The paper is structured thus: Section 1 reviews the development and meaning of
sustainable agriculture, while Section 2 is concerned with the history and nature
of organic farming. Issues regarding organic standards, regulation and the relation-
ship between input use and sustainability are discussed in Section 3. Sections 4 and 5
concern the degree of isolation of sustainable systems and issues of scale and pro-
ductivity respectively. Section 6 concludes the paper, focussing on some of the key
issues in the debates about the organisation of a sustainable agriculture.