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Agriculture is totally sustainable : Comments
By David Leyonhjelm, published 17/7/2013Modern agriculture is not only sustainable now, but more sustainable than it has ever been.
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The Brundtland definition is good. The Wikipedia definition is good too: the capacity to endure. And I would add the bit that I often express on OLO: the ongoing balance between supply and demand, with a big safety margin.
Agriculture in Australia is basically sustainable... if you accept that enormous ecological damage that has been done, in the WA wheatbelt for example, and you accept the fertilizers and the fossil fuel energy needed to plough, sow and harvest the crops, and you accept soil salinity, loss of topsoil and erratic and diminishing rainfall, which has often led to no crops or the large-scale sell-off or agistment of sheep and cattle.
In other words, it isn’t really all that sustainable. Or at least a good part of it isn’t.