Sustainable Agriculture: Unifying Concepts

Gasto, J., L. Vera, L. Vieli, and R. Montalba. 2009. Sustainable Agriculture: Unifying Concepts. Cien. Inv. Agr. 36(1):5-26. This work is the product of a long process that tried to approximate the principia involved in sustainable agriculture in an attempt to analyze it. We believe that these principia are crucial for the systematic, rigorous, and consistent development of sustainable agriculture. The unifying concepts of agriculture sustainability are classified into seven fundamental principles: (i) there is a hierarchy, in decision-making with respect to human actions on the landscape and environment; (ii) human impact on the land should be analyzed from different perspectives (local, global, anthropocentric, and ecocentric); (iii) the carrying capacity in an agrarian context is crucial to ecosystem management and design; (iv) humans arrange nature with little consideration of its own natural organization; (v) land-use planning and design are subordinate to the order determinants that occur in a particular situation; (vi) cultural landscape is a result of humans' actions on the land; and, (vii) the concepts of agriculture and rurality lack a territorial connotation, unlike farm and comarca (a region connected through a common local market). Finally, agriculture sustainability should be addressed from various focal points, with a focus on nature and culture as its main determinants.