Editorial Introduction to Volume III 7Agricultural development seeks to improve peoples’ lives, or crop yields, or water
quality or food supply. Yet it is a comprehension of what constitutes well-being
and ill-being that should be the starting point. Both are states of mind and being.
Well-being has a psychological and spiritual dimension as a mental state of har-
mony, happiness and peace of mind. Ill-being includes mental distress, breakdown,
depression and madness – often described by people as the impacts of poverty.
This article by Deepa Narayan and colleagues forms the second chapter in the
World Bank sponsored study Voices of the Poor, in which perspectives of poverty are
drawn from a wide range of countries. Despite the diversity of poor participants in
the study, their ideas of well-being and what constitutes the good life were both
multidimensional and had much in common. Interestingly, enough for a good life
is not necessarily a lot, and for those with little, a little more can mean a great deal.
Wealth and well-being are seen as different, and often contradictory. Descriptions
of ill-being are also multidimensional and interwoven – yet how little do these
perspectives appear in externally driven efforts to improve people’s lives.
Lester Brown’s 2002 book, Who Will Feed China, drew attention to the rapid
economic development and accompanying consumption patterns within China,
and how these could impact both local and international agricultural and food
systems. We know that already many of the world’s population now aspire to a US
standard of living, and yet adoption of such lifestyles will be impossible. Increased
population, for the first half of this century at least, combined with increased con-
sumption, will, as Brown puts it, ‘eventually collide with the earth’s natural limits’.
The first two chapters of this book provide an overview to these challenges, and
the second focuses on population increase and associated policies. The latter is a
Malthusian perspective – unless population growth is limited and stopped, the
world’s natural resource base will be more and more threatened. It is, though,
population × consumption that is the key driver, and what is quite clear from
Brown’s analysis is that if so-called developing countries adopt the same consump-
tion patterns as those already in industrialized countries, then ecological limits will
soon be reached and breached. Alternative patterns of development and new aspi-
rations will be essential.
Some of these alternatives will centre on the need to intensify agriculture (by
producing more from the same lands), address rural poverty and protect or enhance
biodiversity. In the opening sections to their book, Ecoagriculture, Jeff McNeely
and Sara Scherr set out the challenge: a mutually supportive relationship between
agriculture and the natural world needs to be developed. As Norman Myers has
said, ‘sensible use of nature ... is essential to feed the planet... Nature equals food.
Without wild places, we cannot hope to have food on our tables.’ In this book, the
management of landscapes for both the production of food and the conservation
of ecosystem services, in particular wild biodiversity, is what the authors called
ecoagriculture. Of course, this is easy to say but difficult to do. A wide range of
genetic, technological, environmental management and policy innovations must
be developed to support wild biodiversity in the world’s bread baskets and rice
bowls, as well as in the extensive areas where food production is more difficult.