Title : Sustainability of farms in drylands; Universal assessment methods and regional specificities
Abstract:
Since the publication of the first report on the state of the environment by the IUCN (1952) and the proposal of the term "sustainable development" (1980) followed by the definition of this concept in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission, the international scientific community has continued to make considerable efforts with the aim of concretizing this concept in the different sectors of activity. In agriculture, the concepts of sustainable agriculture, agroecology and sustainable exploitation are also gaining importance and methods for assessing the sustainability of agricultural holdings are adopted by the majority of countries where they constitute the basic tool for the development of the agricultural sector. These methods are designed and applied in several countries around the world but remain very little used in arid zones which cover in some countries a very large proportion of the territory and where agricultural policies aim at increasing agricultural areas and production, nevertheless these objectives cannot be achieved without a prior assessment of the sustainability of agrosystems. However, some studies have used these assessment methods such as RAD (Sustainable Agriculture Network), IDEA (Indicators of Sustainability of Farms) and DIALECTE (Agro-environmental Diagnosis Linking Environment and Territorial Farm Contract) and have for their entirety confirmed the need to adjust several indicators for a possible adaptation to arid zones. In this context we point out the need to design methods based on indicators specific to the local context by taking into consideration the physical and human characteristics of these environments in order to be able to make decisions relating to agricultural development in arid zones.
