Sustainable Development Agricultural Economics and Policy: Intensification versus Diversification (original) (raw)
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Sustainable Agricultural Development Economics and Policy
Sustainability, 2023
Agriculture, in developing and developed nations alike, will face huge challenges over the next century in meeting human food needs and shifting preferences. Agricultural economic development, from the personal and local level to the global and industrial level, must be balanced with communal needs (e.g., food sovereignty, self-sufficiency) and address environmental challenges (e.g., climate change, ecosystem degradation). Local, national, and global policies must support sustainable agricultural economic development, while also addressing future environmental and community impacts. This Special Issue focuses on agricultural systems and forest management in developing or developed nations in Africa, Asia, South America, and North America, and spans conversations from the personal and local level all the way up to the production and circulation of global commodities. Analytical methods from published articles are employed to focus on socio-economic surveys, field experiments, remote sensing, and public policy proposals. The research stresses that sustainable agricultural development can be economically viable while also reducing the environmental impact of agricultural activities and strengthening local communities. An improved understanding of sustainable agricultural and forestry systems can help farmers, researchers, students, and policy makers to design and implement similar systems. From an economic perspective, sustainability can be achieved through “economies of scale”. In simple terms, this involves increasing economic efficiency and agricultural productivity to spare land in the short run, reducing the need to convert natural habitats into agricultural areas. While export commodity agriculture can employ local workers, the diversified food needs of local communities may not be addressed under such systems. The agricultural development of both intensive and extensive systems may be more challenging in the future given changes in climate, agroecosystem degradation, and diminishing resource availability. Agricultural and forestry systems involving commodities may be less sustainable in the future. However, these systems can be designed to be more durable to future shocks in order to address the sustainability shortcomings of the “economies of scale” approach. Alternatively, sustainable agricultural development can use “economies of scope”, where agricultural producers diversify production and input use using systems-based approaches. While such diversification can be profitable, minimizes environmental impacts, and meets local community food needs, the use of these systems may be challenging due to the complexity of managing farms like an ecosystem, reducing input use, the need to sell directly to consumers, or a lack of available capital. Government policies can be structured to support more diversified agricultural production. Sustainable development involves specialization and diversification. Despite the potential for global agriculture to undergo intensification, this may not be environmentally sustainable. Diversification can involve enterprise diversification and ecological intensification. Regional case studies highlighted in this Special Issue focus on diversified agricultural systems for the creation of more sustainable future food systems. We are grateful to the efforts of all researchers who submitted manuscript submissions to this Special Issue of Sustainability. Your research efforts have gone a long way to improving the understanding of more sustainable agricultural and forestry systems. A special thanks to Ionut Spanu, the managing editor of this Special Issue, for his invaluable editorial and publication support over the past two years. Gabriel Rezende Faria, a journalist and public relations officer at Embrapa, Brazil, graciously provided the cover photograph for this Special Issue. Many thanks also to my family who made this work possible.
TEM Journal, 2023
The current research aimed at addressing the trends, challenges, and opportunities in agricultural economics. The constant development in agricultural economics warrants a better understanding of such changes to help with effective decision making in agriculture. Consecutively, a review of literature has enabled the research to identify three trends; organic farming, agroforestry, and climatesmart agriculture. The research used secondary data and primary data when conducting the thematic analysis. The findings from the analysis revealed that opportunities such as consumer demand, profitability, and government subsidies motivated the farmers into undertaking sustainable practices. Meanwhile, the challenges such as time constraint, farm size, and access to equipment and expert skills acted as barriers that prevented the farmers from adopting sustainable practices.
Recent Contributions of Agricultural Economics Research in the Field of Sustainable Development
Agriculture, 2018
Sustainable development is more often considered by media, public opinion, and politicians to be the main goal our society should attempt to pursue in the coming years. To this aim, academic researchers have made sustainability one of the main objects of their studies. This work focuses on environmental sustainability and presents a brief overview of how it is taken into consideration in the agricultural economics field by considering this topic from different perspectives and thus highlighting how this field is gradually broadening its scope to include sustainable development objectives. Our analysis shows that the path towards sustainable development is strongly correlated to the protection of the environment. Therefore, agricultural policies aimed at protecting and preserving the environment, and, more in general, innovation along the agri-food chain, together with consumer attention towards environmental issues, can play an important role in achieving this objective.
Concern about agricultural sustainability emerged as a major issue in the closing decades of the last century as part of the global debate about the sustainability of economic development. In the 1980s, the three pillar concept of sustainable development was proposed and specifically applied by Conway to the evaluation of alternative agroecosystems. Although Conway’s contribution was important at the time, it was limited in its perspective. Recent approaches adopt a wider approach, and in this century, attention has been focusing on ways to sustainably increase agricultural supplies rather than to just maintain these. This recognizes the fact that a substantial increase in demand for agricultural produce is expected in this century. Consequently, the scope and rationale for sustainably intensifying agriculture is examined (in some detail), and the extent to which greater use of organic agriculture is able to contribute to sustainable agricultural development is assessed. The comparative roles of agroecology and economics in guiding agricultural production are discussed, and the concept of multifunctional agriculture is re-examined in the light of proposals for the sustainable intensification of agriculture. Important shifts in the debate about agricultural sustainability have occurred in this century.
Sustainable Agriculture: Interpretations, Analyses and Prospects
The World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet those of the future". Since that time, much attention has been devoted toward better defining the concept, and developing measures to facilitate its assessment (for example, Daly and Cobb 1989; Liverman et al. 1987). While the permutations are many, the common underlying premise relates to the interdependencies and compatibility among environment, economy, and society. Agriculture is a globally occurring activity which relates directly and powerfully to the present and future condition of environments, economies, and societies. While agriculture has provided for basic social and economic needs of people, it has also caused environmental degradation which has prompted a burgeoning interest in its sustainability. Like the concept of 'sustainable development', the t...
Sustainable Development of Agriculture
Sustainable Development of Agriculture, 1988
Food problems-the efficient production or procurement of food and its appropriate distribution among members of society-are problems endemic to mankind. Yet the nature and dimensions of these problems have been changing over time. As economic systems have developed, specialization has increased; and this has led to increased interdependences of rural and urban areas, of agricultural and nonagricultural sectors, and of nations. When the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) began the Food and Agriculture Program (FAP) in 1976, we started with these objectives: (1) To evaluate the nature and dimensions of the world food situation. (2) To identify the factors that affect it. (3) To suggest policy alternatives at national, regional, and global levels: (a) To alleviate current food problems. (b) To prevent food problems in the future. To realize these objectives, FAP was organized around two major tasks. The first task was directed at national policy for food and agriculture in an international situation. Here, computable general equilibrium models were developed for nearly 20 major developed and developing countries and were linked together to examine food trade, aid, capital flows, and how they affect hunger, in addition to the effects of national government policies, which were also considered in detail. This approach, however, needed to be complemented by another approach that dealt with food production at the farm level. The second task, therefore, began in 1980 and was directed to the sustainability of agriculture, with detailed considerations of resources, technology, and environment. This task needed conceptual work as well as case studies to illustrate the major constraints in the sustainability of agriculture. This book presents the results of this second task. Yet another major exercise by Drs. Mahendra Shah and Gunther Fischer, in collaboration with FAD, is reported elsewhere. It has a different focus in that it deals with resource potential for agriculture in developing countries.
Sustainable Agricultural Development
Springer eBooks, 2011
This conference was held at a time when world leaders were preparing to meet in Copenhagen on 7-18 December 2009 to negotiate a binding agreement for reduction of green house gases (GHG) to tackle global warming beyond 2012 and to discuss international concerns regarding climate change, energy crises, and global hunger challenges. It is generally understood that if urgent actions are not taken, the ultimate impact of climate change will be the rise of global temperature, change in frequency and patterns of rainfall leading to food insecurity in many developing countries, especially those depending on dryland farming in Africa. The main objective of the conference was to bring together educators, scientists, researchers, managers, and policy makers from around the world to discuss various aspects of the conference themes and to develop a consensus surrounding the conference synthesis report which contains a set of valuable recommendations, as a way forward for addressing climate change and food security issues. The conference organizers had received an overwhelming response to the call for papers. The submitted abstracts were reviewed and those deemed appropriate to conference themes were accepted. That led to submission of full papers for conference books. Papers related to conference themes were presented in five plenary sessions and fourteen panels. A natural consequence of the diversity of the papers presented at the conference was the arrangement of the contributions into three books covering different areas of interest. These books can be treated almost independently, although considerable commonalities exist among them. Prior to publication, all pre-selected chapters have been rigorously peer-reviewed by relevant experts. The papers contained in this book "Sustainable agricultural development-Recent approaches in resources management and environmentally-balanced produc-vi tion enhancement" represent one part of the conference proceedings. The other part is embodied in separate books which are being published simultaneously. The other books are respectively entitled: (1) "Global food insecurity-Rethinking agricultural and rural development paradigm and policy"; and (2) Climate change, energy crisis and food insecurity: the world in quest of a sustainable face. In this book, papers pertaining to sustainable agricultural development are presented in four parts divided into 20 chapters. Part I deals with the sustainable use of land resources as a potential for sustainable agricultural development, including aspects like land resources governance, land grabbing, and implications for food security, turning adversity into an advantage, reforestation and zoo-ecological remediation of soil quality improvement, mitigation of salinization, and policy frameworks for farmland use. Part II goes on to discuss sustainable management of water resources at farm level, rice fields, reduction of water losses, and extension and education. Part III deals with innovations in agricultural production including slow release nitrogen fertilizers, organic fertilizers, use of waste as a resource, and the implications of animal breeding technologies. Innovative processes in livestock production have been discussed in Part IV focusing on animal husbandry and the use of sorghum, cactus, and halophytes as animal feed. The editors and the publisher are not responsible for any statement made or opinions expressed by the authors in this publication. We wish to take this opportunity to express our sincere appreciation to the members of the Scientific Advisory Board, and the Steering Committee, chairmen and rapporteurs of the technical sessions and cooperating organizations for hosting the Agadir Conference and for the publication of the books. Special thanks are due to all authors, coauthors, and reviewers without whom this comprehensive book would not have been produced. We also owe our gratitude to all of those individuals and numerous other people who in one way or the other contributed to the conference and the book, especially those involved from Springer publishing. Finally, it is hoped that this book will be of interest to researchers, experts, and policy makers in the fields of agriculture, soil and water management and conservation, plant production, soil remediation, livestock development, land governance, and environmental protection. Graduate students and those wishing to conduct research in these topics will find the book a valuable resource.
Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 1993
Rhetorical definitions of agricultural sustainability abound. However, definitions that can be put to operational use in economic analysis have not been adequately developed. An economic definition of sustainability using natural resource accounting techniques is put forward. Two case studies are examined and physical and economic measures of natural resource impacts are developed. Five policy scenarios are tested to determine the public and private gains possible from different approaches to agricultural support and economic incentives.