The prospects for sustainable development are the challenge of our time. Antle and Ray present their own optimistic approach and emphasize the importance of trade-offs and interactions in order to reduce ongoing environmental degradation and unjustifiably increasing malnutrition.

The authors explain, from an economic perspective, participatory processes and provide the analytical tools required to find solutions to these challenges. The book offers a non-technical, accessible introduction to sustainable agricultural development and its relationship with sustainable development in general, based on three analytical pillars.

The first is understanding agriculture as a whole of complex natural, biological, and human systems. The second is the economic approach to understanding the trade-offs, practices, and interactions between the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of these systems at the farm, regional, and global scales.

The third pillar concerns understanding these agricultural systems from the supply side of a sector in a developing economy, and how it interacts—through markets and policies—with other sectors at local, national, and global levels.

Next, the key role played by agriculture in economic growth, economic development, and sustainable development is presented. The systems of family farms and their characteristics are described, as well as an analysis of their performance in the three dimensions of sustainability, while the challenges of sustainable agriculture in developing and industrialized countries are examined.

Finally, ways are developed through which we can, both individually and collectively, move towards a more sustainable development of agriculture.