This course is part of the 1999-2000 Socrates/Erasmus Programme on Ecological Agriculture. The two weeks’ summer course theme is on Human Context of Organic Farming. The second week is dedicated to Economic and Social Impact of Ecological Farming Systems. It is within this second week that the present course on Opportunities and Constraints of Organic Agriculture – A Socio-Ecological Analysis is offered (Viterbo, 24 July 2000).

The objectives of this course are:

• to understand opportunities and constraints of organic agricultural systems in different agro-ecological and socio-economic settings;

• to analyse trade-offs among the agronomic, ecological, economic and socio-political performance of organic agricultural systems.

The learning approach relies on stimulating students’ skills to place their agronomic knowledge into a inter-disciplinary framework of analysis with a view to evaluating all aspects of farming systems.