Tendencies and challenges for the assessment of agricultural sustainability

Abstract

Given that agriculture is one of the activities with highest anthropic intervention on ecosystems, this paper focuses on the importance of aligning food production toward sustainability and the need to rely on evaluation methodologies that guide decision-making and take into account social metabolism. It is concluded that a holistic evaluation of sustainability is necessary, which implies including the social dimension as well as the economic and the ecological one and surpassing the linearity of the current evaluation methodologies.