A lot of titles of research papers in agricultural economics end with "...sustainable development". In your opinion, what does "sustainable development" mean?
For me sustainable agricultural development mean that development which ensures efficient production of safe, high quality agricultural products, in a way that protects and improves the natural environment, the social and economic conditions of farmers, their employees and local communities, and safeguards the health and welfare of all farmed species
sustainability in the context to the agricultural sector seems not much simplistic as in other sectors with reference to the social economic aspects of the farmers in developing country. Utilization of resources for the agriculture sector is more efficient in developed countries may be due to long term experiences of balancing food production and environment in a way towards sustainability. but, still poor farmers in developing countries keen on Economic aspects by increasing food production ignoring the some aspects of sustainable agriculture development. Indeed, this has happening for the sake of hunger than thinking sustainability which seems more justice in their point of view.
nevertheless, farmers in developing country should adopt to the sustainable agricultural practices to have long term as well as more secure agricultural development in their nation.
What I understand with sustainable development in agricultural research is that "without harming the natural resource base, obtaining optimal production levels". Having said that, I would like to add that sustainability does not always mean adopting organic means to produce, but instead it means that using the modern technology in a rational way to ensure that the natural resource base in not altered but sustained for future use by coming generations. Any technology which ensures that the present status of our natural resource base is not degraded can be put under this head, e.g. Resource Conservation technologies, like Zero tillage, technologies to conserve water and energy etc.
In agricultural economics we use this term also for maintaining the level of income, employment, food and nutrition for livelihood security so as to sustain the farm families at the minimum standards prescribed by experts from time to time for sustaining their families both in terms of income and overall health.
In the short run, sustainability is determined by the economics. In the long run, our agricultural practices will dictate the economics. The key to ensuring both is to develop a path that shows how to improve the economics of the farmer while showing him/her how to increase the productivity of the soil. This is no easy task.
The arguments when applied to aquaculture are about the same... just substitute clean water for productive soil. Only, the results will show up faster as the market will not let you sell fish produced in contaminated water.
There are at least two components to address when attempting an answer: the sustainable agriculture and the sustainable development (of agriculture). The first one, the sustainable agriculture, does not necessarily involve development, not in the sense of intervention. Many remote and stable rural communities have sustainable practices although archaic or technologically obsolete. Their practices are sustainable since they preserved with little to no alteration over the decades even centuries. That however is sustainable agriculture providing sufficiency to the farmers' community and their families. There can be quoted many other examples where sustainable and archaic practices have considerable returns today, including community wide benefits and positive side effects, such as in tourism and agri-tourism.
The second component on sustainable development involves one or more interventions, often triggered from outside (of those respective communities). In this sense, the development is seen, with almost no exception as a growth. The basic assumptions when expecting growth in a community or sector include: unequal growth/development, growing wealth gaps and increase of extreme poverty and wealth, among others. This is the basic “requirement” for the development to be “sustainable”.
Elaborating on semantics, a form of development, agricultural in this case, is to be sustainable if the impact it produces does not fades out in time and disappears. Form this point of view no development is sustainable unless for a limited time period. On the other hand, even revolutionary things get replaced over time by newer findings and innovations. Therefore even if there is a positive and sustainable (impact of the) development generator it will be replaced sooner or later.
My opinion about the “sustainable” development is that all development has to be sustainable or else should not be regarded as development! Now, about the time dimension of the sustainability, there is no research I know, so far, about the length in time. Maybe it is high time someone makes a classification and slices that into different stages or categories... Anyone interested to build a team on that? :)
In the context of sustainable development of entire social-ecological systems, to me an adaptive approach still provides a fundamental framework for the implementation and adaptation of land management and polices over time as more information is collected. A crucial issue then could be developing landscape planning (e.g., restoration) that might accommodate for surprises and for variation of land-use pattern as humans will change land-use, and especially land management, to adjust to climate change. In this respect, new conceptual frameworks for the design of landscape sustainability are emerging to establish how landscape condition can be made sustainable in face of unpredictable disturbance and change (e.g., Olsson et al., 2004; Folke et al., 2005; Musacchio, 2009; Opdam et al., 2009; Ostrom, 2009; Benayas and Bullock 2012; Zurlini et al., 2013; Jones et al., 2013).
Strategies to this end could involve the design and management of landscape elements and structure to create less contagious and more heterogeneous rural landscapes enhancing biodiversity-oriented connectivity. In this respect, smallholder farming systems are crucial for rural sustainability. This can imply the strategic placement of managed and semi-natural ecosystems in landscapes to reduce stress intensity, so the services of natural ecosystems (e.g., commodities, water availability, pollination, reduced land erosion, soil formation) can be even enhanced (Jones et al., 2013). Land separation and land sharing are examples of such strategies (Benayas and Bullock, 2012). The first involves restoring or creating non-farmland habitat in agricultural landscapes through, for example, woodlands, natural grasslands, hedgerows, wetlands, and meadows on arable lands (Benayas and Bullock, 2012), or riparian habitats (Jones et al., 2010) to benefit wildlife and specific services. Land sharing involves the adoption of biodiversity-based agricultural practices, learning from traditional farming practices, transformation of conventional agriculture into organic agriculture and of „„simple‟‟ crops and pastures into agro-forestry systems. Some existing smallholder farming systems already have high water-, nutrient-, and energy-use efficiencies and conserve resources and biodiversity without losing yield (Kiers et al., 2008).
A key aspect is to implement monitoring programs to evolve iteratively as new information emerges and research and managing questions change. This helps evaluate how environmental targets and ecosystem services respond to specific landscape pattern designs, and whether or not certain landscape patterns at multiple scales result in synergies and trade-offs among different types of ecosystem services. In a nutshell, learning from what we are doing and from what we have already done.
The more I study the concept of "sustainability" the more I have the impression to study an "empty" concept: the hard core of meaning of this concept is minimal, the interpretations and proposed implications really wide - depending on who talks about sustainability. And more so concerning sustainable agriculture - in a discursive field dominated by big agricultural industries, almost everything outside the traditional big scale agriculture presents itself as sustainable.
For me, concepts such as food sovereignty or -of course...- the Good Life are more interesting, as they still have some kind of definition and are therefore still used in the fight for certain demands. Nevertheless, I think it would be interesting to study how and when sustainability became "empty" and lost its critical contents - but that seems to be the work of a life time.
Farmers, economists, citizens, politicians.... did not have formations in disciplines like Ecology or Environmental Sciences and therefore ignore or do not think about questions like:
1) Why is there in some regions so much agricultural waste, i. e many agricultural products thrown away because not consumed/not exploited? Why not storing unconsumed agricultural products (e.g. food) during periods of overproduction to anticipate and compensate for period of underproduction e.g. due to environmental fluctuations (e.g. drought, heavy rain)?
2) What is the impact of (long-term) mismatches between the scale of provisioning (e.g. local production) and the scale of demand (e.g. international demand for local exotic agricultural products), perhaps causing overexploitation of local environments having long-term consequences (e.g. soil erosion, reduction in soil quality)?
3) What is the impact of agricultural protection approaches (pesticides, genetically manipulated food) for the sustainability of other environmental components surrounding the agricultural landscape?
4) What is the relative importance, of production, transport and consumption in the sustainability of agricultural systems?
...
If I remember well, all this has been discussed in the Club of Rome (1970) (and before), showing for instance that the vast majority of the people have either short-term visions or local scale visions without asking where resources come from and at what (environmental) cost.
Dear Dragos,
When I started to research on sustainable development, I also observed that there was neither oficial nor widely accepted definition with regards to rural areas and agriculture, so that I had to create mine, which I paste here for you, and you will be able to find in the paper attached.
Sustainable rural development 'fundamentally refers to a process of change and multidimensional evolution that depends on the interaction of the social, cultural, environmental, economic, and political subsystems. Its objective is to improve both the quality of life and the economic well-being of the residents of relatively isolated and depopulated areas, and their institutional, physical, and cultural environment by means of the active participation of the people themselves, the administration, and other external agents'.
Article The Contribution of Organic Livestock to Sustainable Rural D...
Dear Dragos,
Sustainable agriculture means to produce high quality and healthy agricultural products mainly food and feed without harming the biosphere (soil, water, air), conserving nature and countryside (even the aesthetic view) and maintaining the ecosystems and their services with one phrase sustaining life without economic and political profit.
I think this report by WRI does a fairly good job. It defines sustainability and then proposes a menu of solutions with practical examples of strategies that meet the definition.
Book Creating a sustainable food future. A menu of solutions to s...
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