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Abstract
More than one-third of the Earth’s land surface is covered by agroecosystems. These systems where people have selected and altered the environment for crop plants and livestock animals vary enormously in their intensity of human intervention. Highly stable and diverse traditional polyculture systems, on the other hand, have maintained global agricultural biodiversity, resilient ecosystems, and valuable cultural knowledge systems, but above all, sustained the provision of multiple goods, food security, and quality of life for millions of people. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations describes these ‘agri-cultural’ systems as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) that are “important centers of origin and diversity of domesticated plant and animal species, the in situ conservation of which is of great importance and global value” (FAO 2008). The increasingly global reach of capitalized industrial agricultural development and production is perceived as the greatest threat to the persistence of sustainable peasant agricultural communities and agro-biodiversity conservation. This research engages with a conceptual framework that utilizes; the Agrarian Question, Metabolic Rift, and Double Movement to articulate how the GIAHS Chiloé Project of southern Chile achieves a unique organizational structure based on principles of agroecology to affect agrarian transitions. This dissertation examines the GIAHS Chiloé Project as a new form of organizing a metabolism of agrarian resistance with which to conserve heritage agricultural communities and their environment from the disruptive rifts wrought by both the state and industrial agriculture.