Abstract

Agriculture is changing around the world. The most dramatic of these changes, however, threaten the very ability of humanity to produce the food needed to sustain itself. Although more is now produced on less land and with less human effort, some farming methods deteriorate our resources to such an extent that the productive life of many important agricultural areas can be numbered, not in centuries, but in decades. Although all view this situation with alarm, few agree on practical solutions to it. Social revisionists recommend stringent reform of those political and economic policies that allegedly created the crisis. At the opposite extreme, others adhere to the belief that economic forces, unfettered by unrealistic social and bureaucratic constraints, ought to be allowed to reshape agriculture in a manner most favorable to humanity's long-term well-being. Between these views is a wide range of stands on ethical issues in agricultural production and on the values of rural community life. Ethics and Agriculture is the first comprehensive anthology of multidisciplinary readings on the ethical questions confronting agriculture today. It sets these issues in context with an introduction to the ethical traditions that structure the discussion.