M. Jahi Johnson-Chappell
W. K. Kellogg Foundation Endowed Chair in Food, Society and Sustainability | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
M. Jahi Johnson-Chappell is a political agroecologist with training in chemical engineering, ecology and evolutionary biology.
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Biography
Dr. M. Jahi Johnson-Chappell is a scholar, organizer, son of social workers, and grandson of Michigan farmers. From 2020-2022, he served as the Executive Director of the Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network, or SAAFON, which offers direct support and organizing for Black, sustainable farmers in the Southeastern United States and US Virgin Islands. Jahi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, both from the University of Michigan.
Over the past 20 years, Jahi has researched and advocated at international, national, and local levels for participatory, socially just, and ecologically sustainable agrifood systems that center the voices of farmers, laborers, and the communities they serve. Pursuing this goal has taken him across sectors and continents, including positions as Associate Professor of Agroecology at Coventry University in the United Kingdom, and as Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Justice at Washington State University Vancouver, where he also served as Associate Director of the Center for Social and Environmental Justice. In the nonprofit sector, Jahi has previously served as the Executive Director of the 46-year-old think tank Food First, and as Senior Scientist and Director of Agroecology and Agricultural Policy at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Additionally, he was a Founding Board member of the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI), and is a former member of the Executive Committee of the Agroecology Fund. He is currently the Vice Chair of the Board of Thousand Currents, an international grassroots foundation.
Jahi’s first book, Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Beyond, was published in 2018 by the University of California Press. In it, he analyzed world-unique breakthroughs in reducing hunger and supporting small-scale farmers in southeastern Brazil. Beginning to End Hunger’s scholarly contributions were recognized by the Society of Human Ecology with their Gerald L. Young Book Award. It was also recently cited by the United Nations’ High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition as a primary source for their recommendation to add the concept of people’s sociopolitical power, or agency, as an additional pillar of the FAO’s definition of food security.
Industry Expertise (1)
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (10)
Sustainable Development
Food Security Policy
Anti-Hunger Efforts
Sustainability
Right to Food
Agroecology
Ecology
Evolutionary Biology
Regenerative Agriculture
Conservation Biology
Accomplishments (1)
Gerald L. Young Book Award, Society of Human Ecology (professional)
2018
Education (2)
University of Michigan: Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 2009
University of Michigan: BSE, Chemical Engineering 2000
Affiliations (5)
- The Ecological Society of America : Former Chair, Agroecology Section
- Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University : Honorary Research Fellow
- Instituto para la Investigación y Acción en Agroecología (Puerto Rico) : Board of Directors
- Agroecology Research-Action Collective : Co-Coordinator/Co-Founder
- Thousand Currents : Vice Chair, Board of Directors
Links (5)
News (6)
378. Dr. M. Jahi Johnson-Chappell on the Link Between Ending Hunger and Deepening Democracy
Food Talk online
2023-05-18
On "Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg," Dani speaks with Dr. M. Jahi Johnson-Chappell, the Director of the Center for Regional Food Systems at Michigan State University. They discuss the barriers to feeding the world’s population despite having enough food, the growing interest in regional food systems following supply chain shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether a true food movement exists in the United States.
MSU receiving $20M to serve as USDA Regional Food Business Center
Michigan Farm News online
2023-05-15
“We are honored and delighted at this opportunity to provide a historic level of support to communities, organizations, and entrepreneurs across the Great Lakes Midwest region,” said CRFS Director M. Jahi Johnson-Chappell.
Food Sovereignty: Getting To The Root Of The Agriculture Problem
WORT 89.9 FM radio
2022-12-09
In our current global agriculture system, corporations focus on producing massive volumes of food as fast and as cheaply as possible. Sounds good, considering we’re always trying to solve world hunger, right? The Family Farm Defenders, a small-farm workers’ rights group based in Madison, would disagree. As would the keynote speaker for their upcoming award ceremony, Dr. Jahi Chappell.
Realizing the right to food: How agroecology tackles both the climate and food crises in one go
Forests News online
2022-11-28
Growing food more locally and improving connectivity between producers and consumers – core principles of agroecology – are aligned with developing ‘deliberative’ or ‘deep’ democracy that confers more equal participation in decisions about food production and distribution, said Jahi Chappell, the incoming Director of the Michigan State University, Center for Regional Food Systems.
Regenerative agriculture needs a reckoning
The Counter online
2021-05-03
M. Jahi Chappell, a scholar and political ecologist who now serves as executive director of the Southeastern African-American Farmers Organic Network (SAAFON), was one of several sources who told me the process of defining “regenerative agriculture” had been largely led by prominent foundations, think tanks, and corporations.
Two Biden Priorities, Climate and Inequality, Meet on Black-Owned Farms
The New York Times online
2021-01-31
“There’s so much knowledge out there, both what’s been modified from our African forbearers and what’s been created in the South,” said M. Jahi Chappell, who heads the Southeastern African-American Farmers Organic Network, a group of Black farmers engaging in ecologically-sustainable agriculture. But for a long time, he said, “The voices of African-American farmers haven’t really been heard.”
Journal Articles (3)
Sparing or expanding? The effects of agricultural yields on farm expansion and deforestation in the tropics
Biodiversity and Conservation2023 Land Sparing predicts that agricultural intensification is the best way to meet productive, humanitarian and conservation goals, and the recent prominence of this strategy on conservation and agricultural agendas is notable. The basic idea is that, by producing more, agriculture intensification can spare natural habitats from further agriculture expansion. Nevertheless, some authors have suggested that intensifying and increasing productivity may actually lead to increasing expansion of agricultural lands (Jevons Paradox). We test the association between agricultural yield on farmland expansion and on deforestation between 2000 and 2015 in 122 nations along the tropics, and in the main tropical regions. To this end we used Generalized Linear Models, as well as Panel Data to verify the effects of agricultural yield and socioeconomic variables on farmland expansion and deforestation. Greater yield increases lead to higher deforestation rates in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and Caribbean and increasing yield average induces agriculture expansion in East Asia and Pacific, giving support to the Jevons Paradox hypothesis. On the other hand, we found a positive association between yield average and forest area change in the tropics, nevertheless, regression coefficients were very small, compared to other significant models. Therefore, Jevons Paradox seems to be more common than Land Sparing and increasing yields inducing deforestation rather than curbing it.
Un‐yielding: Evidence for the agriculture transformation we need
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences2022 There has been a seismic shift in the center of gravity of scientific writing and thinking about agriculture over the past decades, from a prevailing focus on maximizing yields toward a goal of balancing trade-offs and ensuring the delivery of multiple ecosystem services. Maximizing crop yields often results in a system where most benefits accrue to very few (in the form of profits), alongside irreparable environmental harm to agricultural ecosystems, landscapes, and people. Here, we present evidence that an un-yielding, which we define as de-emphasizing the importance of yields alone, is necessary to achieve the goal of a more Food secure, Agrobiodiverse, Regenerative, Equitable and just (FARE) agriculture. Focusing on yields places the emphasis on one particular outcome of agriculture, which is only an intermediate means to the true endpoint of human well-being. Using yields as a placeholder for this outcome ignores the many other benefits of agriculture that people also care about, like health, livelihoods, and a sense of place. Shifting the emphasis to these multiple benefits rather than merely yields, and to their equitable delivery to all people, we find clear scientific evidence of win-wins for people and nature through four strategies that foster FARE agriculture: reduced disturbance, systems reintegration, diversity, and justice (in the form of securing rights to land and other resources). Through a broad review of the current state of agriculture, desired futures, and the possible pathways to reach them, we argue that while trade-offs between some ecosystem services in agriculture are unavoidable, the same need not be true of the end benefits we desire from them.
A polycentric food sovereignty approach to climate resilience in the Philippines
Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene2022 Enhancing climate resilience in agrarian communities requires improving the underlying socioecological conditions for farmers to engage in adaptation and mitigation strategies, alongside collaborative and redistributive community development to reduce vulnerabilities. To overcome barriers to climate resilience in the Philippines, a grassroots farmer-led organization comprised of resource-poor smallholders, scientists, and nongovernmental organizations have organized a polycentric network over the past 30 years to implement food sovereignty initiatives. We explore the extent to which the network’s decentralized and farmer-led organizational structure; programming and services; promotion of diversified, organic, and agroecological farming systems; and political organizing and advocacy create broadly accessible and diverse pathways for resource-poor smallholders to build climate resilience. We find that the Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag-Unlad ng Agrikultura’s (Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development) polycentric governance approach directly addresses the root causes of vulnerability, particularly in working to reclaim farmer rights and control over resources, connecting local and global struggles, and revitalizing agrobiodiversity and place-based knowledge.
