General Introduction - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 1

1 General Introduction
1.1 IntRoductIon
Kenya's food security depends on the ability to increase agricultural productivity
(Yudelman, 1987) without degrading further—but rather facilitating the regeneration
of—the resources on which agriculture depends. How can increases in productivity
be achieved and sustained? Many technologies have been demonstrated to increase
agricultural productivity. What is becoming increasingly clear is that many of these
may not be sustainable, mostly because they engender degradation of the resources
on which agriculture and human well-being depend. The question is therefore not so
much how to increase agricultural productivity but how optimal productivity can be
achieved and sustained.
The central highlands agroecosystem in Kenya serves as a good example of how
conventional technology-based approaches to agricultural productivity can result in
failure, reemergence of old problems, and development of new ones. Efforts have
been geared toward maximizing off-take per unit area (Delgado, 1989) through
intensification of land use (Winrock International, 1992) and increased use of exter-
nal input and technologies. The result has been a proliferation of intensively farmed
smallholder units—now the dominant land-use system in the highlands. This trans-
formation has had limited success as well as important failures. In some cases, there
were initial increases in productivity, but many are now registering declines, attrib-
uted mostly to land degradation and disintegration of the traditional balance among
people, their habitat, and economic systems (Mohamed-Saleem and Fitzhugh, 1995).
The realization that smallholder agriculture depends on a complex of interrelated
sociocultural and biophysical factors has led to their description as complex, diverse,
and risk prone (Chambers et al., 1989).
While causes of technology failure are not always obvious, it is clear that con-
ventional methods are severely limited in their ability to deal with the complexity
of systems such as smallholder farming in the East African highlands. Sustainable
transformation of such systems requires an adaptive and integrated approach—one
that takes a systems perspective, incorporates holistic views of well-being, and takes
into account the multiple goals and multiple perspectives of the primary managers of
these systems. Issues of human values (such as economics and aesthetics), scale, and
discipline (environmental, economic, social, etc.) are central and must be accentu-
ated and solved rather than obscured (Waltner-Toews, 1996). In addition, technical
feasibility and economic viability must not be the only criteria for evaluating new
strategies (Woomer, 1992). Other criteria, such as social and environmental costs,
efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness, must also be included. It is this view that has
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