Agricultural production is only one aspect of food systems. Sustainability in agriculture also needs to address more encompassing concepts such as food se­curity and land availability on a regional level. If agri­culture would switch to organic, 10—20% more land would be needed due to lower yields, given diets do not change and the same amount of wastage is pro­duced as today. However, dietary change is a key topic for sustainable food systems, as a large part of agricul­ture’s environmental charge stems from animal hus­bandry. Reducing meat, egg and dairy product consumption levels would greatly help to reduce envi­ronmental pressure from agricultural production. Focusing on feeding animals on grasslands and not on food crops such as soy and maize would reduce the need for land, as calorie production from crops is much more efficient than from animals. Furthermore, about 30% of agricultural production are lost or wasted globally (Godfray et al., 2010). Reducing this would also contribute to reduced agricultural land use. Such reduced land use would on the other hand reduce pressure to further increase yields. Organic production in combination with reduced waste and lower consumption of animal products that are mainly based on grassland feed (and some by-products of food pro­duction) thus comprise an optimal option for a sustain­able food system (e. g. preliminary results from the FAO-SOL-model, Schader et al., 2012).

WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE BIOENERGY
PRODUCTION?

Ways of Comparisons

When assessing the sustainability of energy crop pro­duction, the first criterion is usually its GHG perfor­mance with regard to a fossil baseline. For this comparison, the baseline fuel mix plays a crucial role, as the increasing importance of unconventional fossil fuel sources such as oil sands will increase GHG emis­sions from the baseline and its general environmental impacts, thus relatively improving the performance of bioenergy production (Faist Emmenegger et al., 2012). This bears the danger that biofuel options with increasing environmental impacts and less favorable GHG balances become relatively more sustainable. Here, we adopt a different focus as we are primarily interested in the sustainability of bioenergy production with reference to sustainability in agricultural produc­tion systems and in food systems in general. This takes all sustainability criteria into account and does not focus on the GHG balance.