Agroecology has become the goal and the guideline for sustainable agricultural production and food systems. Governments and (natural) scientists tend to frame agroecology mainly as a technological challenge. The paper presents agroecology as a social intensification pathway. While behavioral aspects of farmers’ decisions have been largely investigated, the role social relationships and power relations play in the agroecological intensification pathway has received less attention. The paper argues that the agroecological intensification pathway is a means for its (marginalized) supporters to increase their socio-political capital and their control over their livelihoods and the food system. For this purpose, I examine the agroecology intensification pathway from a political ecology angle, at three levels, each embedded in the next : the farm level, the territorial level, and the global level. Actors engaging in agroecology derive social and political benefits from it: These are self-determination at the household, the territory or of the global food system level, redefining the farmer-nature relationship, and the use of agroecology as a discourse in resource conflicts. In essence, these benefits depend on the ability of farmers to organize their territories into agroecology-enabling spaces. The building and protection of such spaces requires agroecological actors to fight for their rights to existence. Social movements and farmer groups do precisely this by creating an enabling institutional environment and challenging the dominant morale and neo-classical values. The agroecological intensification pathway, if based on a grammar of egalitarian relations to nature and others in the food system, requires and has a potential for fundamental transformational changes. Thus, the agroecology intensification pathway appears inherently political.

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