| Chapter : | Introduction: Putting Ecological Economics into Sustainable Agricultural Practices |
|
|
agricultural research and practice need to be carried out with a holistic approach. In other words, only when considered from a comprehensive ecological, sociocultural, economic, and political perspective can ecological agriculture be managed and developed in a sustainable way. Therefore, appropriate methodologies are required to support the systematic incorporation of these related dimensions in order to consider ecological agriculture as an integrated whole.
The current ecological agricultural development in China can be understood as the result of a long-term planning system and a number of market principles that have been introduced in the last three decades. To sustain ecological agriculture's further development, an extensive survey of its present status must be carried out. As Cheng et al. (1992) pointed out, ‘The multidisciplinary documentation and diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of China's development strategy of ecological agriculture are sorely needed’ (p. 1139). In the past, analyses were based predominantly on isolated disciplinary approaches. It is necessary to transcend the barriers among disciplines such as biology, ecology, sociology, and economics to identify the advantages and disadvantages of ecological agriculture from a transdisciplinary ecological economics perspective. Although environmental issues are assuming more importance on China's political agenda, the high expectations for economic growth have made the introduction of environmental concerns in policy making more complex. Environmental externalities, either in production or in consumption, are not seriously taken into account. The result is a pattern of natural capital appropriation in which benefits accrue to some users of environmental services without any compensation for the social costs incurred by the excluded users (Seroa da Motta, 2001). In contrast to past research that focused only on better describing and analysing the subject under investigation, the main task of current ecological agricultural research is to further improve its practice as a sustainable system. In other words, it is inevitably faced with the challenge of balancing the costs and benefits between contemporary and future generations to justify policy actions toward sustainability. This requires a paradigm shift in the research towards being problem oriented.