Abstract

Sustainability of agricultural holdings is a key issue worldwide. Criticisms that hinder its evaluation are the very complex and multidimensional concept of agricultural sustainability and the need of statistical data at the single farm level. Within the sustainability framework, FAO plays a fundamental role. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2: “Zero hunger” has the purpose to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
In the goal 2 framework, the definition of indicator 2.4.1 is the proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture: the ratio between the area under productive and sustainable agriculture and the agricultural land area. The methodology covers the three pillars of farms’ sustainability (economic, environmental, and social) and requires the availability of yearly data at the single farm level covering the 11 sub-indicators described as follows. 1. Farm output value per hectare. 2. Net farm income. 3. Risk mitigation mechanism. 4. Prevalence of soil degradation. 5. Variation in water availability. 6. Management of fertilizers. 7. Management of pesticides. 8. Use of agro-biodiversity supporting practices. 9. Wage rate in agriculture. 10. Food insecurity experience scale. 11. Secure tenure rights to land.
Agriculture censuses collect many data at the farm level, but often do not measure economic performances and wages (sub-indicators 1, 2, 9) or the food security (sub-indicator 10). Moreover, between two censuses serious information gaps can occur and it is difficult to update the SDG 2.4.1. Furthermore, there are methodological issues that can be improved, in order to reduce the risk to obtain unrealistic results and to underestimate this SDG. The challenges and limitations of SDG Indicator 2.4.1 demonstrate the difficulties to achieve sustainable agriculture and develop a suitable indicator to measure the progress of sustainable agriculture.
In this framework, we propose an integrated multi-source approach to calculate the SDG 2.4.1 in Italy, for the reference year 2023. The data sources are: i) the ISTAT sample Integrated Farm Statistics survey (IFS); ii) the ISTAT sample multipurpose survey (MUL); iii) the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) carried out by the research agency CREA on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture. These surveys have different goals. Every EU country carries out the IFS every 3 years for updating the structural data observed by the agriculture census. MUL is a new survey carried out every 3 years for collecting qualitative information on specific farms’ behaviours. The yearly FADN has the goal of assessing the economic results of farms and measuring the effects of the Common Agriculture Policy. The sample data were extrapolated to the reference population using weights derived from the Farm Register, updated to 2023. Based on these sources, ISTAT could calculate the 11 sub-indicators, among which by default we put the indicator 11 equal to 100% in the Italian context.
The main source is IFS, based on a sample including 100 thousand farms. The survey supplies information about all the environmental sub-indicators. In details, the sub-indicator: 4 (organic farming, soil cultivation methods, soil cover methods, crops rotation); 5 (drainage of cultivated area, irrigable and irrigated area, quantity of water used for irrigation); 6 (kind and quantity of fertilizers used); 7 (soil cultivations methods); 8 (number of different cultivations, organic farming, crops rotation, soil cover methods).
The new multipurpose survey concerned a sample of 50 thousand farms. This survey collected data about the sub-indicators: 3 (risk factors, access to credit and insurance); 4 (actions to prevent soil degradation); 5 (actions to increase water availability, sources of water); 6 and 7 (circular economy); 8 (actions for reducing the impact of animal breeding on environment).
The FADN supplied data for the calculation of the monetary sub-indicators 1, 2, 9, 10. As regards 1, we carried out separate calculations for each among 8 agronomic orientations, because the amount of agricultural area (the denominator) has different meanings depending on whether the farm specializes in arable land, meadows and pastures or is a livestock farm. Moreover, we substituted the original 90th percentile criterion suggested by FAO with a clustering approach, in order to obtain results that are more realistic.
According to the FAO “traffic light” approach, for each of the 11 sub-indicators we identified the share of agricultural land managed with a “desirable” sustainability level (green traffic light), an “acceptable” level (yellow) and a “not acceptable” level (red). The results show that, in 2023, in Italy the share of agricultural area managed with the green traffic light was 48.1% and the share with yellow was 29.1%. Overall, the share of sustainable land was 77.2% (green or yellow).
We also proposed an alternative approach for calculating SDG 2.4.1, based on multiway analysis, which allows analysing the 11 sub-indicators jointly. This approach highlights the interrelationships between the sub-indicators and reduces bias due to multicollinearity. This approach leads to slightly different results than the FAO methodology.