Assessing the Sustainability of Agricultural Technology Options for Poor Rural Farmers

This chapter presents an analytic framework to identify agricultural innovations that are sustainable and suitable for the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the population. The framework contains a set of tools to collect and evaluate information on appropriate innovations based on relevant criteria. It considers the dimensions of environmental resilience, economic viability, and social sustainability, as well as technical sustainability considering important properties of the innovation itself. Information on already available agricultural innovations was collected in ten countries in South and Southeast Asia, as well as from the national and international agricultural research communities. A composite sustainability indicator was constructed to compare the collected innovations and radar charts were computed to visualize their performance in each sustainability criterion