LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

GROUP 6, SESSION B: METHODS, TOOLS, DATABASES 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
172. Aggregated indicators of sustainable agricultural production and
food security in the Central Maghreb
J. Soler-Rovira 1,* , J.M. Arroyo-Sanz 1 , F. González-Torres 1 , C. Rojo-Hernández 1 , A. Marquina Barrio 2 .
1 Escuela Universitaria de Ingeniería Técnica Agrícola, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria,
s/n 28040 Madrid, Spain, 2 Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de
Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 Pozuelo de Alarcón, Spain, Corresponding author. E-mail:
jose.soler@upm.es
A sustainable food production and supply for a growing human population is a major challenge for the next
years and decades. Food security, including supply and demand factors as physical and economic access and
wealth and assimilation of nutrients, must be performed by a sustainable agricultural production that ensures
the long term agricultural productivity and ecosystem services. The region called the Central Maghreb includes
Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in the North of Africa. In these countries, despite the great economic
differences, the agro-ecological characteristics are homogenous and are limiting productivity: arid and semiarid
climates, with low rainfall values along the year and concentrated in the sea-side land stripe, where are
located also the most suitable farming soils. These ecological constraints are aggravated with political and
socioeconomic ones that have resulted in a dual agricultural structure: high yield export-oriented vegetable
and fruit farming systems and low-yield inner-consumption-oriented cereal farming systems. In these low
input systems the technological use is scarce and there is an important yield gap between actual yields and
potential ones. The production and inner supply of basic products as cereals or milk is mainly supplied by
external imports from international markets, whereas vegetables and fruits are exported to foreign countries.
In both cases, Spain and the EU are key actors in trade, agriculture, food, health and development policies.
This multidimensional challenge must be studied with a holistic approach, where sustainability and food
security may be assessed by a number of indicators that reveal the strengths and weaknesses, as well barriers
and drivers operating in each country in a multinational scenario and a multilevel assessment. This assortment
of indicators should be synthesised into an appropriate unique indicator that in spite of containing much
information, is easy to understand by the end-users (policy-makers, scientific, technicians, etc.). Aggregated
indicators help to communicate the information succinctly and to make easier to distinguish patterns in the
data by formalising the aggregation process that is often done implicitly, subjectively and intuitively. Indicator
sets may be built up within a framework according to two conceptions of sustainability: goal or property
oriented. The latter is based on systemic properties, such as existence or effectiveness, etc. The aim of this
work is to assess the sustainability of the agricultural production and food security in the Central Maghreb
making operational the systemic framework and incorporating multivariate statistical tools.
The hierarchical structure of the framework was based upon three subsystems: human (food security and
social dimension), natural (environmental dimension) and support (production and economic dimension).
Indicators were organised according to Bossel´s seven basic orientors (Table 1). The methodology was an
iterative process consisting on several steps: system definition, selection of indicators and aggregation of
indicators. This analysis was multinational, including Mediterranean countries, Middle East countries and
others with ecological, sociological or economic similarities, such as South Africa, Norway and Iran. These
countries were selected as the observation set. For each country, 21 indicators were computed (7 orientors x
3 subsystems). The data were obtained from FAO, United Nations, Worldwatch Institute, World Resources
Institute and other international organisations. LCA was performed with some of the basic data.
Synthetic indicators were calculated by principal components analysis, using STATGRAPHICS software.
The aggregation of data into single indices was done using coordinates of the countries with the principal
components and the eigenvalues from the analysis. The indicator set considered for the selected countries is
shown in Table 1. The selected indicators explained with good agreement the differences in sustainability
and food security between the different countries and the synthetic indices ranked them all. The specific indexes
that characterised the countries from the Central Maghreb were analysed in order to evaluate present
and short term strengths and weaknesses to propose a development strategy.
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