Sustainable livestock production: methodological and ethical challenges

Abstract

Research and policy for sustainable agriculture can be grouped into two broad paradigms. Those that define sustainability in terms of resource availability emphasize accounting for the rates at which resources are produced and depleted, and frame sustainability in light of strategies for conservation, regeneration and substitution for increasingly scarce resources. Those that define sustainability in terms of functional integrity emphasize dynamic system models of complex ecological and social processes of reproduction, and frame sustainability as relative in light of system vulnerability to anthropogenic stress. Broad comparison of these paradigms shows that a) there is currently greater research capacityy for analyzing issues under a resource availability paradigm, but that b) functional integrity approaches are more likely to produce ethical consensus over the goals and purposes of livestock production, relative to larger social purposes. The functional integrity paradigm is better for understanding the importance of biodiversity, the problem of spatial and temporal scale, and the relationship between society and ecology. Animal scientists should therefore develop a research approach to functional integrity and should also take advantage of a pluri- and interdisciplinary approach. The existing research capacity for resource availability should not limit animal science to addressing the sustainability of livestock production exclusively in resource availability terms.