310 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
users, the rate at which water loss is controlled, the efficiency of water use and the
rate at which water-winning and water storage technology is introduced.
Further food output scenarios also are strongly affected by assumptions made
about the outcome of political negotiations concerning acceptable levels of envi-
ronmental pollution, degradation and waste, questimates concerning the mobili-
zation of political will to invest in the health of soil amelioration measures, which
would open up hitherto unusable areas to cultivation, as well as price relationships,
market developments and changes in consumer preferences.
In addition, the introduction of factory-based production of meat muscle
(already foreshadowed in the UK Government’s technology foresight programme)
could relieve much of the pressure of livestock farming on grasslands, for example,
while an acceleration of the already observable shift towards more vegetarian diets
in Northern consumer markets (e.g. Kleiner, 1996) would markedly change food
demand forecasts. The likelihood of rapid change in global temperature and rain-
fall patterns adds further uncertainty.
Conversely, continued reliance on high-energy input, chemical-dependent,
intensive farming as the sole or even the main source of global surplus would
appear to be environmentally foolhardy, and increasingly unacceptable politically
as the wider consequences to human health, ecosystem and valued landscapes
become apparent.
‘Making the Flip’
Historically, the number of people and their ‘wants’ have grown, and uses of natu-
ral resources to satisfy them have been developed, regardless of the longer-term
consequences for the environment (Ponting, 1991). In this book, we consider the
alternative, indeed the necessity, of ‘making the flip’:
- conserving, even enhancing, the natural resource base upon which all agricul-
ture ultimately, and indeed human survival, depends; - the resultant negotiations involved in the transformation of wants to accom-
modate the emergent understanding of the natural resource imperative; - the kinds of agriculture which then results from such a reversal of attitudes,
approaches and behaviour.
The book illustrates the social energy which is created as people and institutions
begin to engage in accommodation of ‘wants’ to ‘effects’. The evidence suggests
explicitly that the way to capture the potential for productivity, which is realizable by
paying heed to the health of natural resources, is to work with and support the crea-
tivity, diversity and serendipity which emerges from a process of social learning.
In agriculture, the process requires that farmers become experts, instead of ‘users’,
‘receivers’ or ‘adopters’ of other specialists’ wisdom and technologies. They must
learn to apply general ecological principles to their own locality and time-specific