for more empirical studies in broader areas conducted together with local farmers and other stakeholders that jointly define boundary conditions, constraints, capabilities, and ranges of fair-trade openness evaluated for a true bottom-up agroecological transition.