INTRODUCTION

While the industrial revolution which began in Britain but rapidly spread elsewhere began to raise concerns of pollution and living standards, it is perhaps in agriculture that the first recorded concerns began to arise. Some of the earliest known texts relate to the so-called ‘Arab Agricultural Revolution’ (Watson, 1974, 1981, 1983), part of the Islamic Golden Age from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Given that agriculture is thought to have begun in the Middle East this geographical focus is understandable. The revolution included much research on technologies such as irrigation, crop rotation and introduction of new crops and varieties, and coincided with the rise of the market economy. But writers such as Alkindus, Costa ben Luca, Rhazes, Ibn Al-Jazzar, al-Tamimi, al-Masihi, Avicenna, Ali ibn Ridwan, Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, Abd-el-latif and Ibn al-Nafis expressed concerns regarding air contamination, water contamination, soil contamination and solid waste mishandling as a result of this revolution (Gari, 2002). Indeed, as we have already seen in Chapter 1 it can be argued that agriculture as an industry has had a significant role in the formulation of what we currently refer to as sustainable development (sustainability). This is perhaps not too surprising given that:

1. (1) The end product of agriculture is often food, and as such agriculture is one of the foundations of human society.

2. (2) Agricultural systems occupy large areas of land, far more than any other industry, with the possible exception of forestry.

3. (3) Agriculture on a global scale has undergone substantial change over the past century, and in a number of developed countries has moved from subsistence to agribusiness, which has had a visible impact on the environment, as well as the problems mentioned in Chapter 1.

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