There has been considerable discussion over the past thirty years on how to define “sustainable agriculture.” During most of this period, sustainability was exclusively considered an environmental issue and was therefore measured as such. The 2030 Agenda requires that all sectors, including agriculture, be considered from the point of view of the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, social and environmental.

Over the coming 35 years, agriculture will face an unprecedented confluence of pressures, including a 30 percent increase in the global population, intensifying competition for increasingly scarce land, water and energy resources, and the existential threat of climate change. To provide for a population projected to reach 9.3 billion in 2050 and support changing dietary patterns, estimates are that food production will need to increase from the current 8.4 billion tonnes to almost 13.5 billion tonnes a year.

The Definitions & Terminologies for SDG Indicator 2.4.1.: “Percentage of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture".

On 25 September 2015, the 193 Member States of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets – committing the international community to end poverty and hunger and achieve sustainable development between 2016 and 2030. Six months later, a global indicator framework for the SDGs – comprising 230 indicators - was identified to monitor the 169 targets and track progress, becoming the foundation of the SDGs’ accountability structure.

Sustainable agricultural mechanization (SAM) is an essential input for the development of the smallholder farm sector in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The benefits of SAM range from drudgery reduction to improved timeliness of agricultural operations, increased input use efficiency, facilitating sustainable production intensification, ensuring environmental protection, and contributing to make agriculture more ‘climate-smart’. SAM is also important at other levels of the food supply system, for example in post-harvest operations, processing, marketing and transportation.

This report addresses the economic, environmental and social dimensions of agricultural development, with the objective of ensuring food and nutrition security, in terms of availability, access, utilization and stability. It focuses on the livestock component of agricultural systems, given the role of livestock as an engine for the development of the agriculture and food sector, and as a driver of major economic, social and environmental changes in food systems worldwide.

This paper is specifically about agricultural mechanisation: the opportunities provided by mechanisation for intensifying production in a sustainable manner, in value addition and agri-food value chain development, as well as the inherent opportunities implied for improved local economies and livelihoods. The establishment of viable business enterprises agro-processors, transport services, and so forth as a result of increased agricultural mechanisation in rural areas, is crucial to creating employment and income opportunities and, thereby, enhancing the demand for farm produce.

Dr Tom Brooks, Head, Science and Knowledge International Union for Conservation of Nature UNECE, Committee on Environmental Policy, presentation on Biodiversity Indicators: UNECE and the SDGS at the 12th Session of the Joint Task Force on Environmental Statistics and Indicators, 17 November 2016.

Secure land tenure in rural landscapes is widely recognized as an essential foundation for achieving a range of economic development goals. However, forest areas in low and middle-income countries face particular challenges in strengthening the security of land and resource tenure. Forest peoples are often among the poorest and most politically marginalized communities in their national contexts, and their tenure systems are often based on customary, collective rights that have insufficient formal legal protection.

Over the past decade issues pertaining to land sharing/land sparing have gained some space in the debate on the study of land-use strategies and their associated impacts at landscape level. State and non-state actors have, through their interests and actions, triggered changes at the landscape level and this report is a synthesis of some of the main findings and contributions of a scoping study carried out in Zambia as part of CIFOR’s Agrarian Change Project. It focuses on findings in three villages located in the Nyimba District.

The past decade has ushered in an era of increasingly contentious land politics in Zambia, with investors, the government, and chiefs simultaneously blamed for injustices in land allocation. These conflicts over land have been exacerbated, and at times caused by the lack of transparency and available data on the status of land. While a variety of actors has real grievances with the security and efficiency of the current system of land allocation, smallholder farmers bear the brunt of the risk of continuing the status quo in land policy.

The paper shows that pre-colonial ecologies of agricultural systems in some parts of rural Zambia were sustainable and resilient to prevailing environmental conditions, and were therefore able to ensure relative food security, under communal land tenure. However, colonial policies of land alienation and labour migration impacted negatively on food production systems of some ethnic groups like the citemene system of the Bemba and the flood plain cultivation system of the Lozi, making them extremely vulnerable due to the absence of large numbers of males.