Training Course on Smart Sustainability Assessment Tools and Techniques for Improving Agrifood Industries

Efforts to achieve socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable development are progressing. Agrifood-sector stakeholders are actively contributing by improving productivity, protecting natural resources, and minimizing the environmental impacts of farming and agribusiness operations as seen from their sustainability assessment performance that covers environmental integrity, economic resilience, social well-being, and good governance from production to processing and distribution.

Sustainability assessment has emerged as an important policy tool for both government and private business. The assessment can be in the form of self-evaluation by agribusiness enterprises or reporting to business partners, consumers, or authorities. One of the guidelines for performing the assessment is the FAO’s Sustainability Assessment in Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) Guidelines (Version 3.0). Tools have been developed following the SAFA Guidelines, enabling farms and companies to assess their sustainability in a credible, transparent, comparable manner. They include the Sustainability Monitoring and Assessment RouTine tools of the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture and the Life Cycle Assessment tool for analysis of potential environmental impacts of products or services during their entire life cycle.

This course will familiarize participants with smart sustainability assessment tools and techniques for improving the performance of agrifood industries, particularly SMEs. It will also discuss sustainability assessment from the perspective of the APO’s Green Productivity concept, covering resource recycling, green energy, green factories, and agroinnovation for green agrifood industries.