Consumption and production patterns for agricultural sustainable development

Agriculture has always played a key role in feeding the world population and ensuring the development of sustainable food production systems. However, over recent decades, many farmers have over-exploited agricultural ecosystems in order to increase their production and incomes. This has caused a reduction or degradation of environmental sustainability, reducing farmers’ profitability and leading many producers to abandon rural areas. Moreover, currently, over 820 million people in the world are hungry, while a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, with negative implications on economic, social and environmental conditions at a global level, highlighting how different production, educational campaigns and consumption approaches are needed. In this context, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims at eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, by ensuring an economic, environmental and social sustainable development. In particular, every country by 2030 should allocate public and private financial resources to develop and carry out relevant strategies and programs, by means of 17 sustainable development goals. One of them is represented by “ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns” in agriculture that, in addition to feeding the world population, should ensure both the development of sustainable food production systems and promote responsible consumption by consumers. According to the Agenda, in fact, the sustainable cropping systems, on the one hand, have to increase productivity and production, but on the other, they should reduce the negative social and environmental impacts, thanks also to a sustainable changes in consumers’ choices. Therefore, the aim of this Special Issue has been to collect scientific studies worldwide dealing with the two main topics of the “ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns” goal: (1) the adoption of sustainable production patterns in the agriculture sector; (2) the study of consumers’ behavior towards sustainable food products. This Special Issue contains 13 papers that have tried to enrich the literature on agricultural sustainable development, taking into consideration at least one of its three dimensions: the environmental, social and economic dimensions.