Caput Septimum. 47
54 Dc Tenuta,feu remed.poiTeiTor
In the conclusions I raised a possible path for Strong Sustainability Science of agricultural systems, in order to lay the foundations for a Substantive Economics. However, the path of research is very long. As shown, the difficulties of the proposals made in this chapter have been growing section to section. Knowing that there lies a long road ahead, I believe it is necessary to mark certain goals that would require new scientific evidence as well as ample social deliberation.
If throughout this process we finally obtain a solid and robust SFRA, connecting the different scales of agroecosystems, the following steps to be considered towards the desired direction are two: i) to face the impact of all forms of societal inequality; and ii) to move from modelling scenarios to propose public policies through the analysis of market flows in money terms.
If we do not ground the analysis at the scale of farm units, and we do not take into consideration who owns the means of production (i.e. agricultural funds in socio-metabolic terms), we cannot see how the intangible metabolism affects the material functioning of agroecological landscapes. The societal blindness of our modelling would prevent us from taking into account how inequality would affect the future scenarios devised for a new socioecological transition. I consider that this is also a key factor for defining planning strategies towards sustainability, which ought to be tightly linked to social equity. A small step in this direction would be analysing current landownership distributions, to see if they hamper or facilitate the eco-functionality of the proposed prospective scenarios. In this regard, certain research currently being developed within the SFS group of Barcelona, led by Inés Marco, establishes solid methodologies and coherent empirical comparative data that allow to evaluate the impact of inequality by linking socio-metabolic and reproductive approaches (Marco et al., forthcoming).
However, they have only been applied to past advanced organic agricultures so far.
In addition, we find in these novel researches that link socio-metabolic and socioeconomic inequalities a key to advance towards novel forms of economic valuation in a new Substantive Economics. Through the analysis of relative prices and subsistence prices proposed by these investigations, we could open a workable path from a reproductive Sraffian perspective to a definition of possible public policies that mitigate these impacts and facilitate the transition to more sustainable fairer future.
As we have said, we still cannot fully apply these new steps empirically. But we believe that there exists certain methodological basis to do so; and that, by going ahead in this research, they could provide helpful tools to contribute to address the current global ecological crisis. This is something that is becoming more necessary every day.
Chapter 9. Ongoing and further research
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Annex I. Energy balances construction