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Concepts of Food Sustainability

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DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-08-100596-5.22575-4

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From Anderson, J.R., 2019. Concepts of Food Sustainability. In: Ferranti, P., Berry,
E.M., Anderson, J.R. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Food Security and Sustainability, vol. 3,
pp. 1–8. Elsevier.
ISBN: 9780128126875
Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
Elsevier
 Author's personal copy

Concepts of Food Sustainability

Jock R Andersona,b, a University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia; and b Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United
States
© 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Abstract 1
Introduction 1
The Global and Less-Developed-Country Demand for Food 2
The Issue to Date 2
Trends in Real Food Prices 2
Trends in Nutrition 3
Other Evidence Relevant to Equity 3
Trends in Environmental Costs 4
Land Degradation 4
Conclusion About the Sustainability of the GR Production System 5
The Future 5
Will the Quantity of Research Investments Be Enough? 6
What About the Direction of Agricultural Research? 6
Conclusion 7
References 7
Relevant Websites 8

Abstract

Food sustainability is a topic naturally and necessarily to be addressed in an Encyclopedia of Food Security and Sustainability, even if
precise definitions of it and the related concept of sustainable agriculture from which food is sourced are elusive. An agricultural
system can be said to be sustainable (a) if it can continue to meet demand for food (and fiber) indefinitely while incurring
farm-level economic and environmental costs that societies find acceptable, (b) if it incurs economic and environmental cost
beyond the farm gate that societies find acceptable, and (c) if it also meets some broad socially-agreed equity criteria, including
especially intergenerational equity. Such notions have been widely accepted in policy development in recent decades, from the
1987 UN Brundtland Commission, to the 2015 crafting and international agreement on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
But practical application of such notions naturally must take analysts into the complexities of what environmental costs are accept-
able and just what equity criteria can be agreed upon in order to articulate concrete specific goals and indicators of phenomena that
are themselves challenging to conceptualize and measure, such as hunger and gender equity, for instance, as variously explained in
the diverse articles in this Encyclopedia.

Introduction

The Brundtland Commission declared in 1987, to wide acceptance, that Sustainable Development is development that meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission,
1987). This places intergenerational equity at the conceptual center of such terminology. Libraries are now cogently stocked
with many books (e.g., Tisdell, 1993) and chapters in books (e.g., Graham-Tomasi, 1991), major reports (e.g., National
Research Council, 1999), and innumerable journals (e.g., Environment, Development and Sustainability and Nature Sustainability)
dealing with the many aspects of sustainable development, from earthy agriculture to polluted atmosphere. In this article the
focus is on sustainability of food systems and thus on sustainable agriculture (SA), a term apparently coined by Gordon (Bill)
McClymont, probably in the early 70s (Wikipedia). Many scholars in earlier decades had been pursuing the elements of SA
without the advantage of the term; for instance, Longworth (1992) makes an excellent case that prominent among these
was William J, Farrer, an early Australian wheat breeder. Pretty (2008) goes further noting that concerns about SA go back
at least to the oldest surviving writings from China, Greece and Rome. He argues that today sustainability in agricultural
systems incorporates concepts of both resilience (the capacity of systems to buffer shocks and stresses), as discussed in the
article on stability (Anderson, 2018a) and persistence (the capacity of systems to continue over long periods), and addresses
many wider economic, social and environmental outcomes. Into the 21st century, these concepts are being applied beyond
food and agriculture to the bioeconomy (e.g., Birner, 2018). Many agricultural companies have departments of sustainability

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2 Concepts of Food Sustainability

and strategic commitments to pursuing this objective, and many governments have crafted plans for sustainable agricultural
development, so in many ways it is now “big business”.
There are many different definitions of sustainable human activities such as agriculture (e.g., Pezzey, 1989; Pannell and Schilizzi,
1999). They aren’t right or wrong, only more or less useful. The following can serve as a pragmatic definition of sustainable agri-
culture: an agricultural production system that indefinitely meets demand for food and fiber while incurring economic and envi-
ronmental costs, both on-farm and beyond farms, that societies find acceptable, and that also meets some broad socially agreed
equity criterion. The definition immediately poses two questions: what are “acceptable” economic and environmental costs and
what is a “satisfactory equity criterion”? These questions have no precise answers. What constitutes acceptable costs and a generally
satisfactory equity criterion is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. If combined economic and environmental costs do not rise
over time, then that would seem to be acceptable.
A generally acceptable equity criterion is more difficult to specify. The criterion suggested here for agriculturally-based commu-
nities is that, over time, the incomes of poor farm families must rise enough to permit significant improvements in nutrition for all
members of the family and in access to health and educational services.
The main focus here is on the sustainability issue at the farm level. This focus is limited, since it excludes sustainability issues that
may arise in the food distribution system, i.e., that part of the agricultural system between the farm and the ultimate food consumer.
Consideration of distribution issues would take this article far beyond the limits on the space available but some such are taken up
in other articles, such as concerning standards (e.g., Swinnen and Vandevelde, 2018), and those articles variously dealing with
Climate Smart Agriculture, Structural Transformation of Agriculture, and The Concept of Food Security (Peng and Berry, 2018).

The Global and Less-Developed-Country Demand for Food

Studies around the world including at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) indicate that between 2015 and
2030, about 90% of the increase in global demand for food is expected to be in the less-developed countries (LDCs) of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. The assumption is based on predictions that LDCs will host almost all of the world’s increase in population,
much of it urban, during that period and the average per capita income in those countries is so low that, when it increases, a signif-
icant portion of the increase will be spent on food. In contrast, per capita income in the more-developed countries is high enough
that most people are so well fed (increasingly “too well” fed) that increases in income add almost nothing to demand for food as
registered at the farm gate. For these reasons, most of the problems of achieving a sustainable agricultural production system almost
surely will arise in the developing countries. Accordingly, the discussion here is focused on those countries.
Much attention is given to agricultural sustainability in tracking efforts to feed the world adequately (e.g., Bhullar and Bhullar,
2012). There is increasing focus on sustainable intensification (SI) (e.g., Pretty and Bharucha, 2014, and the article on Irrigation in
this MRW), given that most future growth in food production must come from intensification (increased yields per unit of crop-
land) of existing cropping systems rather than expansion of cropping into present pasture and forest lands (e.g., Kuyper and Struik,
2014 and the Themed Issue they summarize).

The Issue to Date

Trends in Real Food Prices
Global inflation-adjusted prices of wheat, rice, and maize (which jointly account for well over half of the food energy consumed by
people in the LDCs) declined greatly since 1960, except for a couple of upswings, most notably and recently in the food crises of
2007–11 (Fig. 1). These general price declines reflected increases in global and LDC productivity generated by advances in tech-
nology adopted by farmers all around the world. In the LDCs, these technologies are usually considered part of a Green Revolution

FAO Food Price Index in nominal and real terms

2002–2004=100
250

Nominal
200

150
Real*
100

50

0
61 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 00 05 10 15 18
* The real price index is the nominal price index deflated by the World Bank Manufactures Unit Value Index (MUV)

Figure 1 Global food prices over recent decades aggregated by FAO (2018). http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/.

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(GR) in production of the major food staples: rice, wheat, and maize (e.g., Anderson et al., 1988; Djurfeldt, 2018). The GR tech-
nologies were widely adopted across Asia and Latin America, mostly in places where irrigation water was provided. The technologies
were not as well adapted to most production conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa; consequently, they were little adopted there, much
to the detriment of African agriculture, as is elaborated below.
The general declines in prices of rice, wheat, and maize have two important implications for the sustainability issue:
(1) In the world as it has existed since the end of World War II, long-term declines in agricultural prices reflect declines in the
economic costs of production. Thus, the mostly continuing price declines recorded indicate that, over that period, global and
LDC agriculture mostly met any reasonable sustainability criterion for the economic costs of production; trade policy issues
such as foodgrain export bans somewhat compromised that positive observation in the years around the 2008 food crisis, as
explained in the article on International Trade (Anderson, 2018b). The future evolution of food prices is naturally rather
uncertain but Baldos and Hertel (2016, p. 28) argue persuasively that the long-run downward trend in real prices will most
likely resume, notwithstanding climate change inevitabilities and possibilities.
(2) Because poor people spend proportionally more on food than nonpoor people, the general declines in food prices benefited
poor people proportionally more than the nonpoor. The decline in prices, therefore, tends to support the argument that, in the
LDCs, the GR technologies promoted more equity in the distribution of income between the poor and the nonpoor (Lipton and
Longhurst, 1989).

Trends in Nutrition
Other evidence supports the argument that the GR technologies were consistent with the equity criterion for sustainability adopted
here, but only in Asia and Latin America, not in Africa. Data collected by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show
significant improvements in nutrition among the populations of Asia and Latin America but not of Africa. The FAO defines
malnourished people as those whose average annual food energy consumption is insufficient to maintain body weight and support
light activity. The blinkered focus on food energy arises from data difficulties with protein and other nutrients. FAO found that, since
early in the present century, the prevalence of malnourished people in the LDCs as a group fell from about 35% to 20%, and that the
number of malnourished people declined from nearly 950 million to around 800 million (and likely rising given several persistent
conflicts), according to (FAO et al., 2017, p. 7). The improvement, however, was largely confined to Asia and Latin America. In Sub-
Saharan Africa, the nutritional status of the people deteriorated, with the prevalence of the malnourished falling from around 30%
to around 20% (still the highest regionally) but the absolute number increasing from around 190 million to something consider-
ably more than 200 million.
The recent apparent increase in food energy deficiency is cause for great concern and poses a significant challenge for interna-
tional commitments to end hunger by 2030. In today’s world, there is growing over-nutrition and obesity (Peng and Berry,
2018) but the primary reason people are under-nourished is that they do not have enough income to buy the food they need.
In Africa, especially, political instability and prolonged and widespread violence also are big part of the problem, as emphasized
by FAO et al. (2017) in The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World: Building Resilience for Peace and Food Security, and IFPRI
(2018) in its flagship report. The substantial improvement in overall human nutrition in Asia and Latin America from the late 1960s
to the late 1980s and since implies that the income of the poor in those regions increased substantially in that period, providing
evidence that agriculture in Asia and Latin America moved significantly toward meeting the equity criterion of sustainability. The
decline in the nutritional status of people across much of Africa implies the contrary, and is strong evidence that, in those challenged
countries, agriculture has not yet met the equity criterion for sustainability.
International food trade is essential to nutrient access. Wood et al. (2018) have shown how trade enables some poorer countries
to be able to nourish hundreds of millions of people, and how protectionist trade policies could therefore have serious negative
consequences for food security, as detailed in the article by Kym Anderson (2018b).

Other Evidence Relevant to Equity

Studies specifically aimed at investigating the income and employment consequences of the GR technologies point in the same
direction with respect to Asia (Lipton and Longhurst, 1989). Hazell and Ramasamy (1991) examined these consequences among
farmers and linked communities in southern India. They found that both small-scale rice farmers who adopted the new technology,
and landless farm laborers, almost doubled their income. The income of the landless workers rose because the more intensive and
productive technology stimulated an increase in the demand for their services.
David and Otsuka (1994) reported the results of in-depth investigations of the income distribution consequences of GR rice
technologies in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, China, and Nepal. Adoption was not strongly influenced
by farm size or land tenure. Adopting farmers in all countries achieved higher yields (crop output per unit of land), and hence the
increases in income.
This brief review of experience during the past several decades indicates that, in most of the developing countries of Asia and
Latin America, the pattern of agricultural development, at least at the national level, has clearly met any reasonable economic
cost criterion of sustainability. Moreover, significant, though still far from complete, progress was made in Asia and Latin America
toward meeting the equity criterion adopted here. African agriculture, however, has lagged behind the other two regions, and mostly
(there is much diversity within and between countries) has yet to get on a sustainable path (Pingali, 2012; Otsuka and Larson,
2013).

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Trends in Environmental Costs

The environmental costs of agriculture are those costs that are imposed by farmers on others in the society; those “others” have no
way of exacting compensation from the farmers responsible. The main such costs, not necessarily in order of importance, are those
that arise from the clearing and draining of land that harm plant and animal wildlife habitat, not to mention the atmosphere, and,
more broadly, impose losses of socially valuable biological diversity. These include:

• damages to surface-water quality from eroded farm-field sediment, which increase the cost of cleaning the water for residential
and other uses;
• the cost of dredging sediment from rivers and harbors to maintain shipping services; and
• the public health costs and costs of damage to ecological systems because of nitrogen fertilizers, animal wastes, and pesticides in
ground and surface waters.
Further, the economic costs of declining soil productivity (due to land degradation) are often treated as environmental costs (e.g.,
Anderson and Thampapillai, 1990). However, where farmers have secure, enforceable property rights in the land, these degradation
costs are not true environmental costs because the farmers incur and bear them through the way they manage their land. Where the
property rights condition is not met, as it is clearly not in much of the LDCs, damages to on-farm productivity from land degrada-
tion can be regarded as true environmental costs. In any case, in much of the literature dealing with sustainable agriculture, these
costs are treated as environmental costs, and so they are treated as such here.
Environmental costs are particularly hard to measure, whether in more developed countries (MDCs) or LDCs, because the trans-
actions through which the costs are incurred are not registered in markets. Consequently, costs are not expressed in prices. For
example, when farmers drain wetlands to plant a crop such as oil palm, they may destroy wildlife habitat on which hunters,
bird watchers, and others who just like wildlife place a high value. This loss of value is a real social cost, but it is not priced because
there is yet little of a market for the wildlife habitat services. Consequently, farmers have no incentive to take these values into
account when deciding whether or not to drain the wetland and, correspondingly, those who value habitat services have no way
of extracting compensation from the farmers responsible for their loss.
In the LDCs, there is much concern about the environmental costs of agricultural production, especially from the loss of bio-
logical diversity resulting from clearing of land in tropical forests (e.g., Byerlee et al., 2017). The clogging of irrigation canals
and reservoirs by soil eroded from farmers’ fields is also widely seen as a threat to the capacity of affected farming systems. Despite
these concerns, there are no reliable, global-scale estimates of these costs, or of others imposed by agriculture, such as the public
health and ecological costs of pesticides and fertilizers in ground and surface waters. This lack of well-grounded information means
that, with respect to these particular environmental issues, there is no sound basis for judging whether production with the GR and
other modern technologies has or has not met the environmental cost criterion of sustainability. However, the criterion adopted
here is that, over time, the combination of economic and environmental costs should not rise. Although the movement of environ-
mental costs cannot be well judged, the decline in economic costs, noted above, indicates that an offsetting rise in environmental
costs could well be consistent with sustainability.
Although there is insufficient information to make a judgment about changes in total environmental costs, there are data that
permit tentative judgments about the effects of land degradation on agricultural production capacity. One data set permits such
estimates on a global scale. Another set deals with the production impacts of rice grown in Asia using GR technologies.

Land Degradation
A global-scale study of agricultural land degradation by Oldeman et al. (1991) at Wageningen University in the Netherlands is dated
but still instructive. They found that there are some 8.7 billion hectares (ha) of land in crops, permanent pasture, forests, and wood-
lands. The study showed that about 2 billion ha of this land (23%) has been degraded to some extent (slightly, moderately, and
strongly) in the period since the end of World War II to 1990. Eighty-four percent of this land had been degraded by wind and water
erosion.
Oldeman and colleagues did not estimate the cumulative, degradation-imposed productivity loss in each of the three degrada-
tion categories. Crosson (1995) did this by combining the data compiled at Wageningen with data from another global-scale study
done by Harold Dregne and Nan-Ting Chou (1992) at Texas Tech University. Using these two data sets, Crosson calculated the
weighted average cumulative loss on the 8.7 billion hectares of land in crops, permanent pasture, and forest and woodland to
be 4.6% (slightly less than 0.1 percent annually over the 45 years to 1990).
This estimate of global-scale, land degradation-imposed losses of agricultural productivity is much lower than others that have
been presented (e.g., by Lester Brown when he was at the World Watch Institute, and David Pimentel and associates at Cornell
University). Oldeman and colleagues emphasize the weaknesses in their data but those data are still the most credible available,
and that they indicate that, on a global scale, cumulative degradation-imposed losses of land productivity are small. This, in
turn, suggests that the GR technologies adopted by farmers around the world since the end of World War II have not significantly
damaged the capacity of the Earth’s land to support global agricultural production.
Although land degradation damages may have been small on a global scale, based on their impact on rice production, they
appear to have been significant in Asia. Pingali and Rosegrant (2001) concluded that intensive cropping of rice in South and South-
east Asia, and of rice and wheat in a rotation in South Asia, have significantly impaired the productivity of the land. This has
occurred because the production systems employed have resulted in a salt build-up and water-logging of the soil, declining soil

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Concepts of Food Sustainability 5

nutrient status, increased soil toxicities, and increased pest build-up, especially of soil pests. Pingali and Rosegrant note that, in the
decade from the mid-1980s, rice yield growth in those areas was about half of what it had been in the preceding couple of decades.
They attribute a substantial part of this decline in yield growth to the problems induced by the intensive rice production practices. In
this part of their discussion, Pingali and Rosegrant make the important point that practice in intensive production in rice and rice/
wheat rotations is not itself the root cause of the resulting degradation in land quality and problems of pest control. The difficulties
arose from faulty policies that send the wrong signals to farmers about how to best manage their land, and from lack of farmer
knowledge with respect to superior management practices. It follows, as advocated by Crosson and Anderson (2002) that the solu-
tion to the land degradation and pest problems in GR rice and rice/wheat production is improved policymaking and investment in
the education of farmers.

Conclusion About the Sustainability of the GR Production System

The declining trends in prices for wheat, rice, and maize over the past several decades, despite substantial increases in global demand
for these commodities, strongly suggest that the GR technologies have met the economic cost criterion for sustainability. Big
improvements in nutrition in Asia and Latin America, and studies of the favorable income-distribution consequences of technol-
ogies, suggest that, in those two developing areas, the technologies also have definitely moved toward meeting the equity criterion.
This cannot, however, yet be said for Africa.
With respect to environmental costs, the evidence indicates that land degradation has not seriously threatened the production
capacity of agricultural land, although, in rice and rice/wheat production in much of Asia, the GR technologies have caused signif-
icant land degradation and the emergence of pest problems. It will be interesting to get updated assessment as underway by the
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in its intended (as of 2018) “Thematic
assessment on land degradation and restoration”.
These degradation and pest problems, however, have not been of such magnitude as to offset the mainly declining trend in rice
prices. With respect to other types of environmental costs, for example, losses of biological diversity because of tropical deforesta-
tion (e.g., IPBES, 2016) and clogging of irrigation canals and reservoirs with silt, the available evidence is yet inadequate to support
a strong conclusion one way or the other as to whether the GR technologies have met the environmental cost criterion of sustain-
ability or not. In areas such as those in much of Africa that have thus far little benefited from GR technologies, sustainability is surely
a serious question.

The Future

As noted earlier, almost all of the future increases in global demand for food will be in the LDCs including, of course, that which is
lost post-harvest or wasted post acquisition by consumers. There is a broad consensus among students of the world food situation
that most of the increased food demand in the LDCs will be met by production in those countries. The consensus also includes the
belief that most of the production increase will have to be through increased crop and animal yields, in short sustainable intensi-
fication. The belief is based on evidence that both the economic and environmental costs of production would rise to unsustainable
levels if the main pattern of production growth were toward bringing more land into crop production rather than toward increasing
yields.
This raises the issue of measurement of (un)sustainability as a necessary step toward developing better policy and better artic-
ulating priorities for investment that is most relevant to achieving more sustainable food systems. There has been much activity in
this domain of conceptualizing and quantifying pertinent indicators, although it is still something of an emerging field (e.g.,
Pannell and Glenn, 2000; Bell and Morse, 2008; Pezzey and Burke, 2014).
This perspective on the future of sustainable agriculture in the LDCs suggests that the key question about that future is whether
agricultural research, in the LDCs themselves, in the system of international agricultural research institutions, and in some of the
MDCs, particularly the USA, can succeed in developing the higher-yield technologies necessary to do the job. But this perspective
poses another question: why assume that the task rests on such research? What about government policies and other factors, such as
market access that affect farmers’ incentives to adopt the new technologies, even assuming they become available? (Jayne and
Rashid, 2013; IFAD, 2016; Alston and Pardey, 2017).
The answer is that research is the key factor, and it rests on what has been seen in the past half-century when, whatever the policy
and other limitations affecting farmers’ incentives, Asia and Latin America adopted the GR technologies on a wide geographic scale
(e.g., Anderson et al., 1988). But note again that Africa did not share in this favorable experience because the climatic, water
resources, soil conditions and farmers’ knowledge across much of that continent were not as favorable as in Asia and Latin America
to the kinds of technologies making up the GR (e.g., Pardey, 2011). But much of the reason for the failure of the GR to take hold in
Africa was unfavorable government policies, including the failure to invest sufficiently in transport and communication systems that
would better link farmers to markets, not only in Africa but to the rest of the world. It is to be hoped that those unfavorable policy
conditions are being overcome in Africa’s future. The focus here, then, is on prospects that agricultural research will successfully
develop the yield-increasing technologies that the LDCs will need over the next several decades if they are to achieve a sustainable
production response to future demands for food. There is growing concern that the research enterprise may fall short. In recent years
grain yields have stopped rising as fast as they did earlier (e.g., Fischer et al., 2014).

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Perhaps it is time to question the practice of stating average annual rates of yield growth as percentages when making judgments
about the adequacy of future yield growth. The reason is that the United Nations’ projections of population growth in the LDCs over
the next few decades show continuously declining rates of increase. Add to this the prospect that, as per capita income in the LDCs
continues to grow, more and more of them will reach income levels that are high enough that additional income will add little to
food demand registered at the farm gate. The combined impact of slowing percentage population growth in the LDCs and dimin-
ishing impacts of per capita income growth on the demand for food in those countries suggests that declining percentage increases
in crop yields may not be as serious a threat to future food supplies as many seem to think.
But there is reason to question whether the rate of even absolute yield increase can be maintained. The questioning arises from
two aspects of recent trends in investments in agricultural research on a global scale. One aspect concerns the quantity of such
research. The other concerns the direction of the research.

Will the Quantity of Research Investments Be Enough?

Alston et al. (1998) observed that, from 1971 to 1981, global investments in agricultural research increased in real terms at an
average annual rate of 6.4%. Between 1981 and 1991, the rate declined to 3.8%. In Africa, the region especially in need of new
agricultural knowledge, the rate declined from a low 2.5% to an even lower 0.8%. These past data are still relevant today because
of the long gestation period for agricultural research innovations, and it is thus not surprising that African productivity gains in
recent decades have been so patchy (e.g. Fuglie and Rada, 2013).
Some of these trends have continued, as documented by analysts such as Pardey (2011), Pardey and Alston (2012), Pardey and
Beddow (2013), Alston and Pardey (2014, 2017), and the continuing important efforts of the Agricultural Science and Technology
Indicators (ASTI) initiative, led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (e.g., Beintema and Stads, 2017). Agri-
cultural research investment levels in most low- and middle-income countries still fall well below the minimum target of 1 percent
of agricultural gross domestic product recommended by the United Nations, although there are some admirable exceptions, such as
Brazil and China. Higher levels of funding are needed to establish and maintain viable agricultural research programs that achieve
the needed results. Agricultural research investment can command significant returns, as so well documented by Alston et al.
(2000), but these returns take time to be realized, commonly decades. This inherent lag from the inception of research to the adop-
tion of a new technology or a new variety calls for sustained and stable research funding. Funding volatility makes it harder to realize
long-term returns. Africa’s agricultural research spending has exhibited considerably greater volatility than spending in other devel-
oping regions, driven by the short-term, project-oriented nature of donor and development-bank funding in Africa.
Investments in agricultural research over the next couple of decades may not be enough to drive and sustain adequate yield
growth. Along with the noted underinvestment in many parts of the developing world, a further concerning development is the
decline in public investment in agricultural production research in some countries such as USA and Australia where emphasis
has shifted to post-production themes, and where private investors are increasingly significant. The possible spill-in production
research innovations in many LDCs including much of Africa will increasingly come from Brazil and China rather than from the
traditional sources such as USA (Pardey and Beddow, 2013; Alston and Pardey, 2017). But will these be sufficient? The economic
costs of food production around the world might rise enough to violate the economic-cost criterion of sustainability.

What About the Direction of Agricultural Research?

Here, the direction of research refers to the amounts of research investments directed at technologies that would keep economic
costs within acceptable levels, relative to the amounts aimed at containing environmental costs. Evidence suggests that (1) the
demand for environmental services in the LDCs will increase faster than the demand for food over the next few decades, and
that (2) it may prove more difficult to adequately increase the supply of environmental services than the supply of food. The impli-
cation is that it may well prove easier to meet the economic cost criterion for sustainability in the LDCs than to meet the environ-
mental cost criterion. An added complication in solving such problems is the uncertain role that will be played by investment in
biotechnological research, especially involving genetically modified organisms, and the potential conflicts between the gains in
yield stability with respect to biotic and abiotic stresses, and the possible risks of lost market access to countries where imports
of such products are restricted.
The evidence suggesting that the demand for environmental services in the LDCs may increase faster than the demand for food
comes from the experience of the MDCs, for example, the USA, Canada, and Western Europe. The high income in these countries
has induced a much faster increase in demand for environmental services than for food during the past several decades. There
already is some evidence of a similar experience in the higher income LDCs and, as per capita income continues to increase in
the LDCs, it is reasonable to expect a comparable effect across these countries as a group.
This prospect suggests that, if the environmental cost criterion is to be met with respect to agriculture in these countries, research
must be undertaken that will increase the supply of environmental services in step with the relatively fast-rising demand for the
services. This may prove difficult to do. Most simply put, increasing the supply of environmental services requires institutional inno-
vation. For example, institutions for the management of water resources must be devised that give proper weight both to the use of
the water for irrigation and to its use to protect aquatic wildlife and for recreation, not to mention other non-agricultural users.
Experience in the USA demonstrates that constructing such institutions is fraught with difficulties, most having to do with conflicts
of interests between farmers and environmentalists.

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Concepts of Food Sustainability 7

There is reason to doubt whether agricultural research institutions around the world are well positioned to do the kind of insti-
tutional research needed to adequately increase the supply of environmental services. By long tradition, those institutions have
devoted themselves to developing new technologies that would contain the on-farm economic costs of production. They are staffed
mostly by scientists who have demonstrated they are good at developing such technologies. It is very unlikely they would be equally
good at devising the institutional innovations that will be needed to adequately increase the supply of environmental services.
Achieving that goal will probably require a major restructuring of the present agricultural research institutions. The considerable
institutional challenges facing agricultural research in the LDCs were charted by Crosson and Anderson (1993); advances in meeting
those challenges since then have not been particularly encouraging (e.g., Barrett, 2003). Whether the LDCs will succeed in meeting
the future environmental-cost criterion for agricultural sustainability, regrettably, remains in doubt for many of them.

Conclusion

Concepts of food sustainability continue to be highly important to bear in mind in pondering food issues, and thus relevant to
include in this Encyclopedia, notwithstanding the frustrations surrounding operational definitions of just what constitutes sustain-
able agriculture. Concerns about sustainable environmental management should rightly be to the forefront of any thinking about
policy making for the future of the planet and its food consumers and producers (e.g., Matson et al., 2016). Agriculture clearly has
important roles to play in mitigation of climate change, not to mention vital challenges to face in adaptation to such change around
the globe and thus successfully meeting the challenges of achieving food security and sustainability for all of humanity.

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Relevant Websites

http://www.fao.org/climate-smart-agriculture-sourcebook/en/.
http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4332e/i4332e01.pdf.
http://web.stanford.edu/mburke/papers/Chap8_adaptation.pdf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agriculture#History_of_the_term.

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