Embedding the Sustainability Perspective into Agricultural Research

Abstract

Concerns for long-term food security and the sustainability of agriculture are forcing international and national agricultural research organizations to reorient their research goals, programmes and projects to ensure that the sustainability perspective underlies all of them. This requires a major paradigm shift in agricultural research planning and management. This paper develops an analytical framework for agricultural research management that can guide a transition from research directed towards productivity goals alone to that which addresses productivity issues, keeping sustainability concerns in sight. The framework is built on a realistic assessment of food demands and supplies, trade-offs between agricultural production increases and the quality of the natural resource base, the capabilities of emerging technologies and the overall profitability of agriculture. The development of such a framework is illustrated by considering the situation in India as a case study. It is suggested that, in the Indian context, embedding sustainability concerns into agricultural research requires interactions between research with a cropping systems perspective at the farm level, a regional natural resource management perspective with a relatively short-term focus on profitabilty, and a longer-term focus on environmental health at the agroecosystem level. The implications for management of such research are discussed.