**Author details**

*Multifunctionality and Impacts of Organic and Conventional Agriculture*

seen as a program priority for CAAs, considering the demand on their resources for other programs to address persistent poverty in the BBS [40]. The overwhelmingly strong positive opinion among CAAs concerning the use of organic methods, the role of citizens in supporting farmer's markets, the value of community-based farming in preserving the land, environment and family farms and their favorable view of cooperatives indicate that CAAs have the potential for providing strong institutional support for the development and promotion of sustainable agricultural production systems at the community level. In conducting 40 listening session with CBOs across 9 states in the Black Belt region, we discovered that advocacy is a core component of their programs. Thus, they possess the requisite experience and skills to advance sustainable agricultural production systems. CBOs represent a form of social capital and their networks foster coordination and cooperation for the common good and the promotion of sustainable behavior [9, 10, 24, 41]. Social capital is able to reduce transaction cost associated with collective action directed at solving complex problems. Increased social capital is linked with movement toward sustainable agriculture. Collective action facilitated by community organizations such as CBOs can make a difference in achieving goals because the farmer and community are more proactive in solving their own problems and are no longer dependent on the whims of government or other outside entities [20, 42]. In the context of developing and promoting sustainable agricultural systems, CBOs and their networks provide the institutional support that empowers communities to be

more self-regulating and to act independently, collectively and proactively.

Promoting and developing organic/sustainable agriculture is unlike solving a technical problem, although the tendency is to treat it like a purely technical problem. A technical problem by definition is straightforward because the solution is known and protocols for implementing solutions are well defined and results are predictable and in many cases a single organization has the capacity to solve it, for example producing a crop of corn or building a bridge. On the other hand, developing and promoting organic/sustainable food production system is akin to solving an adaptive problem. An adaptive problem is complex. Its solution is not known or well understood and even when solutions are known, it requires several organizations working in unison to solve it. Developing a sustainable food production system is a collective impact initiative that seeks to find a solution to an adaptive problem. Such an initiative requires many stakeholders—a network of organizations—from different sectors learning and working together to systematically address the system of variables that will define a solution to the problem. In addition, all involved stakeholders must be committed to changing their own behavior in order to adapt to the change they seek to bring about [12]. CBOs, as we have discussed, are indispens-

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able members of this network.

Terrence Thomas1 \*, Cihat Gunden<sup>2</sup> and Befikadu Legesse3

1 North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC, USA

2 Ege University, Izmir, Turkey

3 Smart-Eco Consulting, Silver Spring, MD, USA

\*Address all correspondence to: twthomas@ncat.edu

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
