Bioeconomy is the production, utilization and conservation of biological resources, including related knowledge, science, technology, and innovation, to provide information, products, processes and services across all economic sectors aiming toward a sustainable economy’. Its cross-cutting nature offers a unique opportunity to comprehensively address interconnected societal challenges such as food and nutrition security, fossil-resource dependence, natural resource scarcity and climate change, while achieving sustainable economic development.

The FAO framework for the Urban Food Agenda provides a strategy for addressing the emerging calls from countries, responding to demands for a holistic approach to food insecurity and malnutrition across the rural-urban continuum. It aims to support governments in tackling the complex food security and nutrition challenges and opportunities created by urbanization through sustainable food system development. This publication explains the guiding principles that are central to the framework and describes FAO’s comprehensive areas of support to the urban food agenda.

The main objective of this report is to review existing approaches for monitoring and evaluation in order to identify already available indicators, from which the authors compiled two comprehensive lists: indicators at the territorial level, including bioeconomy-relevant SDG indicators; indicators at the product/value chain level, including indicators used for standards, certificates and labels. To conclude, the authors propose a possible way forward to help countries and practitioners in their monitoring and evaluation efforts: a stepwise approach to select indicators for monitoring and evaluating the sustainability of the bioeconomy.

En este informe 2019-2020, la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO) y el Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura (IICA) plantean un enfoque intersectorial de “doble vía”, que, en primer lugar, llame al reconocimiento de que no es posible superar la pobreza ni combatir el hambre, la malnutrición y el cambio climático, si las sociedades y los actores políticos de ALC no plantean lo rural como motor del desarrollo económico, social y ambiental en los países y, en segundo lugar, invite a considerar la agricultura y sus actividades relacionadas como indispensables para desarrollar otras actividades económicas complementarias que promuevan el desarrollo sostenible de los territorios rurales.

Almost fifty countries have placed the promotion of the bioeconomy on their political agendas. However, bioeconomy activities are not necessarily sustainable, and sustainability issues are not often considered in the implementation of the bioeconomy.