Synergies and Trade-Offs for Sustainable Food Production in Sweden: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

The production of food can have large impacts on sustainable development in relation to various socio-ecological dimensions, like climate change, the environment, animal welfare, livestock epidemiology, and the economy. To achieve a sustainable food production system in Sweden, an integrated approach that considers all five of these dimensions, and all parts of the food production chain, is necessary. This paper systematically reviewed the literature related to food production in Sweden, especially in association with resource distribution and recycling logistics, and identified potential sustainability interventions and assessed their effects according to the five dimensions. Participation of stakeholders across the food production chain contributed with the focus of the literature search and subsequent synthesis. In general, there were synergies between the sustainability interventions and their effect on climate change and the environment, while there often were trade-offs between effects on the economy and the other dimensions. Few interventions considered effects on animal welfare or livestock epidemiology and few studies dealt with resource distribution and recycling logistics. This indicates that there is a need for future research that considers this in particular, as well as research that considers the whole food production chain and all dimensions at once, and investigates effects across multiple scales.

Three Decades of Changes in Brazilian Municipalities and Their Food Production Systems

“…This process of land concentration (i.e., great amounts of land unit per producer) led soybean producers to become large landholders in the Midwest, which propelled the advance of the agricultural frontier in Brazil through the logic of economies of scale as a strategy to deal with the lack of infrastructure and to increase profit margins in frontiers [5,16,18]. Export-oriented agricultural frontiers, as usually characterized by large farming systems in the case of soybean in Brazil [49], tend to follow processes of specialization, with simplified landscape structures and large-scale cropping systems [5,23]. This process is driven by the need to increase the scale of production (e.g., expanding planted area) as a way to spread fixed costs, increase marketing power, and to allow bulk purchases of agricultural inputs.…”

“…In trade-off situations, a producer or another hierarchical level (e.g., a given municipality) cannot achieve desired positive outcomes in all dimensions and a decision towards a given benefit may detrimentally impact another socioeconomic or ecological dimension [22]. Trade-off and synergy analysis, sometimes treated as opposing concepts [9], is central to the growing debate about sustainable food systems [9,[23][24][25][26].…”

“…Supported by the premise that sustainable food systems must be holistically evaluated by taking into consideration the trade-offs and synergies between socioeconomics and environmental impacts [22,23], we place our lens at the municipality level, looking for associations of trade-offs and synergies in the food systems with the varying soybean farm sizes across Brazil. The farm unit is where farmers' decisions can be explicitly evaluated [5] but is at the local scales (e.g., municipality) that effects of farming landscapes are better understood as they are dependent upon political, economic, or biophysical contexts [35].…”

The Effects of Hydrophobicity and Textural Properties on Hexamethyldisiloxane Adsorption in Reduced Graphene Oxide Aerogels

“…It can be produced from raw materials such as agricultural, food and municipal waste products, and sewage sludge [ 1 , 2 ]. Due to its relatively high methane content and calorific value, biogas has been widely investigated as a renewable energy source for heating and power generation [ 3 , 4 ]. However, siloxanes, present at low concentrations in biogas, can compromise the operation of biogas-to-energy facilities, presenting technical challenges for its widespread use [ 5 ].…”

Assessing intrastate shipments from interstate data and expert opinion

“…Outbreaks may cause national emergencies, with huge costs to the livestock sector due to disruption of production and export. As such, TADs are a primary concern for food security [ 1 ]. Additionally, several TADs have painful symptoms, making them an animal welfare concern.…”