Dr. Daphne Miller is bringing the worlds of medicine, nutrition and agroecology ever closer. An author, practicing physician and public speaker, Dr. Miller studied medical anthropology at Brown University before receiving her medical degree from Harvard Medical School. Her books include Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up and The Jungle Effect: The Healthiest Diets from Around the World, Why They Work and How to Make Them Work for You. Dr. Miller recently had the opportunity to take time from her busy schedule to talk to Food Tank about her experience at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) International Symposium on Agroecology for Food Security and Nutrition, and why agroecology is important to healthy ecosystems and healthy bodies worldwide.

Food Tank (FT): You spoke this fall at the FAO International Symposium on Agroecology for Food Security and Nutrition in Rome on Diverse Farming Systems and Diverse Diets, and participated in a panel discussion on health and nutrition security through agroecology. What were some of the debates that the panel covered?

Dr. Daphne Miller (DM): Agroecology is both a farming science and a social movement. It focuses on how to nourish a community by supporting the biodiversity of local ecosystems and the innovations of local farmers. Advocates of this type of farming have long promoted its important role in ensuring food security, but what was so significant about this Rome meeting was that it took place at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, an organization which (until now) has largely supported industrial agriculture as the best way to feed the world.

The purpose of the meeting was to explore the following question: “When it comes to simultaneously improving food production, environmental health and human health, does agroecology outperform industrial agriculture?”

Measures of food security have mostly focused on crop yields or kilocalories of food available to a given population. When these are used as the metric of success, agroecology does not necessarily show an impressive edge over industrial agriculture. But when net gains from soil conservation, water harvesting, community economics and human health are included in the equation, agroecology begins to look like a much more promising option.