Sustainable Agricultural Development

An Economic Perspective

John M. Antle, Srabashi Ray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030345990
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

This book provides a non-technical, accessible primer on sustainable agricultural development and its relationship to sustainable development based on three analytical pillars. The first is to understand agriculture as complex physical-biological-human systems. Second is the economic perspective of understanding tradeoffs and synergies among the economic, environmental and social dimensions of these systems at farm, regional and global scales. Third is the understanding of these agricultural systems as the supply side of one sector of a growing economy, interacting through markets and policies with other sectors at local, national and global scales. The first part of the book introduces the concept of sustainability and develops an analytical framework based on tradeoffs quantified using impact indicators in the economic, environmental and social domains, linking this framework to the role of agriculture in economic growth and development. Next the authors introduce the reader to the sustainability challenges of major agroecosystems in the developing and industrialized worlds. The concluding chapter discusses the design and implementation of sustainable development pathways, through the expression of consumers' desire for sustainably produced foods on the demand side of the food system, and through policies on the supply side such as new more sustainable technologies, environmental regulation and payments for ecosystem services.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. M. Antle, S. RaySustainable Agricultural DevelopmentPalgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34599-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

John M. Antle¹ and Srabashi Ray¹

(1)

Department of Applied Economics, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

John M. Antle (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Srabashi Ray

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The first agricultural revolution that took place ten millennia ago among a global population of a few million Homo sapiens made possible a transformation from small groups of hunter-gatherers to settled, increasingly urbanized societies supported by farmers—people who specialized in growing domesticated crops and livestock. As humanity approaches a population of 10 billion this century—with the majority living in cities and enjoying an unprecedented material standard of living—it is becoming clear that the phenomenal global economic growth that made this stunning success of Homo sapiens possible may not be sustainable. Most emblematic of the human condition is the dependence of the global economy on the fossil fuels that made this unprecedented human and economic growth possible, but that also drives global climate change and other environmental changes that threaten its sustainability.

Even with the technological advances that have made modern economic growth possible, human survival will continue to depend on its first industry, agriculture. Indeed, the unprecedented growth in human population that has occurred over the past century would not have been possible without the growth in food production made possible by second agricultural revolution—often called the Green Revolution of the Twentieth Century. But people want not just to survive but to realize their potential in the many dimensions of life that they value. Sustainable development is the concept that is now being widely used to embody this concept of economic and social change that improves the well-being of current as well as future generations within the limits of the natural world. The premise underlying this book is that to achieve this vision of sustainable development, agriculture also must change and evolve in ways compatible with these human goals. This is what we mean by sustainable agricultural development.

Our goal in this book is to help the reader understand the key role agriculture must play in sustainable development, by providing an economic perspective on how we can understand, evaluate, and improve the sustainability of agriculture around the world. We think an economic perspective on this admittedly multidimensional challenge is valuable for several reasons. The concept of sustainable development is an outgrowth of the global economic growth and development that the world has experienced over the past two centuries. Agricultural development in turn plays a key role in economic growth and social development, operating through the ‘demand side’ and the ‘supply side’ of markets for productive resources and agricultural commodities. There is no question that unprecedented advances on the supply side through improvements in agricultural technologies and food systems have been necessary to support the rapid growth in human populations. Yet, in a market-based, global food system, achieving sustainable agricultural development will also depend importantly on the ‘demand side,’ that is, on the choices and actions of people who live and work outside of agriculture. Increasingly, consumers and citizens will play an important role in the future of agriculture and food systems. They do this by influencing where and how food is produced and how the global food system evolves—what we refer to in this book as the agricultural development pathway .

It is now clear that the development pathway the world is on is not sustainable in many dimensions, including agriculture. We discuss the major agricultural production systems in the world and their characteristics and elaborate on their current status and prospects for sustainability. But it is not difficult to justify the view that the current trajectory of most major agricultural systems is not sustainable. As just one of many examples we discuss in this book, consider the US Midwest agricultural system that is a major contributor to nutrient pollution causing toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes and the hypoxic ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. It is also clear that the food system is not ensuring good nutrition and health outcomes for many people in the world. Recent data show that more than half a billion people are undernourished while more than 2 billion are overweight or obese.

The widespread recognition that the world is approaching and in some cases has already crossed critical local, regional, or global ecosystem thresholds or boundaries has led many people to conclude that the goal of economic development must be broadened to sustainable development if continued human progress is to be achieved. In this book, we follow Sachs (2015) in recognizing the twenty-first century as the dawning of the ‘Age of Sustainable Development.’ We adopt Sachs’ view of sustainable development as both an analytical framework in which to understand the processes and consequences of economic and social development and as a normative framework in which to evaluate and set development goals, such as the sustainable development goals (SDG) established by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 2015.

Sachs provides a valuable introduction to agriculture’s role in sustainable development. Yet, agriculture’s role in sustainable development deserves further elaboration in an analytical and empirical framework consistent with economic as well as ecological and social science principles. Additionally, the options and actions needed to achieve sustainable agricultural development deserve further discussion and elaboration in a way that is accessible outside the scientific literature. Our goal in this book is to provide a nontechnical, accessible primer on sustainable agricultural development and its relationship to sustainable development.

Our approach is based on three analytical pillars. The first pillar is to understand agriculture’s role in economic growth, economic development, and sustainable development, interacting through markets and policies with other sectors of economies at local, national, and global scales. The second pillar is to understand agriculture as a highly diverse array of complex physical-biological-human systems—one can say, as managed agroecosystems. Figure 1.1 portrays the food system this way, as a set of interconnected subsystems that includes the supply side with farms and agriculture linked through markets to consumers on the demand side, as well as agriculture’s interactions with the physical and biological systems. Other key interactions are human health that connects both to food consumption and the environment, as well as governance and policy that cut across all the components of the food system in various ways. The third pillar is the economic perspective of the tradeoffs and synergies among the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of agricultural systems at farm, regional, and global scales. In this book, we describe and use the tradeoff analysis approach to understand sustainable agricultural development. This approach begins with the identification of key indicators of system performance that stakeholders view as relevant to sustainability. Using appropriate data and analytical tools, alternative development pathways are evaluated in terms of their implications for the performance of agricultural systems at local, regional, and global scales.

Fig. 1.1

Food systems map. (Source: WorldLink. Nourish Food System Map, www.​nourishlife.​org. Copyright WorldLink, all rights reserved)

Chapter 2 provides a ‘macro’ or big picture view of the role that agriculture plays in economic development and sustainable development, describes some of the aggregate indicators used to set sustainable development goals, and introduces tradeoff analysis as a way to evaluate development pathway s. We begin this chapter with the conventional view of economic growth as the driver of economic and social development, and how the increasing human dominance of global ecosystems and subsequent environmental social challenges motivated the concept of sustainable development. We discuss some of the ways that economists have broadened the conventional development model to incorporate sustainability. Next we discuss how sustainability has been used as a normative framework using the sustainable development goals. Finally, we introduce tradeoff analysis as a way to combine the positive and normative approaches to sustainable development into a unified framework to set goals and evaluate progress toward them.

In Chap. 3, we focus on agricultural systems which we describe as a diverse array of production systems that are composed of interconnected physical, biological, and human components. Our approach to agricultural systems involves an understanding of systems at the farm level as well as larger scales. Two key features of agricultural systems are diversity, that is, the different types of systems, and their heterogeneity, that is, the variation in the physical, biological, and human components within each type of system. We introduce the array of economic, environmental, and social indicators that are used to evaluate the diverse and complex agricultural systems throughout the world, and we introduce two examples that illustrate their diversity and complexity. Building on Chap. 2, we also elaborate on the economic rationale for the tradeoff analysis approach to agricultural system sustainability. Finally, we discuss the tools—the computer simulation models and data—used to implement the analysis of agricultural system sustainability, using climate impact assessment as an example.

Chapters 4 and 5 address the challenges of sustainable agriculture in developing countries and industrialized countries. Low-income and transitional countries span a large part of the arable land area of the world. In Chap. 4, we examine the diverse and heterogeneous systems around the world, focusing primarily on the three regions where the vast majority of poor farmers are located: sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. We discuss the main characteristics of the agricultural systems in these regions, their current status in terms of key sustainability indicators, and some of the challenges they face in moving toward more sustainable development pathways. The challenges of sustainable development in the countries with agricultural sectors that have characteristics of ‘industrial’ agriculture are quite distinct from those of the developing regions. In these countries, the majority of food is produced on large commercial farms. Farm household incomes are relatively high and often equal or exceed incomes in the non-agricultural sectors for comparable skills and experience. A major economic issue is the financial viability of smaller farms and the ongoing consolidation of land into larger farms. Environmental concerns dominate the sustainability challenges of these systems, due to their reliance on chemical inputs, impacts on water quality and quantity, use of hormones and antibiotics in livestock production, and greenhouse gas emissions. Health and safety of farm workers, rural commu...