The prospects for sustainable development are the challenge of our time. Antle and Ray present their own optimistic approach and emphasize the importance of mutual trade-offs and interactions in order to reduce ongoing environmental degradation and unjustifiably increasing malnutrition. The authors explain from an economic perspective, participatory processes, and provide the analytical tools needed to find solutions to these challenges. The book offers a non-technical, accessible introduction to sustainable agricultural development and its relationship to sustainable development in general, based on three analytical pillars.

The first is understanding agriculture as a set of complex physical, biological, and human systems. The second is the economic approach to understanding the trade-offs, practices, and interactions between the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of these systems at the farm, regional, and global levels. The third pillar concerns understanding these agricultural systems from the perspective of a sector’s contribution to a developing economy, as it interacts—through markets and policies—with other sectors at the local, national, and global levels.

Next, the main role played by agriculture in economic growth, economic development, and sustainable development is presented. It describes family farming systems and their characteristics, as well as analyzing their performance in the three dimensions of sustainability, while also examining the challenges of sustainable agriculture in developing and industrialized countries. Finally, it develops ways in which we can, both individually and collectively, move towards more sustainable agricultural development.

• John M. Antle is a professor in the Department of Applied Economics at Oregon State University in the United States. Srabashi Ray is a doctoral candidate in the same department.