Sustainable Development and Food Chain Dynamics: A Question of the Ultimate Measure of Sustainability

This paper looks at the socio-environmental sustainability of agri-food systems and addresses the key issue of measuring ‘sustainability’. The paper begins by providing an overview of the environmental impacts of the global agri-food systems especially focusing on the UK. The author generated a comprehensive analysis of the key hotspots within food systems in a previous paper presented at the 2nd International European Forum on Systems Dynamics and Innovation in Food Networks in 2008. This article takes the discussion further by looking at the key tools for supply chain environmental measurement and contributes establishing a new measure of sustainable production/consumption.