Abstract
Agricultural practices, especially those used in intensive agricultural systems, are increasingly being recognized by their negative environmental effects. As a result, there is a high societal demand for the development of economically viable, environmentally sound, and socially acceptable practices. A key difficulty in evaluating sustainable development and sustainability in agriculture is identifying appropriate indicators that can be used to quantitatively assess economic, environmental, and social sustainability. The literature review shows that the environmental dimension is the most often studied with a large number of indicators. Economic and social dimensions, on the other hand, involve a relatively small number of indicators. Unlike economic indicators, which are a simple combination of monetary variables, social indicators are not easy to quantify as they often involve subjective and qualitative aspects. This chapter provides also an overview on the relationship between agriculture and the associated sustainability issues. At the end of the chapter, we provide an empirical application that assesses the effects of sustainability aspects on farms’ economic performance.
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Ait Sidhoum, A., Vrachioli, M. (2021). Agriculture and Sustainability. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38948-2_44-1
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