2015/01/01 by Frédéric Zahm, Adeline Alonso Ugaglia, Zahm, Frédéric +21
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Agriculture and Rural Development Research #Sustainable Agricultural Systems Analysis #Organic Food and Agriculture
paper · pdf · doi:10.15454/1.462267509242779e12
This paper is a contribution to the launching seminar of the Technology Network Evaluation of the sustainability of agricultural systems and Territory (Erytage) held in France in July 2015. It discusses the concepts of sustainable agriculture and farm sustainability, from a broad analysis of the international literature down to the discussion of their definitions. We showed the incompleteness of the definitions based on the international literature and we propose two new definitions to characterize these two concepts. The first part takes a look at the different conceptions of sustainable development in order to study the different positions proposed so far in the definitions of sustainable agriculture. The second part shows a state of the art of the literature on this concept from a double analysis (a chronology and an interpretative typology). The third part suggests a new definition of sustainable agriculture drawn on both its principles and values but also on associated social objectives. The last part draws from the results of a research on the concept of sustainability farm to suggest a broadened definition of a sustainability farm based upon principles and values, social objectives and the properties associated to such sustainable system.