The conservation of agricultural biodiversity as a strategy to guarantee food security and sovereignty in Brazil

Hunger is a problem that covers several sectors, being mainly the product of a historical trajectory of disorganization of public policies. In this context, concerns arise with strategies that enable increased production, availability, and access to food, with emerging proposals that value the environment during this process, as well as food security and sovereignty. To guarantee these motions, traditional communities stand out, which adopt agroecological production systems, aiming for a sustainable approach that conserves the agrobiodiversity of the people and enhances sociocultural diversity through their “creole” varieties. Creole are commonly selected and cultivated in certain locations by different people, often for their own subsistence. Considering the conception that the epistemological crisis of conventional science is giving space to a new political and participatory epistemology to rise, the objective of this study is to discuss the contribution of agrobiodiversity preserved by traditional communities, represented especially by Creole seeds, under the agroecological perspective, as a strategy to guarantee food security and sovereignty. To this end, qualitative research was adopted as a methodology, to compare agricultural evolution and the food crisis. From this perspective, it is possible to discuss the premises, providing the characteristics of an agriculture on an agroecological basis and its relationship with conserved agrobiodiversity, mainly with native seeds. In the end, it was found that the maintenance of native seeds contributes to food security and sovereignty in line with the agroecological approach, highlighting the urgency of opting for one of the paths: maintaining the model driven by predatory agricultural production capitalism of own sources of resources on which it depends; or the consideration of “recalcitrant territories” sheltered by traditional peoples who position themselves intending to modify the paradoxical and autophagic character of the current scenario, providing strategies to solve problems such as the food crisis which, in itself, exposes other difficulties faced by different peoples.