General Discussion - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 198

agroecosystem. That communities perceive this to be the case is illustrated by their
recognition of the need to enhance both productivity and soil quality through use of
manure. Another example is where they attempt to optimize the use of agrochemicals
to increase productivity but minimize their perceived negative health impacts on the
com mu n it y.
Communities showed great concern for sustainability issues and had a clear-
cut idea of what it meant (Chapter 6) in their own agroecosystem despite its vague
and ambiguous definition. This underscores the global appeal of the sustainability
concept and its power in stimulating debate on natural resource husbandry. Like
the concept of health, sustainability—it seems—is capable of being operationalized
without the need for further refinement of its definition. It is probable that refine-
ment, which implies dilution of its holistic connotation, may result in the loss of its
global appeal and therefore its potential to evoke and guide the need for change in
natural resource management.
Although communities have a strong sense of what is good and what is bad in
terms of the health and sustainability of their agroecosystems (evidenced in their
problem analysis; Chapter 3), they did not seem to appreciate the need for—or lacked
a capacity for—debating, negotiating, planning, and implementing remedial actions
(Chapter 5). Based on their approach in selecting indicators (Chapter 6), sustainable
development, to them, implied stating long-term goals for the agroecosystem and
then building and evaluating short-term and long-term goals based on these. From
their perspective, a sustainability assessment involves an evaluation of the proba-
bilities that the desired long-term goals will be attained given the current manage-
ment practices and agroecosystem conditions. In system terms, this implies that the
agroecosystem together with its socioeconomic subsystems must form a holon with
integrity, that is, the emergent property of a holon to regulate and organize its own
internal structure and function and to mitigate stresses imposed from the outside so
that it can perpetuate itself over all foreseeable external fluctuations. A key require-
ment for integrity is the existence of monitoring and control subunits within the
holon, which in turn implies the existence of at least one measure of performance, a
criterion of what constitutes good or bad performance, and the remedial action to be
taken for each of the possible outcomes. The inability of communities to pursue col-
lective goals, when contrasted with the communities' demand for action subsequent
to the initial village workshops, gives validity to this analysis. The request by com-
munities to form village agroecosystem health committees can be interpreted as an
attempt to build monitoring and control structures.
8.3 aGRoecosystem HealtH
While the concept of sustainability evokes notions of natural resource husbandry,
the agroecosystem health paradigm provides a compelling framework for the suc-
cessful management of agricultural and ecological systems. Community members,
extension agents, and policymakers in this project used concepts derived from the
health disciplines to assess and set goals for their agroecosystem; to debate, negoti-
ate, and plan remedial measures; and then to monitor and evaluate progress. In this
regard, sustainability was seen as analogous to health in the sense that they are both