The following story appears in AGRA’s “Transformed Livelihoods– AGRA’s impact in Africa” : Savaio found herself closing the business periodically, due to the ebb and flow of the agricultural cycle. Her busiest time came during the planting season, when farmers were looking for inputs. “I was serving just a handful of farmers, not even close to a hundred,” she says. “I can’t be exact, but it was a small venture with dim prospects.” Back then, an inventory valued at US$ 1,000 would last her into the new season, before having to restock. Her profit never reached US$ 200, and occasionally she would incur losses as some chemical inputs expired on her shelves. Being a resourceful woman, however, when the shop was not active she turned to producing crops of her own. In 2010, Concern Universal, an international organization working with smallholder farmers in Chimoio, approached Savaio with a training invitation. Concern Universal had been funded by AGRA to help i...
Here's a brief summary timeline of the movement towards agroecology. Agroecological farming is probably as old as farming itself, Western science has only recently begun to examine it. This timeline covers early agronomic and ethnographic studies on what would become agroecology to its scholarship, social movements, and institutional acceptance of today.