Ethics of Sustainable Agricultural Intensification - FAO.org

Over the 10 000 years since the NeolithicIntroductionAge, human population growth has beencorrelated with intensification in foodproduction systems, primarily agriculture, whichhas also greatly modified the world’s ecosystems,for better or for worse. Given the present andanticipated increases in world population, not to mention current and projectedenvironmental problems and ecological stress from agriculture, further agriculturalintensification will be needed. What ethical issues have been (or might have been)raised in connection with past episodes of agricultural intensification? Who can makea difference in directing the course of future intensification, and what ethicalresponsibilities do these potential actors bear?Any answer to these questions will be complex. It will involve sophisticatedanalyses of the historical and natural processes that have influenced and continue toinfluence episodes of agricultural intensification. It will also involve an account of thesocial, economic and psychological underpinnings of both individual and collectiveaction, and this account will need to be woven into detailed factual analyses of theland, climatic and genetic endowments in specific places. The focus in this ethics paperis just one element of the problem: the way that ethical concepts and terms can be usedto articulate the normative dimension – what ought to be the case with respect to humanpurpose and conduct whenever episodes of intensification occur. Although severalexamples from the history of intensification are discussed, the paper does not attemptto provide an exhaustive or representative survey of ethical issues that have beenraised in connection with intensification. Neither does it offer a general or universallyapplicable answer to any of the questions above, much less to the comprehensivequestion, “What ought to be done with respect to intensification?”. Instead, the focusis on building capacity for debate and analysis of these ethical questions, with theexpectation that specific answers will be the result of more focused inquiries conductedby people with more proximate access to and knowledge of circumstances that arerelevant to specific cases.Debate and analysis of ethical issues are difficult for several reasons. In manycultures, ethical norms are deeply embedded in traditions and religious practices,while in others they are thought to be highly personal. With global issues, themultiplicity of cultural, linguistic and ethical traditions means that one cannot drawupon a common set of terminology or working assumptions. Activities that requirecoordination to specify or achieve goals or to implement ideas and concepts may bedescribed as “social”, “economic” or “political” rather than ethical, leading to asituation in which questions about what “ought to be” are not recognized as ethicalones. As social science has evolved to analyse activity in these domains, the scientificpractice of focusing on data collection and the formulation of refutable hypotheses1