Search results for ""author john m. antle""

This book provides a non-technical, accessible primer on sustainable agricultural development and its relationship to sustainable development based on three analytical pillars. The first is to understand agriculture as complex physical-biological-human systems. Second is the economic perspective of understanding tradeoffs and synergies among the economic, environmental and social dimensions of these systems at farm, regional and global scales. Third is the understanding of these agricultural systems as the supply side of one sector of a growing economy, interacting through markets and policies with other sectors at local, national and global scales. The first part of the book introduces the concept of sustainability and develops an analytical framework based on tradeoffs quantified using impact indicators in the economic, environmental and social domains, linking this framework to the role of agriculture in economic growth and development. Next the authors introduce the reader to the sustainability challenges of major agroecosystems in the developing and industrialized worlds. The concluding chapter discusses the design and implementation of sustainable development pathways, through the expression of consumers’ desire for sustainably produced foods on the demand side of the food system, and through policies on the supply side such as new more sustainable technologies, environmental regulation and payments for ecosystem services.

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This timely book focuses on the liberalization of agricultural policy and questions whether it is compatible with the goal of achieving economic and environmental sustainability in the European Union. It presents an invaluable contribution to the growing literature on the sustainability and policy aspects of trade liberalization, focusing on European agriculture.Agriculture, Trade and the Environment discusses quantitative methods for the assessment of agriculture-environment trade-offs for policy analysis at the firm, regional or national levels. It also presents the experience of countries in Europe, with particular regard to the impact of the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and the repercussions of the Uruguay Round. Using a wide range of analytical and quantitative tools, country case studies examine agricultural areas in Austria, Scotland, Italy, Spain, Greece and Estonia. The authors then go on to look at future developments in an enlarged EU context. They conclude that efficient policies for environmental management in the EU need to be tailored to fit local conditions. Any attempt to impose uniform policies across a region as environmentally and economically diverse as Europe will have widely divergent and unintended consequences.This book will prove invaluable to academics and students with an interest in agricultural economics, environmental and ecological economics and the European Union.

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