Dr. Marina Durano, Senior Director of the Pooled Fund, Collaborative for a Gender-Just Economy
Dr. Sophia Murphy, Executive Director, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Our food and agriculture systems are in deep trouble. The EAT-Lancet Commission reports that food is a major driver of environmental degradation, responsible for a dominant share of the harm in five of the six planetary boundaries already exceeded. At the same time, agriculture is among the sectors most vulnerable to climate change, biodiversity loss, and growing freshwater scarcity. And despite unprecedented levels of global food production, hunger and malnutrition are rising. An estimated 318 million people in the world are facing acute food insecurity (see 2026 Global Outlook). Industrialized food systems show every sign of overheating yet still are not getting their core job done.
Agroecology offers a compelling response to these overlapping crises. Agroecology consists of a number of principles to guide agriculture and food systems. It emphasizes intercropping and polycultures, integrating livestock, trees, and crops on the farm, focusing on healthy soils and water systems as indicators of farm success. Agroecology relies on biodiversity and encourages more diverse food production, which allows for greater dietary diversity for consumers. Evidence increasingly shows that these practices support improved nutritional outcomes. Agroecology removes the need for harmful agrochemicals, which are strongly correlated with cancer, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity degradation, and polluted waterways.
Agroecology is not just about food production. As a holistic framework, it builds food systems in ways that integrate production, distribution, and consumption, rather than treating them as disconnected challenges. Public procurement programs in countries as diverse as the U.S., Brazil, and India illustrate the possibilities of linking the human right to food with a food economy focused on rural livelihoods, local capital circulation, and creating markets for foods that meet higher standards for human and environmental wellbeing.
Agroecology and the care economy
An underexplored dimension of agroecology is its relationship to the care economy and care work. Food systems are not only about producing calories; they meet a range of daily human needs. Transforming crops into nourishing meals requires time, energy, and resources — tasks that remain largely invisible and uncounted in economics. Cooking, collecting water and fuel, and feeding dependents are core components of care work. The link to the care economy, in turn, raises the question of how agroecology frameworks view women’s work, because in much of the world, food system-related responsibilities fall disproportionately on women.
Time-use data illustrates this clearly. In South Africa, women spent an average of 17 hours per week cooking in 2010, with an additional 1.1 hours devoted to collecting firewood and water. In the United States, women’s weekly cooking time fell dramatically over the 20th century — from 25.1 hours in the 1920s to seven hours by 2010 — largely due to technological change, market provision of food, and shifts in labor patterns. However, the overall reduction in care work hours in the U.S. has not closed the gender gap in who puts in that time. The figures highlight how food preparation is shaped by infrastructure, income, and policy choices. It is largely not a matter of individual preference.
Research suggests that more time spent cooking at home is associated with better nutritional outcomes, particularly through reducing consumption of ultra-processed foods that are often considered convenient for those facing time constraints, but are also associated with poor health outcomes. In general, ultra-processed foods provide calories but are typically poor sources of essential nutrients. In low- and middle-income countries, ultra-processed foods still make up a smaller share of diets, but their consumption is rising rapidly, especially for urban poor households whose access to healthy foods are constrained by fragmented, informalized retail markets and poor transportation infrastructure. In high-income countries, ultra-processed foods are already dominant.
For many women, this trade-off between time and health presents a dilemma. They are predominantly responsible for the wellbeing of their household members. They know that time and effort spent preparing nutritious food is rewarded with better health outcomes for themselves and their dependents. Yet this work is not valued or counted in economic statistics. Indeed, when the work is turned into a commodity for purchase, it becomes a cost. And if it remains a task within the household, it is a contribution that comes in addition to, and sometimes at the expense of, paid work.
Similarly, agroecology’s contribution to better outcomes for food producers and their land is often presented as a cost: in comparison to monocrop agriculture, agroecology requires more labor, more decision-making, and engagement with less streamlined distribution systems in a food system where industrial food processing and food retail are highly centralized. Yet the benefits of agroecology are public goods, including cleaner water, cleaner air, more biodiversity, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and healthier soils for future food production. Like nutritionally healthier households, the benefits accrue not just to the individual but to society at large. In contrast, the benefits of monocrop agriculture are measured by economic indicators such as GDP. These benefits accrue disproportionately to highly capitalized farms, input suppliers, and concentrated processing and retail sectors, and are associated with a precarious and poorly paid workforce and a decline in independent small and medium-scale farms.
Relying on measures of GDP correlates monocrop agriculture with economic progress. The real costs, which include exploitative working conditions, high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, poor health outcomes, and freshwater shortages, are captured in statistics that are disconnected from economic assessments of industrial agriculture’s contribution to wellbeing. Feminist economics rejects this disconnected assessment, maintaining a holistic view of food production choices on the food system as a whole. The result amplifies the benefits of protecting and promoting more agroecological agriculture.
Policy choices drive unsustainable food systems
Instead of supporting local, community-led food provisioning, most governments direct public and private investment towards long supply chains dominated by international agribusiness firms. In many poorer developing countries, the primary commercial focus of any government support for agriculture is focused on export markets. Women appear in these systems primarily as consumers, low-wage workers, or small-scale farmers operating with minimal public support.
At the global level, export crops have generated substantial revenues for a sector that is famous for its high levels of market concentration. Meanwhile, many lower-income countries remain trapped in agricultural commodity dependence. According to UNCTAD’s State of Commodity Dependence 2025, at least 15 countries in Africa, five in South America, and eight in Oceania depend on unprocessed agricultural commodities for more than 60% of their export revenues. They are trapped because they earn relatively little from these crops and remain vulnerable to volatile commodity markets while the production of these crops puts unsustainable pressure on their environments and undermines domestic food security.
Macroeconomic policy choices play a central role in maintaining these unsustainable food systems. Growth strategies often prioritize high-output, large-scale agribusiness and commodity exports, particularly in countries with narrow tax bases and limited fiscal space. Heavy sovereign debt further constrains the pursuit of alternatives. UNCTAD’s World of Debt Report 2025 finds that 46 developing countries now spend more on public debt interest payments than on health or education. In at least five agricultural commodity-dependent countries, interest payments alone are between 1.4 and 5.1 times higher than public health expenditures. These fiscal pressures crowd out investment in local food systems, care infrastructure, and social protection.
At the same time, macroeconomic frameworks continue to largely ignore unpaid care work. National accounts fail to measure this work, which remains primarily a female domain. Yet without care, the productive economy cannot function. When public spending is cut, financial crises strike, or pandemics emerge, women’s unpaid labor often expands to fill the gaps more than men’s labor. They continue to perform socially assigned care roles while absorbing additional responsibilities created by shrinking public services, job losses, or illness.
Uniting food systems with the care economy
Agroecology could underpin a just transition for agriculture. To succeed, agroecology needs to be integrated with a broader care-centered economic vision. At its core, this vision asserts the preeminent importance of protecting nature and human wellbeing as a precondition for productive activity. This requires policy frameworks that enable both systems to flourish together, rather than treating food production and care as separate domains. Several macroeconomic shifts are particularly important:
- Public investment is needed in local infrastructure that supports shorter value chains, linking farmers directly with care workers, schools and community services, and consumers. In turn, comprehensive social protection programs should complement these policies, thus reinforcing achievements in wellbeing and environmental protection.
- Public procurement policies for food and care — covering school meals, early childhood education, and social services — can create stable demand for agroecologically produced food while improving nutritional outcomes.
- Trade policies should be reoriented to support agroecology and care. This could include targeted subsidies that support local and regional food markets and diversification away from commodity exports. The vicious cycle of commodity export production to service external debts is especially harmful, as it has contributed to exacerbating food insecurity in debtor countries, including through deforestation and excessive demands on freshwater sources.
- Migration systems must recognize agricultural and care workers as essential contributors to social and economic wellbeing and protect them as such, rather than framing them primarily as risks and deliberately creating precarious working conditions through badly designed migration programs.
- True-cost accounting of our industrial food system should be applied to both environmental impacts and unpaid care work, making visible what current economic models systematically exclude.
Achieving these shifts will require integrated governance approaches that bring agroecology and the care economy into closer alignment. Rethinking how food, care, and macroeconomic policy interact is a necessary first step towards a just transition — one that respects planetary boundaries while advancing wellbeing, equity, and resilience.
