Sustainability Assessment of Agricultural Systems in Paraguay: A Comparative Study Using FAO’s SAFA Framework

Abstract

Sustainability is a topic that is at the center of current discussions in the political, economic, social, and environmental fields. For its analysis, an integral and multidisciplinary vision is needed. This work aims to assess the sustainability of agricultural systems in Paraguay through a comparison applying SAFA (Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems) indicators. The research focuses on 15 case studies on the territory of the Eastern Region of Paraguay divided into five classes of agricultural systems: agribusiness, conventional peasant family farming, agroecological peasant family farming, neo-rural farming, and indigenous agriculture. Data were collected through interviews with producers and key informants, direct observation, and scientific literature research in order to assess, through the SAFA Tool Software, the level of sustainability of each agricultural system as a whole and for each sustainability dimension (political, environmental, economic, and social dimension) in a comparative way. It has emerged that producers belonging to conventional peasant family farming, agroecological peasant family farming, neo-rural farming, and indigenous agriculture have achieved levels of sustainability that are similar to each other and very good in all four dimensions of sustainability. Meanwhile, agribusiness achieved moderate scores in the dimensions of governance and environmental integrity, and was good in the economic and social dimension.

Assessing Sustainability in Cattle Silvopastoral Systems in the Mexican Tropics Using the SAFA Framework

“…The SAFA framework has been previously used for several purposes, such as measuring the sustainability performance of organic farms in Italy and Saudi Arabia [ 13 ], or smallholding coffee farmers in Colombia [ 14 ]. Similarly, this tool was used to compare five types of agricultural systems, determining that all systems, excluding agribusiness, where similar to each other and had good performance in all sustainability dimensions [ 15 ]. SAFA was also useful to establish the differences between organic and conventional banana crop systems, showing that organic performed better on the governance, environmental and economic dimensions, whereas the conventional systems were better scored on the social dimension due to their size and processes [ 16 ].…”

Análisis de la sostenibilidad de una empresa de caña de azúcar en Ecuador

“…A pesar de las bondades observadas a raíz de los hallazgos de este trabajo, la implantación de la metodología GRI refleja apreciaciones dispares (Chong et al, 2020). Por un lado, su uso es bien recibido en distintas latitudes (Dankova et al, 2015;Hanisch et al, 2019;Soldi et al, 2019), mientras que algunos autores han criticado la manera en que se han impuesto esas metodologías de evaluación al punto de ser consideradas una obligación internacional para la empresa en sectores económicos puntuales (Ageron et al, 2012;Chen & Bouvain, 2014;Polanco et al, 2016), y se ha criticado la tendencia de posicionar al GRI como método monopolizador que resume la sustentabilidad ambiental empresarial (Hahn & Lülfs, 2014), sin embargo, los resultados de este trabajo resaltan su utilidad, tal como se ha reportado también en otro tipo de organizaciones (Mainardi, 2016). Para el caso de San Carlos, los resultados de la comparación entre el Balance Social y GRI arrojan que esta última funcionó como un mecanismo impulsor de la sostenibilidad empresarial, por lo cual conviene seguirla implementando.…”

SAFA and GeoGebra Allies to Evaluate Natural and Cultural Sustainability: Yasuni Biosphere Reserve

“…In the case of migrants settlers the most sensitive and most relevant issues for their intervention and classified as Limited are: 1) Materials and Energy, the waste from the production processes is not recycled and the plastics are burned unlike with the farmers of Paraguay who if they recycle the generated waste whose category is Better [63], 2) Fair Trade Practices, there is some divergence between buyers and producers, to boost this issue requires four factors: the hybrid presence of the actors, similar mercantile speeches, joint tolerance to the conflict and the co-creation of common rules [64], 3) Labor Rights, it is essential to propose a strategy to strengthen labor rights to minimize collective inequality in communities [65]. The area of sustainability in the 1MC case is 25,12 u 2 ; It is the largest of the remaining two, showing an increase of 5,32 and 3,98 compared to the 2MC and 3MC cases, respectively.…”