Social Life Cycle Assessment of Major Staple Grain Crops in China

Abstract

The agricultural sustainable development for human well-being considers food security and ecological health as well as people’s socio-economic conditions. Nowadays, most of the holistic assessments of agricultural sustainability, mainly focus on food production and ecological consequences, relatively lacking analysis from the socio-economic perspective. In this context, this study constructs an agricultural social life cycle assessment model based on the guidelines of UNEP to assess the social and economic impacts on the three major staple grain crops in China, including maize, rice and wheat. The assessment model aims to analyze effects of stakeholders containing farmer, agricultural value chain actors, consumer, rural areas, society, and impact categories including high-quality growth of agriculture, a comfortable life in rural areas, the prosperity of rural people. The data is mainly from national statistical databases and representative industry databases. The impact assessment adopts social risk and social impact as quantitative characterization methods, and Analytical Hierarchical Process to obtain weights. The results show that: among the three major grain crops, farmers are the most important factors for stakeholders, and agricultural industrial development has the greatest potential negative impacts on society; maize has the most positive impacts on agricultural sustainable development in China.

Exploring social indicators in smallholder food systems: modeling children’s educational outcomes on crop-livestock family farms in Madagascar

“…In fact, the S-LCA guidelines only incorporated smallholders as vulnerable stakeholders in 2020 (UNEP, 2020; Arcese et al, 2023). There are few examples of consequential S-LCA in agri-food systems (Feschet et al, 2013;Iofrida et al, 2019;Wei et al, 2022), where social impact pathways are quantitatively explored using causal or correlational analysis (UNEP, 2020). (Head, 2010;Mayne et al, 2018;Munda et al, 2020).…”

Social-life cycle assessment of oil palm plantation smallholders in Bengkulu province, Indonesia

“…S-LCA research has developed significantly worldwide, and the majority of S-LCA studies are conducted to evaluate the social and socio-economic aspects of products and their potential impacts along their life cycle, from extraction and processing of raw materials to final disposal, passing through manufacturing, distribution, use, reuse, maintenance, and recycling [ [13] , [14] , [15] , [16] ]. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to find S-LCA studies conducted in the agricultural or plantation sector, particularly in the case of smallholder palm oil plantations [ [17] , [18] , [19] ].…”