ABSTRACT
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1.1 INTRODUCTION
What is a sustainable agroecosystem? An easy way to answer this question is to give a definition: A sustainable agroecosystem maintains the resource base upon which it depends, relies on a minimum of artificial inputs from outside the farm system, manages pests and diseases through internal regulating mechanisms, and is able to recover from the disturbances caused by cultivation and harvest (Edwards et al., 1990; Altieri, 1995). Such a broadly applicable definition still begs many other questions: How do we identify an actually existing agroecosystem as sustainable or
not? What particular facets of a system make it sustainable or unsustainable? How can we build a sustainable system in a particular bioregion, given realistic economic constraints? Generating the knowledge and expertise for answering these kinds of questions is one of the main tasks facing the science of agroecology today.
