The sustainability of agro-ecosystems depends on their ability to deliver an entire package of multiple ecosystem services, rather than provisioning services alone. New social and ecological dimensions of agricultural management must be explored in agricultural landscapes, to foster this ability. We propose a social–ecological framework for the service-based management of agro-ecosystems, specified through an explicit and symmetric representation of the ecosystem and the social system, and the dynamic links between them. It highlights how management practices, with their multiple effects, could drive the provision of multiple services. Based on this framework, we have identified the design of collective multiservice management as a key research issue. It requires innovations in stakeholder organizations and tools to foster synergy between ecosystem functioning and social dynamics, given the complexity and uncertainties of ecological systems

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Eating patterns are important for building sustainable food and agricultural systems. This paper begins by presenting the main features of eating patterns worldwide. These eating patterns include the relative convergence of diets, more rapid food transition in emerging and developing countries, development of a more complex food chain, and substantial food losses and waste at distribution and final consumption stages. These patterns have negative consequences on health and the environment. The drivers of these patterns are examined to identify knowledge gaps, the filling of which should facilitate the design and implementation of actions and policies aimed at making food systems more sustainable.

Two-stage budgeting postulates that the consumer's utility maximization decision can be decomposed into two steps. In the first stage, total expenditure is allocated over broad groups of goods. In the second stage, group expenditures are allocated over elementary commodities. In this article, we assume that the current weighted true cost-of-living price indices defined for each broad group of elementary commodities vary only very slightly with sub-utility levels. Hence, it is possible to approximate the first stage of a two-stage budgeting structure by a maximization problem involving a single price index and a single quantity index for each of the broad groups. Relationships between conditional and unconditional expenditure and price elasticities are derived within this context. Copyright 2001, Oxford University Press.