Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Sections
Personal tools
You are here: Home → Discuss → Session 13 – 12.06.2010 Core questions of sustainability science → Session 6 "Divergent vs. convergent development models" and agro-ecological systems management
Log in


Forgot your password?
 

Session 6 "Divergent vs. convergent development models" and agro-ecological systems management

Up to Session 13 – 12.06.2010 Core questions of sustainability science

Session 6 "Divergent vs. convergent development models" and agro-ecological systems management

Posted by Agharley at December 04. 2010
The Session on Divergent and Convergent development models brought up a lively discussion in the class about the productivity of different approaches to agriculture and agroforestry. Liz Walker did the leg work after the class and sent us several articles that addressed this issue. She concluded from her review that "there were as many studies confirming the inverse relationship as refuting [that productivity increases with farm size]". My review of the literature largely comes to the same conclusions. 
 
The import research questions that come out of this discussion on land-use change and food production are two-fold. 
 
1) The first question fits into Bill's first category of Normative questions (Why do we want to understanding? Valuing and evaluating). This question is what other priorities for agriculture  are important to evaluate when assessing the success or failure of a particular system of production?  As our discussion in class demonstrated, one of the main priorities researchers have considered in the past is the relationship between acreage per calorie of food. More nuanced studies have understood that sometimes the constraint is not acreage but labour and have evaluated practices based on calorie output per unit of labour or a combination of both acreage and labour. 
 
Beyond calorie output over acreage and labour constraints, what are our other priorities for agriculture that we should take into account when evaluating and designing agriculture systems or funding agriculture development programs? Some potential priorities that I can list of the top of my head include 1) contribution to GDP growth and national wealth 2) rural poverty reduction 3) maximizing output per unit of water 4) maximizing output while minimizing environmental degradation 5) using agriculture and agroforestry to reduce GHG concentrations in the atmosphere and mitigate climate change 6) maximizing nutrition value of different types of agriculture per unit of land or labour rather than calorie content.... and the list goes on. 
 
These questions are to some extent values questions. Is it more important to a given region or government to have an agriculture policies that benefits net GDP or that benefits rural livelihoods, food security and poverty reduction?  Perhaps policy makers believe that the first priority is to get the country as a whole on sounder macro-economic footing by emphasizing high-value export oriented agriculture and use other programs and policy instruments to address poverty problems in the county. That is a perfectly reasonable policy decision, but what is important that it is made with an understanding of the other potential roles and priorities that agriculture might have in other scenarios and what the impacts of those might be.  
 
2) However, before we can even begin to have a values conversation that puts various weights on different priorities for developing agro-ecological systems, we need to understand better from a science (sustainability science) perspective what the trade-offs even are and what all of the possible relationships between agriculture and other variables that we should be investigating and considering in our analysis. 
 
This leads me to questions that fall more squarely under Bill's second category of questions:  Analytic questions (What do we want to understand? Causes, consequences, processes). To address these issues we need an empirical investigation into the relationships of many variables that are not yet clearly understood such as: 1) What does the relationship between land and labour ratios say about the types of agro-ecological systems that make sense to explore? 2) Exactly how big are the land and labor costs of various agroecology approaches (per bushel of production) compared to modern precision farming? 3) under what ecological conditions do different scales of agriculture make more sense? and 4) how will climate change effect these relationships? This is only a partial list of relationships that need to be investigated based on field-trials, case studies and a historical investigation of the empirical record before we can have a more sustainable approach to agricultural decision-making. 
 
If we do not first begin with a discussion of the multitude of priorities that humans might have for agriculture (beyond productivity maximization which clearly still must be one priority with global populations rising to 9 billion by 2050), we will not be able to remove ourselves form the current myopic vision of the mainstream agriculture-development industry and see more options and pathways for sustainable agro-ecological systems management. 

Re: Session 6 "Divergent vs. convergent development models" and agro-ecological systems management

Posted by chrising at December 05. 2010

I believe I'm too late to post my own question, but Alicia's comments are quite similar to the questions I was planning to ask before last week got away from me.

I've also included some of the references that Alicia referred to. They were posted to our Cambridge group course site, but here they are for the broader seminar. 

I too am very interested in agriculture as a dynamic nexus of humans, the environment, policy, and business. I am or have been involved in some studies that attempt to answer some of the questions Alicia listed, so I've included some commentary on those specific efforts and where more information can be found. 

First, a response to this section of questions:

"Beyond calorie output over acreage and labour constraints, what are our other priorities for agriculture that we should take into account when evaluating and designing agriculture systems or funding agriculture development programs? Some potential priorities that I can list of the top of my head include 1) contribution to GDP growth and national wealth 2) rural poverty reduction 3) maximizing output per unit of water 4) maximizing output while minimizing environmental degradation 5) using agriculture and agroforestry to reduce GHG concentrations in the atmosphere and mitigate climate change 6) maximizing nutrition value of different types of agriculture per unit of land or labour rather than calorie content.... and the list goes on. "

This list of of priorities Alicia includes seems thoughtful and fairly thorough (though I'm sure there are other priorities that could also be added. I am curious too about the business perspective on agriculture. Although agriculture has almost always been and will continue to be a highly regulated industry - there are also some interesting questions to ask agribusiness people, including farmers, buyers, processors, retailers, and consumers. Having had the chance to participate in two years of agribusiness study tours through MIT, I know that although farmers make some decisions more slowly than leaders in other industries, they are responsible to issues of supply and demand - whether altered by policy or arising "naturally" through marketing and general consumer demand. 

This means that for many farmers the decision to begin growing organic crops or raising organic livestock may be entirely or largely because of market demand and price premia available. In the case of organics, policy plays a role (in the form of national and international organics standards agreements and regulation) but perhaps less of a role in the decision making a farmer faces than does the market status of supply and demand. 

I think it would be quite interesting to evaluate the promises, protocols, carrots, and sticks of the various regulatory programs and certification programs available to farmers to see what are the driving forces in decision making. Happily, this is not a new idea - Michael Toffel at the Harvard Business School http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=ovr&facId=386263 works on some of these issues, and there is a multi-authored research project underway at MIT Sloan looking in part at the effects of certifications on sustainability for agriculture related companies. 

As a specific research project along these lines, I think it would be interesting to do some evaluation from a climate science/environmental science/ecology/economic(?) perspective to determine whether the goals of certification programs like the organic standards, rainforest alliance, forest stewardship council, marine stewardship council, eco-certifications from many different countries to see what measurable ecological goals these practices have met, and whether there is enough benefit to the certified businesses to make renewing the certification sustainable economically. 

Now to respond to just two more points Alicia raised in her second question section:

Regarding the effects of climate change on agriculture: I had the opportunity to work this summer at IFPRI using a model that does attempt to answer questions about the potential effects of climate change on agricultural outcomes. The work I was involved with is not yet published (should be soon!) but a study from last year might prove interesting on this topic: http://www.ifpri.org/publication/climate-change-impact-agriculture-and-costs-adaptation 

One of the many things I learned from my summer working with the IMPACT model was that there is a good deal of uncertainty in modeling these complex systems. Of course, it would be shocking if it wasn't tricky to model complex systems! So I think that knowing the caveats is important, but working through a quantitative model can be very useful to analyze potential policy interventions and their outcomes, as well as just to understand what societies throughout the world might need to adapt to. 

As a supplement to the question on evaluating land and labour costs for different agricultural practices, I would add the interesting question of what are the GHG emissions factors for different agricultural practices. The work I currently do with Unilever, the University of Aberdeen, and the Sustainable Food Lab seeks to answer these questions with a GHG lifecycle analysis tool (currently called the "cool farm tool"). With this open source tool, farmers are able to analyze the GHG implications of their (quite specific!) farming decisions and evaluate how changes they could feasibly make would reduce their CO2-eq emissions. 

This work is HIGHLY interdisciplinary, with a science advisory team of agricultural scientists, soil scientists, crop physiologists, climate scientists, and then of course the non-science team of the individual farmers who use the tool, and the companies that request the tool for their suppliers. 

You can find out more about it here: http://www.growingforthefuture.com/content/Cool+Farm+Tool although the next edition of the tool will be much better and is not available to the public yet. 


References from the discussion on agro-ecological systems management:

  •  Win-win ecology : How the earth's species can survive in the midst of human enterprise. http://books.google.com/books?id=oGRugZ14xP4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Rosenzweig,+Michael+L.+2003.+Win-win+ecology+:+How+the+earth%27s+species+can+survive+in+the+midst+of+human+enterprise.&source=bl&ots=gCQBtn3wh4&sig=uepkfgmAxnmWHmtAaJcCCAvYeww&hl=en&ei=5Q38TKivCYqr8Aaf_YzTCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Rosenzweig%2C%20Michael%20L.%202003.%20Win-win%20ecology%20%3A%20How%20the%20earth%27s%20species%20can%20survive%20in%20the%20midst%20of%20human%20enterprise.&f=false
  • The Payoff of conservation investments in tropical countryside: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/49/19342.short 
  • Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural Production Function: An
    Analysis for Fifteen Developing Countries. Cornia GA (1985). World Dev
    13:131–145.
  • Levine, Edward and S. Helfland. "Farm Size and the determinants of
    productive efficiency in the Brazilian Center-West."  Agricultural Economics
    31 (2004) 241–249.
  • Assunção, Juliano  and Maitreesh Ghatak. Can unobserved heterogeneity in
    farmer ability explain the inverse relationship between farm size and
    productivity.  Economics Letters 80 (2003) 189–194.
  • Dietrich Vollrath. "Land Distribution and International Agricultural
    Productivity"  American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2007.
  • Bruce F. Hall and E. Phillip LeVeen "Farm Size and Economic Efficiency:
    The Case for California" American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol.
    60, No. 4 (Nov., 1978), pp. 589-600.
  • Comparing organic farming and land sparing (attached)
  • Reconciliation ecology and the future of species diversity  (attached)
  • Bates, D. and T. Rudel.
    2004. Climbing the ‘‘Agricultural Ladder’’: Social Mobility and
    Motivations for Migration in an Ecuadorian Colonist Community. Rural
    Sociology 69(1): 59-75.
  • Habitat fragmentation may not matter to species diversity Gal Yaacobi, Yaron Ziv and Michael L. Rosenzweig. http://www.bgu.ac.il/~oferovad/library/Yaacobi_etal_PRSB2007.pdf
Attachments
Powered by Ploneboard
Document Actions