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Conference paper2019Peer reviewed

Sustainability in animal food production - a systematic literature map to identify knowledge gaps

Hansson, H.; Segerkvist, K. Arvidsson; Sonesson, U.; Gunnarsson, S.

Abstract

Sustainable agriculture has previously been defined as the management and utilization of the agricultural ecosystem in a way that maintains biological diversity, regeneration capacity, vitality, productivity and ability to function - today and in the future. In animal food production sustainability discussions often contains a large portion of ecological aspects. However, the economic dimension of sustainability is also crucial since agriculture is organized in private firms where revenues need to exceed costs at least over the long term to sustain the firms. Furthermore, the social dimension of sustainable development, which covers aspects such as social acceptance of animal production, employment, as well as, aspects specific to animal husbandry, e.g. animal welfare and public health ethical considerations. In this project a systematic mapping approach was used, i.e. the literature search processes were conducted with the same comprehensive method as for a full literature review, but does not extend to full critical data synthesis. The wide range of hits due to the comprehensive search string was instead manually assessed to identify relevant papers from the abstract text and the chance of deleting relevant papers therefore low. We found that the literature has primarily been focusing on dairy and beef, while other areas of livestock production have received less attention. Only few studies attempt to assess all three dimensions of sustainable development. While the environmental dimension and the environmental dimension combined with the economic dimension of animal production have been relatively well covered, the social dimension has received limited attention. Furthermore, there has been limited attempts to investigate how different aspects of sustainability across the three dimensions function to reinforce or impair each other. Moreover, we identified relevant gaps in knowledge based on our mapping; gaps that will be discuss in relation to stakeholders.

Keywords

beef; pig; poultry; dairy; fish

Published in

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
2019, Volume: 545, pages: 47-52
Title: Sustainable governance and management of food systems : ethical perspectives : EurSafe 2019 Tampere, Finland 18 – 21 September 2019
ISBN: 978-90-8686-341-9, eISBN: 978-90-8686-892-6
Publisher: Wageningen Academic Publishers

Conference

15th Congress of the European-Society-for-Agricultural-and-Food-Ethics (EurSafe), SEP 18-21, 2019, Tampere, FINLAND