xvi Sustainable Agriculture and Food
‘Rio Summit’ was, however, followed by several important actions that came to
affect agriculture, including the signing of the Convention on Biodiversity in
1995; the establishment of the UN Global Integrated Pest Management (IPM)
Facility in 1995, which provides international guidance and technical assistance
for integrated pest management; the signing of the Stockholm Convention on
Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001, so addressing some problematic pesticides;
and, ten years after Rio, the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in
Johannesburg. In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment then drew atten-
tion to the value of environmental services, and in particular the role that agricul-
ture plays in affecting them (MEA, 2005).
Today, concerns about sustainability centre on the need to incorporate agricul-
tural technologies and practices that (i) do not have adverse effects on the environ-
ment (partly because the environment is an important asset for farming); and (ii)
are accessible to and effective for farmers, and lead both to improvements in food
productivity and have positive side-effects on environmental goods and services.
Sustainability in agricultural systems incorporates concepts of both resilience (the
capacity of systems to buffer shocks and stresses) and persistence (the capacity of
systems to continue over long periods), and addresses many wider ecological, eco-
nomic and social and political dimensions:
- Ecological – the core concerns are to reduce negative environmental and health
externalities, to enhance and use local ecosystem resources, and preserve biodi-
versity. More recent concerns include broader recognition of the positive envir-
onmental services from agriculture (including carbon capture in soils, flood
protection, biodiversity services). - Economic – economic perspectives seek to assign value to ecological assets, and
also to include a longer time frame in economic analysis. They also highlight
the often hidden subsidies that promote the depletion of resources or unfair
competition with other production systems. - Social and political – there are many concerns about the equity of technological
change. At the local level, agricultural sustainability is associated with farmer
participation, group action and the promotion of local institutions, culture
and farming communities. At the higher level, the concern is for enabling
policies that target poverty reduction in developing countries and diet man-
agement in industrialized countries.
In recent decades, there has been remarkable growth in agricultural production
worldwide. Since the beginning of the 1960s, aggregate world food production
grew by 145 per cent to the early part of the 21st century. In Africa, it increased by
140 per cent, in Latin America by almost 200 per cent and in Asia by 280 per cent.
The greatest increases have been in China, where a five-fold increase occurred,
mostly during the 1980s and 1990s. In industrialized countries, production started
from a higher base; yet it still doubled in the US over 40 years, and grew by 68 per
cent in western Europe (FAO, 2005).