Table 2.
Criteria and indicator systems for sustainable agriculture and range management.
| Relevant convention process or government | Indicators |
|---|---|
| Global level processes seeking to measure sustainable agriculture on a country scale | |
| Millennium Development Goals | There are no specific references to agricultural sustainability or agricultural biodiversity in the Millennium Development Goals |
| Convention on Biological Diversity | ‘Area of…agricultural…ecosystems under sustainable management’ is identified as a possible indicator by the CBD |
| International attempts to define indicators of sustainable agriculture | |
| Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN | The Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development initiative has developed C&I including Improved Management of Natural resources and Sound Use of Agricultural Inputs (Tschirley 1996) |
| World Bank | Initial work has been carried out into C&I of sustainable agriculture, but not yet applied (Dumanski 1997; Dumanski et al. 1998) |
| Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development | There is a programme of work on indicators for sustainable agriculture. This has included national studies from 15 countries (OECD 2001) |
| Regional attempts to define indicators of sustainable agriculture | |
| European Union | The European Commission has published some proposed indicators on agriculture and the environment. The project on Indicators for Sustainable Agriculture is developing C&I to be measured using existing EU data in three fields: landscape, agricultural practice and rural development (Anon. undated) |
| Indicator Reporting on the Integration of Environmental Concerns into Agriculture Policy | The IRENA project of the European Commission is integrating and measuring environmental concerns in the Common Agricultural Policy. Thirty-five indicators have been identified, including landscape-scale factors |
| Environmental Indicators for Sustainable Agriculture | The ELISA research project identified a set of 22 state and 12 pressure indicators for sustainable agriculture to help to implement EU policies, especially for landscape indicators |
| Examples of national processes to define towards sustainable agriculture | |
| Belgium | The SAFE: Framework for assessing sustainability levels in Belgian agriculture includes the development of indicators measured at three scales: field, farm and ecosystem/landscape |
| Canada | The Environment Bureau has developed C&I including farm resources management, soil degradation risk; water contamination risk; and agro-ecosystem biodiversity change (McRae et al. 2000) |
| The Netherlands | The Centre for Agricultural Environment has developed environmental performance indicators and yardsticks for agriculture, focusing mainly on potential environmental problems (Horlings & Buys 1997) |
| UK | The Department of Farming and Rural Affairs has developed indicators of sustainable farm management including coverage of a range of biodiversity-related indicators (Anon. 2002b) |
| Examples of farm-level assessment systems developed by or for food companies | |
| Organic standards | There are now almost 200 organic standards around the world, meeting the principles of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements and in Europe meeting EC regulations. Most include standards relating to biodiversity |
| University of Michigan | An on-farm assessment tool for sustainable agriculture developed for Ben and Jerry's Homemade Inc., included genetic diversity; management of natural areas, riparian strips, pasture, crop fields and surrounding lands; and GMOs (Bylin et al. 2004) |
| Unilever's criteria for sustainable agriculture | Unilever identified 10 indicators, including one for biodiversity with some ‘typical parameters’: level of biodiversity on site, habitat for natural predator systems, cross boundary effects (Kees Vis & Standish 2000) |