Agricultural sustainability, growth, and poverty alleviation

The natural resource base must, ultimately, sustain livelihoods. In developing countries with rapid rates of population growth, and without appropriate agricultural technology for making the most of scarce natural resources, this means being forced to deplete soils, watersheds, and forests in order to maintain rural and urban populations. This degraded resource base, however, cannot be squeezed indefinitely for this or any other purpose. Clearly, unless these resources are managed in sustainable ways, current (and often impoverished) as well as future generations will find their welfare threatened. But what precisely are the goals? Policymakers in developing countries face growing frustration in trying to select realistic sustainability targets. Targets proposed often represent ideals--they are conceptually hazy and require difficult (and sometimes unrealistic) political decisions, balancing use of natural resources against welfare of current versus future generations, and of various groups within the population. Policymakers cannot, and should not, abandon growth and poverty alleviation goals for the sake of sustainability; the options are often wrongly cast in this way. Frustration over this situation is compounded by the lack of solid theoretical and empirical information on the potential for various international, macro, a and sectoral policies to bring about desired outcomes. In short, policymakers are often unsure which of the many sustainability targets to aim for, what the short- and long-term costs (both absolutely and vis-a-vis other goals) of various targets might be, and how to go about reaching these goals.

The notion of sustainability must be practically introduced into policymakers' decisions and researchers' agendas. This means that more thought needs to be given on how to operationalize the concept (what are we supposed to sustain, how do we measure it, when do we measure it, where (geographically) do we measure it?), and how to weave it into a realistic, development-oriented framework, placing sustainability alongside other societal goals.