Abstract
In various contexts where productivity norms increasingly permeate all scales of food production systems, I propose analyze farmers’ decision making and practices in adjustment to various agronomic and ecological dimensions, as well as aspects related to product transformation, social organization, and land access. The need to build a less destructive and more resilient agriculture in the face of the ecological crisis leads me in this thesis to explore the role of values. I explore how farmers give meaning to their actions and redefine desirable orientations in a given socio-cultural context. Considering that agroecology cannot be solely based on expert evaluation focused on economic and ecological indicators, my work aims to identify approaches that can account for the different relationships with plants in the choices made by farmers. Agrobiodiversity encompasses the values of different cultivated species, as well as their systemic interactions. In this thesis, I first conduct a literature review of the multiple values of agrobiodiversity to provide an overview of the values described in recent scientific publications and how they are studied (Chapter 1). The obtained results challenge the predominance of economic and productive values related to practices and crop choices and instead reveal the diversity of values from the farmers' perspective. I complement this approach with two field surveys in the northwest of Morocco and in the southern French Alps. My objective is to describe how values interact with the multiple dimensions of a local system, from the field to the territory: values, practices, socioecological contexts, and agrobiodiversity, encompassing varieties, species, and their diversity. To achieve this, I draw on various theoretical and methodological contributions from anthropology, the pragmatic philosophy of values, and field practices in geography and ethnoecology. I highlight that agrobiodiversity is shaped by social interactions related to the land, beyond motivations directly linked to the cultivation of specific plants. Local organizational knowledge also plays a significant role in understanding agrobiodiversity dynamics (Chapter 2). Farmers take into account multiple social, environmental, cultural, climatic, economic, and political components of the socio-ecosystem to distribute their crops in space and time. These values are dynamic and recompose through changes in agricultural practices that oppose the limitations of industrial agriculture, creating new attachments and identities (Chapter 3). Therefore, my work questions the conditions for maintaining multiple values and agrobiodiversity in a context of ecological and economic instability.