Amn. Izac et Mj. Swift, ON AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY AND ITS MEASUREMENT IN SMALL-SCALE FARMING IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, Ecological economics, 11(2), 1994, pp. 105-125
We argue in this paper that there is a need to bring the current debat
e on sustainability down to a more pragmatic level, to 'operationalise
' sustainability. Given the diversity of agricultural systems througho
ut the world, the best that is possible may be to develop proximate de
finitions that do generate testable theories, as we try to do in this
paper by developing a pragmatic and measurable definition of the conce
pt which is relevant to small-scale farming in sub-Saharan Africa. The
definition we offer takes the community of the village agroecosystem
as a relevant and embracing social and spatial unit of analysis. It is
based on the anthropocentric value judgement that future generations
must have the same range of options concerning the use of agroecosyste
ms as the current generation. Given that village agroecosystems genera
te various environmental amenities for the human communities, this val
ue judgment means that a sustainable agroecosystem is one which has th
e capacity to respond to exogenous change as well as to internal disru
ptions by maintaining non-declining trends in its resources and amenit
ies over a period of at least one decade. The approach we advocate has
the dual dangers of over-simplification and the creation of tautologi
es. It should always be borne in mind that the criteria of sustainabil
ity may differ from ecosystem to ecosystem, zone to zone, nation to na
tion. Each situation should be scrutinised for the essential criteria
for assessment, which may be different, and greater or lesser in numbe
r, than those we have proposed. As a generality we do maintain, howeve
r, that for progress in sustainability assessment, this process of cho
ice should be based on the principle of parsimony. Tautology, the erec
tion of self-fulfilling predictions, is a more fundamental danger in t
he approach we have taken. We have emphasised several times the necess
ity of rigorous testing of hypotheses concerning the determinants of e
ach of the components of sustainability that we have described. This i
s the real challenge to the researcher, but insight into the design of
appropriate experiments may be gained from preliminary application of
pragmatic tests of relative sustainability of the type described here
. We try to avoid ecological and economic dogma as far as possible in
our discussion of sustainability, attempting to argue instead from wha
t we actually observe in the systems we study. Whilst a great deal of
ecological and economic theory may seem at first look to be applicable
to the analysis of the sustainability of small-scale agricultural sys
tems, we find that closer analysis reveals the inapplicability of much
of what has been subsumed under the titles of agroecology or natural
resource economics. Concepts such as stress and disturbance, stability
and diversity, community structure, economic optimality, maximum soci
al welfare, do not, on inspection, provide particularly strong predict
ive power, particularly when applied to the dynamics of resource-poor,
small-scale, community-structured, and to a non-negligible extent, no
n-market-driven agricultural systems.