Saifi, Basim
- Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Research article2008Peer reviewed
A coevolutionary model for promoting agricultural sustainability
Saifi, Basim; Drake, Lars
Abstract
This article presents a coevolutionary model of agricultural development that is based on observations from the environmental history of agriculture and the need for addressing development processes toward sustainability. It asserts that the challenge of agricultural sustainability can be fruitfully addressed within an analytical framework that consciously and explicitly considers agricultural development as consisting of processes of coevolution involving agriculture and the surrounding ecological and socioeconomic systems. Widening the processes to include strong interconnectedness with national and global systems with respect to off-farm resources and farm outputs has led to various agro-ecological problems. Strengthening local interaction and interconnectedness in a rural-urban context is found to be essential for developing a system of sustainable agriculture. Such development requires influencing many subsystems and implementing changes in production methods and land use as short-term responses to the problem, and technological development, resource allocation and changes in values as long-term responses. It also requires some sustainability principles and indicators in order to direct actions and to facilitate communications, which can be derived from the model. Applying the model on Swedish agricultural sustainability during the twentieth century reveals some, probably, important findings for "building" sustainable agriculture and lends support to the usefulness of the model. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords
sustainable agriculture; coevolutionary processes; agricultural development; local interaction; agroecology
Published in
Ecological Economics
2008, volume: 65, number: 1, pages: 24-34
Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
SLU Authors
Drake, Lars
- Swedish Chemicals Agency (KemI)
Global goals (SDG)
SDG2 Zero hunger
SDG11 Sustainable cities and communities
UKÄ Subject classification
Ecology
Economics
Environmental Sciences and Nature Conservation
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.11.008
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/78079