ABSTRACT
The expected growth of the world population for at least the next four decades will demand not only increased food production worldwide, but also improved food availability and fair production and distribution of food at local, national, and global scales. This demands a concept of sustainable agricultural and food systems that not only addresses quantitative production issues, but also increasingly considers environmental issues of agricultural food production, such water and air pollution, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. In addition, social and economic aspects have to be taken into account, such as economic viability of farmers, organization and efficiency of supply chains and markets, communication and coordination among stakeholders, and farmer-consumer relationships. These aspects can no longer be analyzed in isolation if we wish to establish sustainable agricultural and food systems. Thus, global and holistic approaches are required. Such approaches have been, for example, developed in recent years in the framework of agroecology, applied to the food system, whereby agronomic, ecological, economic, and social dimensions are taken simultaneously into account at different scales (Francis et al. 2003; Gliessman 2007; Wezel and David 2012).
