Overview to Four Volumes: Sustainable
Agriculture and Food
Jules Pretty
The Context for Agricultural Sustainability
The interest in the sustainability of agricultural and food systems can be traced
to environmental concerns that began to appear in the 1950s and 1960s. How-
ever, ideas about sustainability date back at least to the oldest surviving writings
from China, Greece and Rome (King, 1911; Cato, 1979; Hesiod, 1988; Con-
way, 1997; Li Wenhua, 2001; Pretty, 2002). More recent concerns began to
develop during the 1960s, and were particularly driven by Rachel Carson’s book
Silent Spring (Carson, 1963). Like other popular and scientific studies at the
time, it focused on the environmental harm caused by agriculture. In the 1970s,
the Club of Rome identified the economic problems that societies would face
when environmental resources were overused, depleted or harmed, and pointed
towards the need for different types of policies to generate sustainable economic
growth.
In the late 1980s, the World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED), chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, published Our Common Future,
the first serious attempt to link poverty alleviation to natural resource management
and the state of the environment. Sustainable development was defined as ‘meet-
ing the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future genera-
tions to meet their own needs’. The concept implied both limits to growth and the
idea of different patterns of growth (WCED, 1987).
In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development was held in
Rio de Janeiro. The main outcome was Agenda 21, a 41-chapter document setting
out priorities and practices across all economic and social sectors, and how these
should relate to the environment. Chapter 14 addressed Sustainable Agriculture
and Rural Development (SARD). The principles of sustainable forms of agricul-
ture that encouraged minimizing harm to the environment and human health
were agreed. However, progress since then has not been good, as Agenda 21 was
not a binding treaty on national governments, and all remain free to choose
whether to adopt or ignore these principles (Pretty and Koohafkan, 2002). The