The role of technology in sustaining agriculture and the environment (original) (raw)
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Policy, technology, and management strategies for achieving sustainable agricultural intensification
Agricultural Economics, 2006
Considerable agreement exists among researchers, development practitioners, and policymakers regarding the goals of sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI). They include: achieving agricultural productivity growth, household food security, and improved rural livelihoods and employment, while simultaneously mitigating environmental degradation. However, the multiplicity of these objectives, as well as the choice of approaches to achieving them and the site-and context-specificity of specific technological and institutional interventions, assures that the research and policy challenges to achieving SAI will remain considerable. This article summarizes the contributions of the articles in this Special Issue in four areas of the literature. First, labor market constraints, the labor intensity of specific agricultural technologies and practices, and labor's substitutability, or complementarity, with other inputs are shown to widely influence their viability and related input efficiencies. Second, the articles identify specific tradeoffs and synergistic relationships that arise in the attainment of these multiple goals stemming from technologies, management practices, and policies introduced under specific agroclimatic, market, and institutional conditions. Third, these papers contribute to the literature on agricultural technology adoption by furnishing additional empirical evidence on the determinants and effects of investment behavior and adoption of specific technologies and management practices. Finally, the articles in this Special Issue emphasize that there is no single policy nor technological, management, or institutional innovation that unambiguously promotes SAI. Preferred policies must be contextualized and sensitive to initial biophysical, market, and institutional conditions.
ABSTRACT The green revolution has removed constraints on productivity growth in agriculture but at considerable environmental and social cost. The heavy application of fertilizers and pesticides containing certain undesirable elements (such as toxic residual of nitrate) may create negative externalities such as water and air pollution. Because of the high social costs of chemical fertilizers, it is crucial that nutrient uptake used by crops should be also socially optimal to ensure an optimal economic return from money invested in the use of fertilizers with less external pollution costs. At least, there are three approaches that can be introduced to handle the environmental problems: command control approach, market mechanism, and sustainable farming system. However, market based policy and promoting sustainable agricultural systems get much more attention in recent decades. Empirical studies prevailed that application of those environmental policies could reduce both farm production and profits. Apart from the market-based policies, farmers must be encouraged to apply sustainable farming systems. The implementation of crop rotation or cropping patterns, which can reduce fertilizer application rates, may be considered as a crucial choice of handling environmental problems. Then, farmers who adopt the sustainable farming system may be given some subsidies to compensate the loss due to the application of the system.
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.
Ensuring the Future of Sustainable Agriculture
Villages in the Future, 2001
A few decades ago, Green Revolution technologies were seen acritically as providing the “solution” to a perceived crisis in agriculture, especially related to the need to increase yields, agricultural incomes and total food production. The Green Revolution has since ...
Economics of new technologies for sustainable agriculture
Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 1997
Sustainable agriculture is prescribed as a policy approach that maximizes economic bene®ts while maintaining environmental quality. It is argued that this approach is human capital-intensive and encourages new scienti®c developments. To attain sustainability, economic incentives for the development and adoption of precision technologies (with minimal residues that cause environmental damage) have to be developed. Taxation and tradeable permits are desirable policies to attain ®rst-best solutions; however, when heterogeneity and lack-of-information problems are signi®cant, alternative institutions have to be developed. The paper presents and discusses such institutions.
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.
As outlined in this chapter, agricultural development has a major ecological and environmental footprint. Nevertheless, agricultural development (together with other biologically based food-supplying industries) is needed to provide enough food for the world's growing level of human population. This chapter begins by discussing the general impacts of agriculture on the environment and the use of natural resources, then considers market failures as influences on the occurrence of agriculture's environmental impacts and its use of natural resources before examining economic factors that affect agricultural sustainability. Subsequently, the implications of agricultural policies for the state of the environment and for the availability of natural resources are outlined.