Sustainable Food Production by Shahid Naeem Suzanne Lipton and Tiff van Huysen

Author:Shahid Naeem, Suzanne Lipton, and Tiff van Huysen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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FOOD, FARMING, AND HUMAN WELL-BEING

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND HUMAN WELL-BEING

The Three Pillars of Human Development

In chapter 1, we considered that development from an ecological perspective is a form of niche construction. Something members of almost every species do is modify their homes and habitats to better their lives. In the course of a few millennia, however, humans have vastly exceeded anything any other species has ever been able to do. So extensive is our niche construction that we have modified the entire planet to produce and sustain approximately 471 million tons of human mass: about 7.6 billion people. We noted, however, that while our biological success in terms of mass and numbers is indisputable, from ecological and social perspectives we’ve done poorly, creating a world in which environmental sustainability is at risk and prosperity is massively unequal. The relatively new paradigm of sustainable development has thus grown in popularity because it promises improved human prosperity while reversing, or at least preventing, further environmental harm that would adversely affect both future human generations and all other life on Earth.

Human endeavors to improve our lot in life are collectively known as HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, but there are many ideas about how best to define this term. Perhaps the best definition, and the one we adopt here, is that provided by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Their definition of human development is “the process of enlarging people’s choices. In principle, these choices can be infinite and change over time. But at all levels of development, the three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living. If these essential choices are not available, many other opportunities remain inaccessible.”1

This definition or conceptualization of human development was pioneered by the economists Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen and by the ambassador and UN senior advisor Üner Kirdar in the 1990s, and it highlights the importance of the noneconomic dimensions of development.2 Embedded in this framework are what we can consider the three PILLARS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: health, education, and access. Here, access refers to access to information, water, and energy and other resources, natural or otherwise, including, for farmers, land, seed, livestock, fertilizers, biocides, and the other forms of capital described in chapter 1. We’ll consider the important issue of access, which all three pillars of human development depend on, at the end of this chapter.

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