Identifying Sustainability Assessment Indicators for Assessing the Sustainability of Smallholder Integrated Farms in Coastal West Bengal, India

Abstract

Smallholder integrated farming system (IFS) is debated as an alternative to conventional external input driven commercial farming in developing nations. The sustainability of IFS is the key to secure sustainable livelihoods of millions of small and marginal farmers and they need to be monitored and assessed precisely. This asks for a valid set of sustainability assessment indicators that envisage the social, economic and ecological dimensions of sustainability and are validated by the agri-experts working in a specific agroclimatic zone. The present study was conducted to screen sustainability assessment indicators for IFS, in the context of coastal agroclimatic zone of West Bengal, India. Guided by an indicator framework, a pool of 87 indicators were scouted and given to the local agri-experts for rating their relevance against a 4-point scale. Based on the weighted mean score of the indicators, ease of access to them, cost of their measurement, clarity of the indicators to the experts and their redundancy, local agri-experts screened 52 indicators covering the social, economic and ecological dimensions of sustainability. The important selected Ecological indicators were Biomass availability, Soil organic Carbon, Depth of ground water table, Soil macronutrient etc. Similarly, important Economic indicators were Cost of cultivation, Ownership of land, Input sources, Off-farm income etc. and Social indicators were Gender equity, Adherence to local culture, Workload of women and Balanced nutrition etc. In this study, we outlined the methodology of selecting these sustainability assessment indicators of IFS with special reference to the context of developing nations that resulted in a rich pool of contextual sustainability indicators for the coastal agroclimatic zone of West Bengal, India. We also discussed some core methodological and logistic issues associated with this. Adaptation of this methodology of indicator screening might be used in different contexts of smallholder systems for monitoring farm-level sustainability of IFS.