Social Well-being in Community Development: Challenges in Creating Justice Objectives

Introduction The viability of rural communities and methods of food production is central to the health of the environment as well as humanity. So mounting evidence of the destructive and unsustainable ways more and more food is produced today is especially alarming. The prevailing model of economic development, widely referred to as globalization or neoliberalism, includes massive export-oriented agriculture as a major component, and creates structures of concentrated power and wealth that generate far-reaching problems on a global scale (Cavanaugh; Porritt; Robbins). Industrial agriculture can be directly or indirectly linked to widespread contamination of rivers, soil erosion (currently estimated at 1% annual loss worldwide), depletion of fresh water supplies, growing chemical imbalances of oceans, loss of seed varieties, and acceleration of global climate change. Whether rationalized or unintended, the cumulative impact of such deleterious trends brings to mind the experience of Green Revolution technologies several decades ago, which raised productive potential but often at high social and environmental costs.