6 What Has All This to Do with the Sustainability of Agriculture? Example: The Making of Farm Bills (Institutionalizing a Discussion of the Social Contract about Agriculture)

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preserve the special status of academic research has to become more open. To make this point clear,

consider the example of the making of a farm bill.

5.6.2 The Case of the U.S. Farm Bill 2002

The U.S. Farm Bill 2002 represents a clear change in (or a big revision of) the U.S. federal government’s

attitude toward regulation and intervention in agricultural development. The passing of this farm bill

has generated contrasting views and assessments on its overall quality (e.g., http://

www.sustainableagriculture.net/summary-5-6-02.htm).We can relate this example of decision making

to the discussion of analytical tools presented in Section 5.4. When making this decision, the U.S.

federal government must have selected this specific bill out of a set of possible alternative bills. To do

that, U.S. decision makers must have used a problem structuring similar to that represented in both

Figure 5.4 (in terms of impact matrix) and Figure 5.7 (in terms of social impact matrix). In this case, n

is the set of possible alternative ways of spending a certain amount of (billions of) dollars in implementing

a package of policies and m is the set of criteria used to represent and assess the expected performance

associated with the implementation of each of the alternative policies. Actually, it should be noted that

the decision about the amount of money to be spent in a farm bill could be considered itself as a

variable, rather than a constraint. In this case, different policies requiring the expenditure of different

amounts of billions of dollars should have been considered in the analysis. Obviously, the chosen

alternative (the actual “Farm Bill 2000”) must have been considered the “wisest” choice in relation to:

(1) a set of m multiple goals (e.g., economic viability of the agricultural sectors, food security, quality of

the food, environmental impact, social stress in rural community, protection of cultural values, etc.), (2)

a set of data and models characterizing n scenarios associated with the implementation of the n alternative

policies included in the problem structuring and (3) the legitimate contrasting perspectives of the

social actors considered relevant in such an analysis.

Put another way, to make this choice, the U.S. government must have used:

•



•



•



A problem structuring, implying decisions about (1) what is the set of relevant social

actors who have to be considered when deciding, (2) a set of criteria that are considered

relevant for this choice, (3) what is the set of criteria that are relevant to some stakeholders

but that can be neglected to satisfy other conflicting criteria and (4) a mix of policy options

that can be combined to generate the set of alternative bills considered.

A set of analyses (models and data) and predictions used to characterize the effects of

the possible policies on different descriptive domains through scenarios (e.g., in social terms,

economic terms, ecological terms, landscape use terms) characterized at different scales. That

is, to make such a decision, it has been necessary to have an idea of what will or could happen

when adopting the package of monetary and regulatory policies 1, 2 or 3. The MSIA of

different effects of each package must have been characterized using a set of different indicators

reflecting the relevant and legitimate contrasting views defined in the problem structuring.

A process of political negotiation among different interests and concerns associated

with the various stakeholders in the U.S. food system. The particular choice of one of the

possible policy packages (the actual Farm Bill 2002), in fact, implied that some stakeholders

got more benefits than others (implying that some of the criteria have been given more

priority than others).



Analysts of agriculture as well as social actors might have asked a number of questions about the

choices made by the U.S. government in this farm bill:

1.



2.



Could U.S. society at large and the various stakeholders in the U.S. food system have had a

better chance to form a clearer picture of what was the information space used by the

decision makers for organizing such a discussion?

Could U.S. society at large and the various stakeholders in the U.S. food system have been

involved in a more transparent process of discussion of the basic problem structuring (defining

the relevant criteria and defining possible options)?



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3.



4.



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Could U.S. society at large and the various scientists and academic institutions have been

involved in a more effective multi-scale integrated analysis of possible effects of the various

alternative bills?

Could U.S. society at large and the various stakeholders in the U.S. food system have been

involved in a more transparent process of negotiation about the weights to be used when

dealing with contrasting perspectives about priorities?



If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then U.S. society at large and the various stakeholders in

the U.S. food system have lost an important opportunity to learn how to design, discuss, understand

and negotiate future farm bills in a better way. In the future, this ability will become extremely important

if the existing trends referring to the postindustrialization of a globalized world remain.

The context is changing so fast that the validity of the social contract used to define the various

roles that social actors have to play in the food system has to be monitored and negotiated on a regular

basis. This is why academic programs willing to deal with the sustainability problems of agriculture

should give top priority to the development of new tools and procedures for dealing with MSIA of

agriculture. Agriculture should no longer be considered just another economic sector producing

commodities. Rather, agriculture should be associated with a multifunctional set of activities associated

with land use.

At this point, we can try to answer the question about the role of academic programs dealing with

agriculture in the new millennium. The top priorities for academic programs of agricultural colleges

within the U.S. should be that of producing scientific information relevant for the discussion of a next

farm bill in 2008 and that of becoming able to make a difference in the shaping of the discussion and

the societal multi-criteria evaluation of the U.S. farm bill in the year 2014. In fact, future farm bills

should be able to better reflect (1) the continuous change in societal perception about what a food

system entails and (2) the growing scientific awareness about the ecological and social dimensions of

sustainability.

These two lines of research for agriculture can be related to the discussion about the two possible

interpretations for the term agroecology presented at the beginning of this chapter.The first of the two

interpretations (how to totally rethink agriculture) refers to the process of societal learning about how

to better design, discuss, understand and negotiate future farm bills in both developed and developing

countries. The second interpretation of the term agroecology is about the need to expand the option

space of the set of possible technical coefficients available to generate mixes of techniques of production

in various agroecosystems. This has to do with expanding knowledge about ecological and economic

performance profiles of individual techniques of production and integrated systems of production.The

usefulness of this second activity is associated with the beneficial effect of increasing the diversity of

potential performance profiles to be adopted in a multifunctional framework of land uses.

Obviously, the sustainability predicament of agriculture in both developed and developing countries

implies that more research is needed in both directions. For sure, the first direction of research is the

one that will provide a higher return in the short term, because of the clear obsolescence and cultural

lock-in of current mechanisms of policy interventions in the agricultural endeavor in both developed

and developing countries.

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