ABSTRACT
Each of the three main types of sustainable agriculture organizations, however, agrees on the main components of the movement agenda: the need for more public research on sustainable practices, the need for public policy incentives for sustainability, the desirability of family farming, and the imperative to improve the environmental performance of agriculture. Increasingly, this consensus has extended to issues such as opposition to major trade liberalization agreements (the World Trade Organization and NAFTA) and opposition to genetic engineering of crops and foods.[10]
PUBLIC POLICY AND THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY
Three necessary but insuffi cient conditions for the continued advance of sustainable agriculture are the development of improved sustainable technology; the presence of a vigorous and dynamic sustainability movement; and the development of a public policy environment that reduces the public policy disincentives to an environmentally sound, socially responsible, and economically viable agriculture. Of these three conditions, the public policy environment of agricultural sustainability is arguably the most important over the long term, even though the macro-public-policy environment is diffi cult to redirect, and there are areas of public policy disagreement among farmers, consumers, and environmental actors in the sustainable agriculture community. For example, some sustainability advocates, particularly those in the environmental community (and some farm groups in that community), believe that the federal (and global) levels of action are most important or effi - cacious, whereas others believe that at this time the local (community or regional) arena is where advocates can most easily make a difference. Nonetheless, it is apparent that over the long term sustainable agriculture cannot advance far in a public policy environment that involves the strong disincentives to sustainability that currently prevail. There is a need for more active federal, state, and local regulation of both the on-site and the off-site impacts of agriculture; for ending the commodity-driven pattern of federal agricultural policy that shovels the lion’s share of subsidies in the direction of large, monocultural producers of overproduced commodities; and for redirection of the public agricultural research agenda. Some of the most innovative public policy ideas in sustainable agriculture are being developed in Europe. Green payments, taxes on pesticides and fertilizers, and the embracement of a “multifunctionality” approach to government agricultural policy are particularly promising policy instruments.[11] Each of these policy instruments would support sustainability and yield other
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benefi ts (reduced government outlays, rural development, reduced greenhouse gas emissions). Still, there are no technocratic shortcuts to sustainability. Sustainability is, and must remain, as much a social movement as it is a set of practices and measuring sticks of agro-food system performance.
