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The present article analyzes the phenomenon of agroecology in the current context of the dispute over rural spaces between, on the one hand, agribusiness and other corporate land grabbers, and on the other, organized farmers and their allies. Using the concepts of food sovereignty, disputed material and immaterial territories, and re-peasantization, we explain the importance of agroecology for rural social movements in this context. We provide examples from the "Farmer to Farmer" movement, a strategy that rural social movements have used to spread agroecology on a greater scale, and discuss the growing process of building agroecology processes within the transnational social movement La Via Campesina, which brings together rural movements, peasant organizations and family farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transnational rural social movement La Vía Campesina has been critically sustained and shaped by the encounter anddiálogo de saberes(dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) between different rural cultures (East, West, North and South; peasant, indigenous, farmer, pastoralist and rural proletarian, etc.) that takes place within it, in the context of the increasingly politicized confrontation with neoliberal reality and agribusiness in the most recent phase of capital expansion. This dialog among the ‘absences’ left out by the dominant monoculture of ideas has produced important ‘emergences’ that range from mobilizing frames for collective action – like thefood sovereigntyframework – to social methodologies for the spread ofagroecologyamong peasant families. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]