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Strategies to enhance the sustainability of agriculture have emerged and grown more sophisticated over the past 20 years as the body of research and practice has expanded. Driven by the increased recognition of the environmental consequences of contemporary agricultural practice in both the industrial and developing world, early interventions focused largely on natural resource management and conservation. On-farm practices received the bulk of attention from researchers, change agents and farmers. While the social and economic aspects of sustainability were recognized, they were not the focus of early research or practice, nor did most research address the policies and traits of large-scale systems that constrain and facilitate sustainable agriculture. In fact, sustainable agriculture practices were and still are associated with the adoption of site-specific practices that rely to the degree possible on resources that are generated on-farm or at the local level.
Global Food Systems, Resource Use and Risk
At the same time, global commerce in food products, including fresh fruits and vegetables, animal products and ornamental species has become a dominant feature of the food system. Globalization of food trade in agricultural commodities is in some senses the antithesis of key concepts of sustainable agriculture--particularly the emphases on local, typically smaller scale supply and marketing systems, reduced reliance on off-farm resources, and nourishing local ecosystems and economies. MacDonald et al. (2015) refer to this as the transformation of the geography of food systems, accounting for about 13% of worldwide cropland and pasture. While increasing global food trade offers opportunities to participate in lucrative markets to farmers, the ramifications of the scale of exchange extend far beyond the economic.
Global trade in food products distances the depletion of resources and environmental impacts of food production from the economic and social processes that drive consumption. Water use for export crop production provides an example of the environmental impacts of the distancing between demand and production. Schwarz and Mathijs (2017: 231) report that the burgeoning production for export in coastal Peru over the past two decades has increased income and employment, but uses five times more groundwater use than local crop production. Two high-value crops for export, asparagus and grapes, account for over 50% of total groundwater extraction. Cotton exports in Uzbekistan account for 20.3 billion m