Résumé
Agroecology is increasingly put forward by development actors as a way forward for family farming in sub-Saharan Africa to meet several challenges (AFSA 2016, Debray et al. 2019, Gliessman 2020). Many scholars demonstrated the benefits of agroecology for income and food security (Kangmennaang et al. 2017; Gollin 2018; Bezner Kerr et al. 2022), ecosystems sustainability (Dufumier, Marc et Le Naire, Olivier 2019), or women empowerment (Bezner Kerr et al. 2019; Cetrone et al. 2021). But farming structure is a marginal dimension of agroecology in many researches while the issue of farming structure is a central point in the way in which the transformation of agriculture “should be” carried out in SSA. Given this background, this communication aims to question the relation between the types of family farm structures and the levels and diversity of agroecological principles implemented, in order to better understand the heterogeneity of agroecological transitions in African territories. The main hypothesis is that the implementation of agroecological principles depends on the structural characteristics of farms and that the configuration of this relationship between structures and agroecology depends on the context. To answer this question, this communication has a comparative approach and uses a database including about 3000 farms in 10 study sites in 7 countries (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Tunisia, Tanzania) produced by the Viability project (a project lead by ICRAF and Cirad in the framework of the Transformative Partnership Platform on agroecology). By building farm typologies, we identify main patterns of relations between family farm structures and types of agroecology in SSA. Our results show that, contrary to the dominant narrative about small-scale farms being more agroecological, the situation is more complex and diverse. Some of these small-scale farms face strong structural constraints and this communication wonders if agroecology is enough to remove them.