One of the greatest current challenges for the farming sector is to find a compromise among agricultural production to deal with the increased demand worldwide and the environmental impacts for more sustainable development. This is, in fact, a concern for the policymakers and international organisations and led FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) to propose the CSA (climate-smart agriculture) approach. This chapter intends to analyse the impacts of recent events, namely the Covid-19 pandemic, on the sustainability of agriculture worldwide. Data from OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) were considered for the agricultural land and nutrient balance over the period 2019-2021. There is a long way to run to improve the sustainability of agriculture worldwide and the expectation about the contributions of the pandemic to open opportunities to mitigate the environmental impacts from the farming sector are not yet visible.
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The recent implications from international exogenous disturbances spread worldwide (Ali et al., 2020), over diverse markets (Dokić et al., 2020), household groups (Lian et al., 2023) and human security (Tansuchat et al., 2022). Bringing difficulties for the whole human dimensions, including research activities (Spies et al., 2021). They spread over the different dimensions of sustainability with negative externalities, nonetheless opened/reinforced new opportunities to improve frameworks of more sustainable development, including in agricultural practices (Adnan & Nordin, 2021).
These instabilities also (re)open the discussion, namely in the more vulnerable countries (Yang & Liu, 2022), about the need to promote more sustainable agriculture (Al-Saidi et al., 2022). This debate highlights the interrelationship of farming sustainability with the following domains: food sovereignty (Azenzem, 2022); food security (Wudil et al., 2022); rural revitalisation (Khan et al., 2022); financial risk management (Polukhin & Panarina, 2022); urban agriculture (Sridhar et al., 2022); safety of agricultural products (Teng et al., 2022); energy production (Vo, 2020); and agroecological transitions (Nelles, 2023).
In addition, it shows the need for more resilient (Hafez & Attia, 2020) and stable (Li et al., 2023) chains. Alternative productions and supplementary food have been identified in the current times (Kumar et al., 2021). These discussions are relevant to better address the post-pandemic scenario (Martey et al., 2022). Nonetheless, in some circumstances, there is evidence of no significant changes during the pandemic (Gómez Serna & Bernal Rivas, 2020). In other cases, there are signs of mixed effects (Satama et al., 2022).
The new technologies and the digital transition, within the context of Agriculture 4.0, may bring important contributions to more sustainable development in the agricultural sector (Qin et al., 2022), including unmanned aerial vehicles (Ahmad et al., 2020) and smart approaches for food security (Rasul, 2021). The same happens, in some conditions, about the added value for agriculture from nanotechnology, adjusted agronomic practices (Koç & Karayiğit, 2022) and more sustainable decisions (Pathirana & Carimi, 2022).
The diversification of agricultural incomes and the interlinkage of farming activities with other sectors (tourism and small industry) are referred often to as solutions to improve the sustainability of regions and villages (Auliah et al., 2022). The programmes of education, namely from the higher education institutions play here a fundamental role (Baptista et al., 2021), as well as the insights from the scientific community (Ikehi et al., 2022), the agricultural policies (Ling et al., 2023), the public regulations (Manian et al., 2022), infrastructure facilities (Paria et al., 2022) and extension services (Pampori, 2021).
Sustainability in agriculture is interrelated with many factors (from supply and demand sides) and some of which may constrain the strategies designed to promote more eco-friendly practices (Arroyo-Lambaer et al., 2022). From the demand side, consumers are currently informed about the benefits of healthy food (Guiné et al., 2022) and this influences the agricultural sustainability framework, namely when the customers prefer organic products (Zámková et al., 2022). In these contexts, adjusted water management, for example, is crucial (Barbosa, 2022).