The path to more sustainable agriculture and food systems

When the United Nations Member States unanimously adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, they committed to deliver a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable future for people and the planet.

Food and agriculture play a crucial role in this commitment. To ensure that our agriculture and food systems become more productive and more sustainable, we must adopt integrated approaches that support effective and sustainable solutions. One such approach is agroecology. 

An agroecological approach to sustainable agriculture and food systems is defined as one that favours the use of natural processes, limits the use of external inputs, promotes closed cycles with minimal negative externalities and stresses the importance of local knowledge and participatory processes that develop knowledge and practice through experience, as well as scientific methods, and the need to address social inequalities.

An integrated approach

Rather than relying exclusively on indicators based on yield per hectare, milk production per cow or income per farm to assess the performance of agriculture efficiency, agroecology adopts a wider perspective to maintain and enhance biological and ecological processes in agricultural production. 

There is increasing evidence of the positive impacts of agroecological approaches on the environment, biodiversity, and household incomes in particular. This evidence, however, is drawn from results that are often fragmented across case studies, communities’ experiences or field observations, and usually lacking harmonized methodologies for data collection and measurement.

To fully harness the transformative potential agroecology has to offer, it is imperative that we find the means of accurately and reliably tracking its performance.

An innovative tool for agroecology

FAO, with partners from across academia, research institutes and civil society, have developed the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE), designed to support agroecological transitions, at different scales and in different locations, through informed policy-making processes. 

TAPE consolidates information on the impact of agroecological approaches, and provides a guidance framework for reviewing policy options for agroecology that can assist policymakers in assessing the multidimensional impacts of agroecological production systems.

TAPE leverages a set of innovative features, including:

• The use of participatory and iterative decision-making processes;
• A stepwise analytical framework that includes a participatory community validation step; 
• The ability to measure agroecology's performance at different scales, locations, and times;
• A linkage to wider context and policy elements in order to connect granular farm-level data to wider territorial-level data;
• The use of open-source data collection software (KoBo Toolbox).

TAPE is designed to assist in carrying out diagnostics of production systems across environmental, social and cultural, economic, health and nutrition, and governance dimensions, as well as a variety of contexts (production systems, communities, territories, agroecological zones, etc.).

This can contribute to the development of projects that aim to build evidence and collect data about sustainable agriculture and the specific role of agroecological approaches. It can also be used to analyze how existing efforts to measure agroecology can contribute to building globally relevant and harmonized evidence.

Furthermore, TAPE can be used to assess all types of production systems and agricultural sub-sectors: crop, livestock, aquaculture and fisheries, and forestry. It is also fully adaptable to local contexts and languages.

How TAPE works

TAPE uses a clear and accessible stepwise process to gather and analyse multi-dimensional data, leveraging a public on-line data collection tool, KoBo Toolbox. This free and open-source platform can be accessed via any browser or device, and offers both online and offline functionality.

STEP 0: The process begins with the collection of all relevant context information, with farms or households as the most basic unit of measure, including the descriptions of production systems and agroecosystem and the wider enabling, or disabling, environment.

STEP 1: The 10 Elements of Agroecology, a core element of TAPE, are used to establish a diagnostic of the agroecological situation. This diagnostic can help to identify the strengths of the system, (for example, high diversity in plants and animals, or strong connections to local markets) as well as weaknesses (such as limited synergies between the different productions, no existing knowledge-sharing platforms, etc.).

STEP 2: This step aims to quantify the performance of the system with ten core criteria informing the sustainability dimensions. These criteria are: secure land tenure (or mobility for pastoralists); productivity (per area and per person); income; added value; exposure to pesticides; dietary diversity; women’s empowerment; youth employment; agricultural biodiversity; and soil health.

The final step is a participatory analysis of the results, where the multidimensional performances from Step 2 are reviewed in the light of the diagnostic established in Step 1 and the enabling environment emerging from Step 0. 

By analyzing the evidence resulting from this stepwise process, stakeholders and the community can chart a sustainable way forward.

Sharing knowledge and driving sustainable progress

TAPE was developed under FAO’s strategic objective of making agriculture, forestry and fisheries more productive and more sustainable, and is currently being tested in multiple FAO regions.

Information gathered from its use will be made available in a central database, accessible to a wide variety of stakeholders. The database will allow analyses of specific agroecological contexts and provide snapshots of their performance at multiple scales across a variety of agricultural production systems and geographical locations, in different moments in time – for example before and after the implementation of a project.

Once validated, a key challenge will be ensuring the tool’s wider adoption and promotion through robust policies and enabling environments across all production systems.