Jeffrey B. Tschirley
WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT (SARD)?
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) entered the fray in November 1988 with the following definition of sustainable development:
Sustainable development is the management and conservation of the natural resource base, and the orientation of technological and institutional change in such a manner as to ensure the attainment and continued satisfaction of human needs for present and future generations. Such sustainable development (in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors) conserves land, water, plant and animal genetic resources, is environmentally non-degrading, technically appropriate, economically viable and socially acceptable.1
Surprisingly, there has been general acceptance of this definition as the conceptual framework for sustainable development in agricultural and rural sectors. However, many countries and organizations are now calling for a more operational, field level, definition.
THE SARD FRAMEWORK
The need to move SARD from the conceptual to an operational mode arises from the 'conditionality' that is tying development assistance funds to a demonstrated commitment by the country to 'sustainable development' and the Agenda 21. Donors are asking countries to identify priority problems and set out strategies to address them. This may take the form of a National Environmental Action Plan, a National Conservation Strategy, a national Agenda 21 or other exercise.
In some cases countries request assistance either to prepare a sustainable development plan or to implement it. For example, they agree that adjustments are needed in agricultural policy but what steps do they take to analyse the problem? How do they set priorities? And then implement them? Or, perhaps, they agree that local community participation is desirable, but what steps should they follow? How are local communities 'empowered'?
The four thematic areas of SARD2, and its sub-elements provide a useful starting point for countries. The SARD framework includes:
1. Policy Adjustment and Planning Assistance:
2. Strengthening Human Resources and Institutional Capacity:
3. Improved Management of Natural Resources:
4. Sound Use of Agricultural Inputs:
THE INTEGRATED NATURE OF SUSTAINABILITY
Indicators can be developed for each category of the SARD framework to measure the condition and trends in each critical sector. However, the challenge of sustainability (and the point that inhibits progress) is its three-dimensional nature (the environmental, the social and the economic) and the need to make trade-offs (e.g. between short-term economic growth and long-term environmental protection) and adjustments to maintain these three components in a dynamic balance. Although many would like to believe otherwise, 'win-win' (all parties benefit) situations are not always possible. Invariably, someone or some group becomes disadvantaged (Pareto sub-optimal) from a policy change, and then resists the change.
Cutting across the three elements of sustainable development are issues which often determine how effective development interventions will be. These factors must be reflected in the core SARD indicators. They include:
Although the development of sustainable development indicators poses an enormous challenge, there are a number of entry points to begin work. For example, the governments of most countries already influence land use through their agriculture, forestry and fisheries policies and planning processes. They use various kinds of information to arrive at their decisions. Clearly, the traditional environmental indicators that focus on the use of pesticides and fertilizers, crop productivity, land conservation and so on ignore human and institutional performance, even though it is often the critical factor in success.
USING PERFORMANCE INDICATORS IN SARD
Many countries have national agricultural development plans which are developed on a three or five-year rolling basis. These plans frequently use a policy analysis matrix that examines supply and demand conditions, prices, investment requirements, exchange rates, trade opportunities and other factors to achieve objectives such as food security, poverty alleviation, income generation and/or nutrition objectives.
Goals and objectives are established (or the existing ones modified) that, at least nominally, are based on exploiting comparative advantage both within and between countries. This means that, ceteris paribus, a country or district with its unique endowment of natural and human-made capital is able to produce a product more cheaply locally than it can import it. The converse is also true - the same country or district may find it cheaper to import a product than to produce it locally.
In determining comparative advantage, the natural resources base and its agro-ecological potential are critical but often under appreciated factors in determining the costs of production and productivity (yield/ha). Such values are usually considered only indirectly in the policymaking or planning processes or not at all. Thus, a framework is needed that accommodates the full range of social, environmental and economic factors that enter the sustainability nexus.
The most widely accepted framework at present is referred to as pressure-state- response which was developed in the 1970's and is well suited to addressing the chain (filiere) of events that lead to environmental impacts. Pressure refers to the driving forces that create environmental impacts. They could include hillside farming, agro-industrial processing, livestock grazing, forest harvesting, etc. State refers to the condition(s) that prevail when a pressure exists. This could be for example declining yields, fish dieoff or soil erosion, etc. Response refers to the mitigation action(s) and levers that could be applied to reduce or eliminate the impacts.
Experts in the Netherlands, probably the country most advanced in using environmental indicators for policymaking, insist that, to avoid an overload of information, indicators must be 'issue driven'.3 Failure to do this results in the generation of too much information and lack of focus on the underlying forces that created the problem. At first glance this point seems obvious yet in much indicator work, the demand for data is quite heavy. PSR is well-adapted to an issues-oriented approach but is weaker when planning is required and a broader range of information is required, much of which is not issue-oriented.
The shortcoming of PSR, vis-à-vis sustainability indicators and analysis, is its ability to address the economic and social dimensions of sustainability. This paper has argued that sustainability is about better management and making trade-offs between economic, social and environmental objectives. If PSR is accepted as the default framework, it must be complemented by a component that allows for further analysis and trade-offs between the three components of sustainability. Figure 1 outlines such a modified PSR framework.
AGGREGATING DATA AND INFORMATION
It is commonly thought that politicians have short time horizons and cannot digest large amounts of information. While the former is probably true, experience in a number of countries4 reveals that:
1) politicians are able to and often do use a wide array of information in
arriving at their position;
2) their positions change as new information becomes available; and
3) their information comes from a wide array of formal and informal sources.
Thus, the temptation to arrive at single digit indicators or to produce indices that aggregate a number of weighted indicators (the correlations for which are seldom known) should be avoided in the early stages of indicator development. More effort and trials are needed, as has been done in the Netherlands, to experiment with menus of indicators that are thematically linked to represent several dimensions of an issue such as overgrazing or deforestation. For example, land degradation could arise from unemployment, poverty, insecure land tenure, food insecurity, population pressure, cropping practices or other factors. In most cases it will be a combination of factors and each country must identify the key ones for their situation. This paper emphasizes the role of indicators in promoting sustainable development at the national and sub-national levels, but some groups5 are calling for indicators to monitor progress in implementing the Agenda 21 at the global level. They are interested in issues such as biological diversity, climate change, international waters, toxic chemicals, etc. At present statistical data is available only for national boundaries which limits its usefulness in determining net production potential and population supporting capacity. Therefore, an important requirement for improving the usefulness of indicators is the need to organize sub-national data in an agro-ecological-zone format which can overlay district boundaries. On this basis, environmental, social and economic constraints in countries and districts can be assessed in the context of population-supporting capacity. Although this work has been undertaken in some countries, it lags far behind the need. An agro-ecological- zone-based information system could also include information on waterlogging and salinity, loss of forest cover, presence of plant and animal genetic material, and prevalence of vector-borne disease, land tenure, food security, energy and other factors which figure strongly in sustainability analysis.
THE USE OF SUSTAINABILITY THRESHOLDS
The last constraint to the use of indicators for sustainability analysis is the poor understanding among technical experts of how economic, social and environmental forces interact. There are numerous cases where high levels of soil erosion have existed for long periods without significant loss in productivity (or not enough to induce the farmer to change behaviour). Thus, one cannot state unequivocally that soil erosion is an indicator of unsustainability unless a link can be established demonstrating significant economic and/or social effects.
Despite this uncertainty, the use of thresholds which provide a range of allowable degradation under specified conditions could be important tools for planning and monitoring sustainability performance. For example, most agro-ecological zones have information available on soil type, climate, topography and land suitability for various crops. When an erosion rate is known, experts familiar with the region can estimate whether the erosion rate is sustainable under a given cropping regime. Based on past experience, training, and intuition, such rule-of-thumb estimates constitute expert systems that, if organized systematically, could be used by planners and analysts.
Some scientists however, maintain that such thresholds cannot be generalized with sufficient accuracy7. This gap between the need for scientific accuracy and the need for information for decision-making connotes the phrase: 'The perfect is the enemy of the good' .The agro-ecological zones framework, with its seven zones and 26 land classes, when matched to the crop being produced and accompanied by broad ranges of sustainability can be sufficiently accurate to alert planners to potential problem situations.
Once planners, policymakers and land users agree on the issues to measure, criteria for a threshold table can be established for social and economic aspects based on cost effectiveness factors such as time, expense and level of detail involved. In many cases, rule-of-thumb measures are a practical way to begin. Two important elements in such a process are: a) the use of participatory mechanisms, and b) to state clearly the criteria used in calculating an indicator. These aspects are an important means of promoting transparency and dialogue in the planning process. If a person or group knows the assumptions and methods used in developing an indicator, even if they disagree with the method or the result, an open and flexible process can become the basis for dialogue and adjustment.
Threshold values could be established for each of the priority sustainability components identified by the land users and planners. These could include: soil erosion, water quality, soil fertility under low and high input systems, pesticides, fertilizers, and crop diversity. In the case of crop diversity, rough measures could be developed of the percentage of total land in a district devoted to a single crop; one example being the wheat producing region of Kenya. If 90% of the available land were in wheat, it could be a cause for concern unless factors, such as high crop diversity found in the nearby Mau highlands, were seen to balance the narrow crop diversity in the wheat region.
In most cases no single indicator would determine sustainability or unsustainability. However, collectively, a series of indicators that exceed the threshold levels should be sufficient cause to investigate data quality, conduct a rapid survey of the area involved, consult knowledgeable experts, or all of the above. Table 1 is a crude demonstration of an approach that could be used.
A rule-of-thumb approach has its greatest utility at the district (sub-national level). In a country such as China, even the provincial level would be too large but county level could be considered. In a country such as Tanzania, the district level would be sufficient and in this case and that of most East African countries, efforts are being made to decentralize the planning process by strengthening the technical capacity of district offices. As part of the institution building process at the district level, efforts could be made to develop indicators in conjunction with a process of workshops and meetings with local groups to identify sustainability concerns and objectives, and provide training on information collection and planning.
CONCLUSIONS
1. Development of sustainability indicators should be closely tied to the development of national and sub-national information systems for agricultural planning and programming.
2. Initially, the emphasis should be on improving national and regional capacity with regard to data collection and information collection; barring this, global indicators will have little meaning.
3. Aggregation of existing data to derive global indicators would likely lead to inefficient allocation and resources and misunderstanding of local forces and influences that underlie unsustainable development practices. However such exercises might usefully be carried out on a regional basis (e.g. Africa, Asia, Latin America) or among countries with a number of common characteristics (e.g. OECD, small island states).
4. Thresholds and targets are useful means of allowing countries to compare their performance, for example in controlling soil erosion, against internationally accepted norms based on local natural resource endowments and land use practices.
5. Basic data and information regarding production potential and supporting capacity should be organized based on agro-ecological zone and overlayed with national or district boundaries.
6. Interactions between the environmental, social and economic components of sustainability need considerable field research to better understand how they affect each other and the driving forces that need to be measured.
7. Human and institutional capacity to manage the development process through participatory and transparent approaches is fundamental to sustainable agriculture. Indicators to monitor these dimensions are essential but extremely difficult to collect; more emphasis is needed in this area.
8. An important goal that indicators can help achieve in developing countries is greater participation and transparency in the planning and programming process in countries. Without this, even the best data and analysis will not lead to sustainable development as it was conceived at UNCED.
NOTES
1 Aspects of FAO's policies, programmes, budget and activities aimed at contributing to sustainable development. FAO Council Report, CL 94/6, November 1988.
2 Initially developed in 1991 at the de Bosch Conference on Agriculture and the Environment (s' Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, 15-19 Apri11991) and subsequently incorporated as Chapter 14 of the Agenda 21.
3 Albert Adriaanse, Personal communication, 22 September 1994.
4 Note the work by Tunstall in USA, by Adriaanse in the Netherlands, and Moris in Kenya on the use of indicators and the ways in which policymakers develop their positions and make decisions.
5 Notably the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Scientific Committee on Protection of the Environment (SCOPE).
6 The 'Pressure' and 'State' boxes need not always be negative. As positive trade-offs from the sustainability analysis flow through the system, adjustments should become less extreme.
7 This calls to mind the Baconian School of thought which involves strict adherence to the accumulation of 'fact'.