As the ®gures above on the development of the organic market indicate, the
growth in consumer demand for environmentally friendly, ``green'' or chemical-free
food products has led to an expansion in Europe and North America of organic
registration schemes. These schemes are seen to guarantee that products are produced
in a certain way, with a range of agricultural inputs prohibited. The eects of
these schemes on producers, and the implications of an expansion of the world
market in such goods are also discussed in the context of agricultural sustainability.
This raises issues regarding the scale, productivity and organisation of a future sustainable
agriculture.
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 relationship
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 productivity
respectively. Section 6 concludes the paper, focussing on some of the key
issues in the debates about the organisation of a sustainable agriculture