José Ramón Vielma Guevara / Juana del Carmen Villarreal Andrade / Luis Vicente Gutierrez Peña
Agroecology was born as a consequence of the need of human beings to produce food to maintain themselves as a species, but without destroying or minimizing the impact that agricultural activities have on the environment on a global scale. From the etymological point of view, the word ecology is a compound word: 'agroecology' is formed by Greek roots and means 'agriculture that takes care of the relationships between living beings and their environment'. Its lexical components are: agros (field, land in its natural state) and oikos (house), plus the suffix -logía (science that studies). Agroecology is a scientific discipline, a set of practices and a social movement, according to the definition of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).