Agroecology for Structural One Health

Based on colonial capitalist logics, global biosecurity strategies have long relied upon downstream measures of surveillance and control to reduce disease burden and address the rising risk of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). One Health aims to address this through what it describes as a systems approach, yet in failing to grapple with capitalist hegemony, the framework reproduces the microbial and logical diseases it intends to prevent. Calls for a Structural One Health approach embed the principles of agroecology as a pathway toward food sovereignty, joining the calls of peasants, smallholders, Indigenous Peoples, fishers and forest dwellers globally. This paradigm of food production takes a truly ecosystems approach in embedding place-based production systems within political economies centred on human and more-than-human relations rather than on extraction and division. Working outside the standardized monoculture of industrial agriculture, agroecological food producers the world over embrace biodiversity as an effective safeguard against harmful pathology, creating and living the alternative paradigms necessary for unwinding our interconnected planetary crises. One Health without structural integrity is only as strong a framework as status quo production systems and biosecurity measures, serving to reinforce rather than transform the current dominant global system.