ABSTRACT
Agro-food systems are complex arrangements that connect many diverse resources, including biophysical endowments with socio-economic drivers, at a variety of scales. Shaped by multiple actors from global trade agreements and international agribusiness to national governments seeking to raise export earnings, agro-food systems become increasingly stretched from sites of production to distant centres of food consumption marked by superior purchasing power. Understanding the fragility of the environmental resource base on which agro-food systems rest is becoming increasingly urgent. The concept may yet prove decisive as new generations of eaters appreciate how dietary choices shape the biological basis of our world.
