Conclusion

This book set out to explore the relationship between the environment

and the food that we eat. The environment is represented as comprising

a set of resource stocks (soils, water, biodiversity) and waste sinks (the

atmosphere, water bodies) that are that are sustained by a diverse range

of ecosystem services (provisioning, regulating, supporting). A variety

of evidence is presented to support the argument that the contemporary

global agri-food system imposes demands on the environment that we

might regard as unsustainable. In other words, that the rate of depletion,

degradation and loading threatens the long-term capacity and functional

capability of these resource-provisioning, waste-sequestering and

ecosystem services.