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summary Transition Towards Sustainable Food Consumption and Production in a Resource Constrained World
Reflections on the Foresight Stakeholder Conference, 4–5 May 2011, Budapest, Hungary The SCAR Foresight Stakeholder Conference aimed to be the cornerstone of the Foresight process by identifying innovative solutions which would enable agri‐food systems to cope with a range of complex and interlinked challenges over the next 30–40 years. This article reflects the major views and themes emerging from the conference. Several transitional pathways towards more sustainable food consumption and production were identified and these might provide a basis for forward thinking in the development of public policies and industry strategies: (a) consider expected resource scarcities in long‐term research priority setting and take planetary boundaries seriously; (b) support trans‐disciplinary research to understand the complexity of agri‐food systems and enhance agro‐ecological and resilience research; (c) give consumer‐oriented research a higher priority in public funding; (d) take a cross‐sectoral approach and make public agricultural knowledge and innovation systems (AKIS) fit to cope with the new and interconnected challenges; (e) explore new means of policy coordination and consider the trade‐offs between different sectoral policies; and (f) take a long‐term view for both research policy and research priority setting and enable more efficient research spending by strengthening transnational program cooperation. Tackling long‐term European agri‐food system sustainability challenges will require increased investments in research and innovation.

As a result of the economic restructuring and political reforms undertaken during the 1990s, Hungary has a varied set of farm types that encompass a wide array of different sizes, degrees of capital intensity and forms of ownership. This article explores the performance of Hungarian farms and concludes that, in contrast to other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, the majority of commercially oriented farms are profitable. However, estimates are sensitive to the valuation of own land and labour inputs. From the application of factor and cluster analysis, eight clusters of farms are profiled and the most competitive group identified. While the most profitable cluster also has the highest mean farm size, farm consolidation should not be treated as a panacea for dealing with low agricultural returns in the region.

This chapter describes the architecture of an ontology based content authoring system, developed according to the challenges emerging from Bologna process deployment in Hungary. Considering the needs of Hungarian academic sector, mobility of learners has also been treated as a key requirement. This system has several fundamental components: an educational ontology–which also serves as the domain of curricula development, a content developer, a content repository, and an adaptive knowledge testing engine with a test bank. The services and learning objects are distributed towards the students through a mobilized learning management system.