Lancaster Environment Centre

Mission

Our mission is to couple cutting edge research in plant science and other disciplines with a practical focus on sustainable agriculture in order to address the ecological, economic and social challenges facing agriculture in a rapidly changing global environment.

Drivers

• Required increase in agricultural production and effective food distribution to feed a growing global population.
• Increasing consumer demands for safe and healthy food.
• Increasing ecological challenges and ecological demands on agricultural production.
• Increasing recognition that agro-ecosystems play a key role in conservation and mitigation of global change impacts.

Background

Agriculture is at the crossroads. The global population is expected to increase from its current 6 billion to 9 billion by around 2050. The fact that this is accompanied by changes in diet driven by rising affluence, further increases demands on agricultural production. There is very little potential to offset these demands by increasing acreage, as available land is typically marginal, while fertile agricultural land is being lost due to desertification, urbanisation and climate change. The trend of growing energy crops further reduces the land available for food production. Most conclude that an increase in productivity must be achieved if we are to start to address the global concern over food security.

At the same time, we see increasing recognition of the important contribution agriculture can make in negating key ecological issues such as climate change, land use change and biodiversity loss. Current policies are promoting a new paradigm, recognizing and supporting the role of agriculture and the agricultural landscape in providing environmental services (biodiversity conservation, nutrient and water management). Meeting the productivity and ecological demands creates a new and challenging agenda, involving stakeholders across the globe. This means that agriculture can only be sustainable in environmental, social and economic terms if there is a radical shift of emphasis in the near future, while preparing the ground for greater global challenges to come.

Food security may be usefully conceptually divided into three major components: Food availability (production, distribution, and exchange), food access (affordability, allocation, and preference), and food utilization (nutritional value, social value, and food safety). The FAO (and others) also explicitly include stability (Stamoulis and Zezza, 2003) as a fourth component, to acknowledge that food security varies seasonally and interannually in many places.

It can be helpful to conceptualize a ‘food system’ and indeed, the term is in common parlance although it has a wide range of usages and meanings. In addition to considering the food chain activities and the outcomes of these activities, food system discussions need also to recognise what can be the rather considerable conflicts among those within food supply chains (from input suppliers to final consumers) as well as between those concerned about some aspect(s) of food supply and those concerned about other issues. Hence, the use of crops and land for energy, for forest products, for fiber crops, as well as non-agricultural uses of land and water (e.g., for mining, manufacturing, urban sprawl, etc) are not merely a matter of tradeoffs; they are points of heated (and sometimes violent) social conflict among various persons and groups in society. Moreover, merely increasing production or productivity is unlikely to resolve these conflicts.

This suggests that food security is not so much a “problem” to be solved but a state, or condition, to be attained; it is what Rittel (1972; Rittel and Webber 1973) termed a ‘wicked problem.’ That is to say, the “problem” of food insecurity is not amenable to being easily and simply solved as it is not possible to identify all of its relevant food security parameters. Indeed, many of the key parameters are outside what is traditionally included in food security debates and involve energy policy, mitigation of climate change, subsidies, tariffs, and quotas, environmental concerns, wealth distribution, and population growth. Put differently, food security is not solely about science and technology. It is not solely about social institutions. It is not solely about natural phenomena. Nor is it the sum of these. Instead, it is about the rather messy entanglement of all of these.

The Centre for Sustainable Agriculture will deliver science and social science underpinning sustainable agriculture and food security for the 21st century, via a unique collaboration across the faculties of Lancaster University and with other key partners in UK (e.g. The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Rothamsted Research, Waitrose supermarkets, Myerscough College) and across the world (e.g. China Agricultural University, North West China Agricultural and Forestry University, CSIC, INRA). This centre will form an integrated and interdisciplinary focus for independent research and knowledge transfer relating to sustainable production of high quality food.