At the end of the course, students are expected 1) to develop an understanding of the complex relationship—both tradeoffs and synergies—between different components of the ecological-economic system (i.e., agricultural yields, income, biodiversity, trade, land use etc.),  2) to become familiar with the historic and contemporary issues that shaped the debate on the relationship between agriculture and economic development, 3) to get acquainted with various methodologies to evaluate tradeoffs in achieving goals associated with ‘development’ and ‘sustainable agriculture’ 4) to gain experience on two skills key to academic research: formulating good research questions and writing good state of the art in a field.