What Kind of Agriculture? What Might Science Deliver?

Until recently, nearly all agricultural research was unified by a focus on increased production. Arguably, production subsidies in Europe and the US made that approach viable. But today, paradoxically, we are faced with both growing fragmentation and integration in agricultural research. Agricultural research is now seen as the solution to problems of global warming, rural development, environmental improvement, economic growth, sustainability, and even public health. We can discern the outlines of a new integration of food, pharmacy, diet, and health. But, at the same time, we can also see a gulf between molecular approaches to biology – genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, among others – and older fields such as systematics, and plant and animal breeding. This is paralleled by a shift from public standards focused largely on safety, to a proliferation of sometimes conflicting standards for sustainability, worker rights, fair trade, and organic, etc. Missing is any attempt to ask what kind of food and agriculture we want. We need to begin to answer this fundamentally ethical question if we are to ensure that investments in agricultural research yield improvements