Critical Issues in the Development of Sustainable Intensification Indicators.

The concept of Sustainable Intensification (SI), although popular, has attracted considerable confusion and scepticism with regard to its meaning, methods, and indicators. Critics suggest that SI is an oxymoron and a term underpinned by a productivist agenda. In a recent paper (Mahon et al., 2017) we undertook a systematic review of SI indicators in the global literature in order to examine whether these criticisms were valid. At this symposium we intend to share these findings and raise some critical issues surrounding the development of a comprehensive and unambiguous set of SI indicators. In our review we analysed a sample of 75 articles and from these identified a total of 218 SI indicators. Of these indicators, 36% were about the ‘outcomes’ of agricultural systems. Within this, we found an emphasis on production-related outcomes (e.g., agricultural yield, resource use efficiency, cost of production) and less on the social and political dimensions (e.g., gender equity, cultural autonomy) of agrifood systems. Many indicators lacked specificity and elucidation of the justification, farm type, and scale for which they were proposed. Some indicators were mentioned without due consideration of the societal impacts of their adoption, e.g., ‘area under irrigation’, ‘access to appropriate technologies’ and ‘subsidies to encourage SI practices’. In addition, a number of indicators appeared to have trade-offs between them – e.g., the use of improved crop varieties versus the in situ conservation of agrobiodiversity – which would be difficult to achieve concurrently. Our findings raise some issues for debate. Is it necessary for SI to address all of the three facets of sustainability-related outcomes, namely, environmental, economic, and social, or should there be more emphasis on some dimensions? If priority is given to some goals over others, how would these weightings be conducted and in what way would contexts impact upon them? Furthermore, is it necessary to develop SI indicators for specific farming types or should SI be operationalised based on a set of generic indicators applicable across various farming types? We suggest that this symposium is an important opportunity to address these areas of ambiguity and contention and make progress towards the development of an agreed upon set of indicators.