Abstract

This chapter explores anticipation in agriculture through relational system analysis. It explains why the current trend of technological development in agriculture, creating land without farmers in developed countries and farmers without land in developing countries, is unsustainable. It starts out with a theoretical discussion on how relational system analysis can make a useful contribution to the analysis of the functioning of complex adaptive systems, such as social-ecological systems. Human societies belong to the special class of self-producing and self-maintaining metabolic systems that depend on anticipation to preserve and adapt their identity in time. Anticipation is achieved through a semiotic process in which anticipative narratives associated with recorded information are used to guide action and tested for their validity. It is shown that anticipation requires the ability to establish, reproduce, and adapt a set of expected relations between functional and structural components of the metabolic system. The theoretical framework is used to identify the drivers of the evolutionary path of agriculture and explain why policies regulating its development have consistently failed to anticipate troubles. Finally, the analysis and explanation of what went wrong is used to reflect on required changes in the storytelling about agriculture for the future.