The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) leads the US government’s Feed the Future initiative to address global hunger and food security. As one of five USAID Feed the Future research program areas, the Program in Sustainable Intensification invests in research with small holder farmers to identify pathways out of hunger and poverty, particularly for women and children, through sustainably intensified farming systems that improve food, nutritional and income security, conserve or enhance the natural resource base, and provide a foundation for addressing climate change. Program investments strengthen social and professional connections of small holder farmers by linking them to U.S. universities, international and national research organizations, the private sector, and other farmers facing similar challenges. The program includes a range of management strategies for mixed crop-livestock-horticulture-tree systems in key ‘bread basket’ regions. Achieving multiple sustainability outcomes, rather than just focusing on crop yields, requires simultaneous consideration of a range of impacts spanning biophysical, economic, social, and human health conditions and across multiple scales. Ensuring that objectives are achieved across many different types of production systems requires that methods to measure success are developed that are sufficiently comprehensive to capture the complexity but are also practically simple enough to widely employ.
Results/Conclusions
Research partners participating in the Program for Sustainable Intensification are developing a sustainable intensification (SI) assessment framework to facilitate standardized comparisons of the impacts of SI strategies, particularly in smallholder farming systems. The SI assessment framework aims at providing a synthesized list of SI indicators and metrics, categorized into five domains (productivity, economic, environmental, social, and human condition) and three scales (field, farm/households, and landscape). The framework is mainly intended for use by agricultural scientists working in research for development projects but is flexible and can be used by scientists interested in achieving sustainable development goals more broadly. The goal is to provide research results that communities, scientists, implementation partners and policy makers can objectively evaluate with explicit linkages across potentially competing sustainability goals (e.g. biodiversity conservation, agricultural production, food security, and gender equity). It is not intended to fit all requirements or replace other efforts to develop SI indicators, but rather to provide a common framework that can guide research on SI and facilitate cross-program learning and assessment on the factors that lead to increased sustainability.