Sustainability in Agricultural Development: trade-offs with productivity, stability, and equitability

This paper aims to estabish a working definition of sustainable agriculture. The paper advocates Agroecosystem Analysis, using the concepts of agroecosystems, agroecosystem hierarchies, agroecosystem properties and their trade-offs to stimulate interdisciplinary analysis. The paper argues that defining sustainability in terms of preservation or duration has little practical value. Long-term experiments to measure persistence are of research interest but take too long to constitute a practicable analytical method. By contrast, measuring the ability of an agroecosystem to withstand stress and shock is a subject for experiments using classical agricultural mothods. High sustainability is not the only desirable aspect of agricultural production and in many situations it may be necessary to trade a degree of sustainability for higher levels of productivity or equibility.