Many of these assumptions and priorities also influence sustainable agriculture programs. Such an examination is critical if we are to avoid reproducing the problems engendered by conventional decision-making processes in the re- search, education, policy, and business institutions which determine agriculture. KennethDahlberg 9 notes that assumptions and biases which may occlude the development of sustain- able agriculture concepts include: separating ourselves from nature and viewing it as something which must be dominated; measuring progress in increasing applications of science and technology; emphasizing technology and formal social institutions over natural systems and less formal aspects of society; and failing to see how human societies fit into and are dependent upon larger natural systems. We would add to Dahlberg’s list the tendency to overlook the needs of human beings who are separated from us, whether it be by distance, by socioeconomic status, or by time. These types of assumptions govern how we understand the world and have been institutionalized in educational and research pro- grams. MacRae et al. note that many characteristics of the research process responsible for conventional agriculture’s great productivity create obstacles to developing sustainable agriculture. Among these are over reliance on reductionism and quantification, scientists’ belief in objective “truth,” and the divorce of research from its potential social consequences . Along with Patricia Allen those authors also cite obstacles posed by a peer review system and publishing process which tend to reward individual “isolated” achievement while discouraging long-range interdisciplinary work and innovative ideas. This is aggravated by research funding from private sources, which encourages research on technology development rather than social analysis. The same assumptions and biases which govern research and education are also embedded in much of U.S. agricultural policy. They are expressed primarily as short-term economic considerations such as maximizing production, minimizing production costs and consumer prices, vertical aeroponic tower garden and maximizing the market share of certain agricultural commodities. These priorities have largely been those of the agricultural sector, and not necessarily those that are best for society at large.
To address these types of whole-system issues we believe that sustainable agriculture concepts must go beyond placing top priority on environment and production practices and give greater emphasis to social issues. Current definitions are often based on two assumptions that we believe to be problematic: 1) that the farm is the primary locus for achieving agricultural sustainability and 2) that short-term micro-economic profitability is paramount.Major institutions promulgating “sustainable” agriculture often focus on the farm level rather than on the whole system. This is clear from the priorities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Low Input Sustainable Agriculture program. LISA focused on “low input technologies [which] provide opportunities to reduce the farmer’s dependence on certain kinds of purchased inputs in ways that increase profits, reduce environmental hazards, and ensure a more sustainable agriculture for generations to come.”As these priorities demonstrate, agriculture is often thought of almost purely in terms of farms and farmers, a perspective traceable to the period in which most Americans were involved in farm production but which no longer reflects agriculture’s true scope. Even though the on-farm transformation of resources into food and fiber is a core process of the food and agriculture system, it is but one of many components. The system includes not only generating agricultural products, but also distributing those products and the infrastructure which affects production and distribution at regional, national, and global levels. Interactions among the larger environmental, social, and economic systems in which agriculture is situated directly influence agricultural production and distribution. The following briefly describes how these larger systems affect agriculture yet remain unaccounted for in many sustainable agriculture programs.Agricultural practices ranging from the development of irrigation projects to the use of agrichemicals have often had negative environmental impacts such as wildlife kills, pesticide residues in drinking water, soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and salinization. Substituting environmentally sound inputs for those which are damaging is an important step in addressing these problems. But ecological sustainability re- quires intensive management and substantial knowledge of ecological processes which go far beyond substitution and cannot be achieved merely by substituting inputs.
Such substitutions need to account for their complex and long-term ecological consequences. Otherwise they may engender secondary and perhaps more serious problems in the same way that conventional solutions frequently have been shown to do. Viewing agricultural systems as true ecosystems can serve as a model for bringing the whole-systems perspective to bear on social and economic issues as well. Instead, however, sustainability programs often take conventional approaches to solving these problems by changing the production practices which are directly at fault without addressing the total ecosystem context of either the problems or the alternative production practices which show promise as solutions. An example is the current emphasis on input substitution. Most projects funded by the USDA Low- Input Sustainable Agriculture program in its first two years, for instance, explore how inputs which cause environmental damage or incur expensive costs for the farmer can be replaced with more environmentally or economically benign inputs . In most cases single components of farming systems are being analyzed and little attempt is made to place these analyses in the context of whole agroecosystems.Agriculture both affects and is affected by the larger society. Farmer production decisions, for example, determine the diversity and quality of foods available to consumers, and farm size and technologies have been associated with the economic and social vigor of rural communities.At the same time, society deter- mines what is possible at the farm level. Farmers lose valuable farmland when encroaching urbanization creates zoning problems, inflates land values, and generates urban pollution which lowers crop productivity. Production decisions are heavily influenced by consumer decisions. A recent example is farmers’ voluntary discontinuation of Alar on apples. Although farmers continued to endorse the safety of Alar, they realized that this position was untenable in the face of consumer concerns. The international scope of agriculture also plays an important role. Social and economic conditions in other countries and global food supplies can greatly affect the viability of farming in local regions, as evidenced when the world grain shortages of the 1970s led to enormous expansion in U.S. grain production. When foreign demand for U.S. grain subsequently declined, many American farmers’ incomes fell, often to the point where debts incurred to expand production could not be paid, and major social and economic dislocations in the grain belt occurred.
Efforts in sustainable agriculture are not unlike those of their conventional counterparts in that they tend to serve certain clientele selectively and generally do not evaluate the social consequences of the technologies that sustainable agriculture encourages. For example, organic farming strategies are often sup- ported because they are environmentally sound, and in terms of the prices organic foods command, are profitable for farmers. An unintended and unaddressed social consequence of this is that people with low incomes often cannot afford organic products and thus are denied access to food containing fewer pesticide residues.The agricultural industry is a significant portion of the nation’s economy: in 1984 about 20 percent of U.S. jobs were in some aspect of food and fiber production, distribution, or service and these workers and their industries contributed 18 percent of the gross national product. The importance and volatility of food prices have made most governments reluctant to let market forces alone set these prices. Thus, a host of institutional measures have been implemented to address agricultural prices in order to manage their effects on consumer welfare, public coffers, farmer income, foreign exchange, food security, nutrition, and food distribution. Such policies include commodity programs, water and reclamation programs, import/export policies, and research and extension programs. Larger economic factors indirectly affect the agricultural system, factors such as interest rates, trade policy and negotiations, the exchange value of the U.S. dollar, and environmental regulations. In the context of these economic policies, agriculture is subject to non-agricultural constraints and conditions, a fact acknowledged broadly in the literature of both conventional and sustainable agriculture. Yet most research and extension programs in both conventional and sustainable agriculture do not recognize or address thesmacrofactors. Sustainable agriculture efforts generally concentrate on environmentally sound farm-level technologies which are economically profitable for farmers to adopt. Less commonly do such efforts address how the technologies they generate will affect or be affected by larger economic concerns in the long run.A second assumption behind many sustainable agriculture definitions, that short-term profitability is of ultimate importance, is also common. This is a central tenet of LISA, forming the first of its ten Guiding Principles: “If a method of farming is not profitable, it cannot be sustainable.”This is problematic, particularly since there is little acknowledgement that profitability is determined by policies, fiscal procedures, vertical gardening in greenhouse and business structures that can obstruct sustainability. We recognize that short-term profit- ability is important in commercial agricultural systems; clearly, if growers are to adopt sustainable agricultural practices, these must be profitable in the short run as well as the long run. The problem lies in pursuit of short-run profitability at the expense of environmental and social goals. In conventional agriculture, the drive to maximize short-term profit has meant that many pressing problems have been ignored or exacerbated. Natural resources have often been treated as expendable commodities , and agriculture has functioned more for financial gain than for human need.
The social costs of production have generally been neglected: chronic hunger, inequitable economic returns and unsafe working conditions for farm labor, possible negative health effects related to nutrition and agrichemical use, and the decline of socioeconomic conditions in rural communities associated with large-scale industrial agriculture. Subsuming social goals to economic goals may easily be reproduced in sustainability programs unless sustainability concepts address the fact that profitability and social goals are often not compatible in current economic systems.A useful concept of agricultural sustainability needs not only to acknowledge social issues as priorities equivalent to those of production, environment, and economics, but to recognize the need for balance among those disparate but highly interactive elements which comprise agriculture. Toward this, we offer the following perspective: A sustainable food and agriculture system is one which is environmentally sound, economically viable, socially responsible, non-exploitative, and which serves as the foundation for future generations. It must be approached through an interdisciplinary focus which addresses the many interrelated parts of the entire food and agriculture system, at local, regional, national, and international levels. Essential to this perspective is recognition of the whole-systems nature of agriculture; the idea that sustainability must be extended not only through time, but throughout the globe as well, valuing the welfare of not only future generations, but of all people now living and of all species of the biosphere.This sustainability concept moves beyond emphasis of farm-level practices and microeconomic profitability to that of the entire agricultural system and its total clientele. Richard Lowrance, Paul Hendrix, and Eugene Odum16 describe a model which approximates a whole-systems approach. They see four different loci or subsystems of sustainability: 1) farm fields where agronomic factors are paramount; 2) the farm unit wherein micro-economic concerns are primary; 3) the regional physical environment where ecological factors are central; and 4) national and international economies where macroeconomic issues are most important. Their model demonstrates that focusing on only one level of the agricultural system neglects others that are equally essential. A whole-systems perspective fosters an understanding of complex interactions and their diverse ramifications through- out agriculture and the systems with which it articulates. This understanding is at the root of sustainability. Vernon Ruttan17 describes an ever-widening comprehension of “whole system” as he delineates three waves of social concerns which have arisen about natural resource availability, environmental change, and human well-being. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the first wave focused on whether resources such as land, water, and energy were sufficient to sustain economic growth. The second wave, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focused on the effect of growth-generated pollution on the environment . The most recent concerns, manifest since the mid-1980s, also center on adverse environmental effects, but the key distinction is the transnational issues such as global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain. As agriculture and its impacts become increasingly globalized, the need for a whole-systems perspective,particularly in terms of decision-making, become increasingly critical. Dahlberg 9 observes that although the impacts of modern industrial society are global, the data and analytical tools we use to assess those impacts are limited by national, disciplinary, or sectoral boundaries.