Today the goal of designing highly productive, sustainable agricultural produc tion systems is at the forefront of the agricultural research agenda around the world. The key to designing sustainable agricultural production technologies is in understanding their economic, environmental, and human health impacts. This volume presents a methodology designed to quantify such impacts and to represent them as tradeoff's. We propose this tradeoff' methodology as an approach to accomplish two essential elements in achieving agricultural sustainability. First, the tradeoff's method is a key to the design of successful interdisciplinary research projects to assess sustainability of production systems. Second, the tradeoff's method provides a successful means to communicate research findings to policy makers and the public. To put this effort into perspective, we would like to explain its origins and reflect on its implications for conducting future research. In 1987, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned a report that set out to ascertain why, in view ofthe extensive literatures on certain classes of agricul tural pollution, there had been few if any attempts to incorporate pollution externalities into the rather voluminous literature on the assessment of agricultural research impacts (Antle and Capalbo, 1988; see also Antle, 1994).

Inhalt
1 Introduction and Overview.- Conceptual and Methodological Foundations.- 2 Tradeoffs in Policy Analysis: Conceptual Foundations and Disciplinary Integration.- 3 Conceptual and Methodological Aspects of Assessing Pesticide Environmental Impact in Developing Areas.- 4 Conceptual and Methodological Aspects of Investigating the Health Impacts of Agricultural Pesticide Use in Developing Countries.- An Introduction to Pesticide Policies in the Andean Region and to the Carchi Case Study Site.- 5 The Case Study Site: Physical, Health, and Potato Farming Systems in Carchi Province.- 6 Economic Reforms and Changing Pesticide Policies in Ecuador and Colombia.- Model Development and Analysis.- 7 Econometric and Simulation Modeling of the Carchi Potato Production System.- 8 Describing Pesticide Movement in Potato Production on Carchi Soils.- 9 Health Impacts of Pesticide Use in Carchi Farm Populations.- 10 The Role of Pesticides in Farm Productivity and Farmer Health.- 11 Integrated Simulation Model and Analysis of Economic, Environmental, and Health Tradeoffs in the Carchi Potato-Pasture Production System.- About the Authors.- About the Mathematical Symbols Used in This Book.- Acronyms.