Agricultural transition processes and sustainability: A review with a focus on low-income settings

The need for agricultural systems to evolve in a more sustainable direction is widely recognized. When agriculture is placed within a sustainability transitions framework, the focus is almost entirely on industrial agriculture in middle- or high-income settings, implicitly placing large-scale, highly mechanized agriculture as the prevailing (and problematic) regime to be transformed. Less attention is given to settings of small-scale, low-intensity, subsistence farming where the agricultural sector is in the early stages of a transformation to modern, commercial, and larger-scale production. In this review, I consider how low-income countries at the start of this agricultural transformation process may take purposive actions to “leapfrog” past the lock-ins that hold industrial agriculture elsewhere in an environmentally destructive pattern. These lock-ins include a highly concentrated agrifood industry with power held by a small handful of transnational agrifood corporations; a narrow innovation environment often controlled by those same companies; and the embedded nature of dominant agricultural technologies. Low-income countries can take steps to shape an agricultural system that is more amenable to evolving in a sustainable direction. They can facilitate competition and diversity in the agrifood industry; promote diversity in farm structure; stimulate and shape an innovation environment oriented toward sustainability priorities; foster stakeholder engagement to build consensus across the decentralized agricultural sector; and maintain sight of the multiple (environmental, social, and economic) dimensions of sustainability. While these steps increase the likelihood that the trajectory of agricultural transformation will incorporate sustainability into its end state, prospects for purposive decision-making are narrowed by the inherent complexity of agricultural systems; the tensions and tradeoffs among the multiple dimensions of sustainability, especially in low-income settings; and the weakness of institutions, including central governments. Future research should concretize these concepts with case studies and empirical work in low-income settings to evaluate whether the sustainability transitions lens is, in actuality, helpful to policy makers. • Brings together the language of sustainability transitions and agricultural transformation. • Focuses on agriculture as a socio-institutional regime. • Focuses on low-income countries at the start of the agricultural transformation process. • Considers how low-income countries may leapfrog past unsustainable lock-ins. • Acknowledges limitations in the likelihood of purposive decision-making.