agronomy Review Sociotechnical Context and Agroecological Transition for Smallholder Farms in Benin and Burkina Faso Parfait K. Tapsoba 1 , Augustin K. N. Aoudji 1, Madeleine Kabore 2, Marie-Paule Kestemont 3, Christian Legay 4 and Enoch G. Achigan-Dako 5,* 1 School of Economics, Socio-Anthropology and Communication for Rural Development (EESAC), Faculty of Agronomic Sciences (FSA), University of Abomey-Calavi (UAC), 03 BP 2819 Cotonou, Benin;
[email protected] (P.K.T.);
[email protected] (A.K.N.A.) 2 Institut des Sciences des Sociétés (INSS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique (CNRST), 09 BP 355 Ouagadougou 09, Burkina Faso;
[email protected] 3 UCLouvain (UCL), Place des Doyens 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;
[email protected] 4 Autre Terre, Organisation Non Gouvernementale (ONG) du Groupe Terre, 01 BP 4173 01 Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso;
[email protected] 5 Laboratory of Genetics, Biotechnology and Seed Science (GBioS), Faculty of Agronomic Sciences (FSA), University of Abomey-Calavi (UAC), Abomey-Calavi, 01 BP 526 Cotonou, Benin * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +229-9539-3283 Received: 25 July 2020; Accepted: 9 September 2020; Published: 22 September 2020 Abstract: West Africa is facing the challenge of its population’s food insecurity in a context of accelerated degradation of natural resources. In order to efficiently face this double bottleneck, agroecological interventions were implemented as a way to promote best agricultural practices. Agroecology is a mode of production that nowadays questions our food system which, despite technological progress, still struggles to feed the world’s population. This systematic review is part of the vision of a deep agroecology and aims at analyzing the institutional, political, organizational, and social obstacles and levers for an agroecological transition and its amplification in Burkina Faso and Benin.