Economic indicators to assess the sustainability of conservation farming projects: An evaluation

Multiple criteria for sustainability, such as the five pillars in the FAO/IBSRAM (International Board for Soil Research and Management) Framework for the Evaluation of Sustainable Land Management (FESLM), raise difficult assessment and evaluation problems. Economic viability is included as one of the pillars in this FELSM and is essential for the sustained adoption of conservation farming projects. However, even specifying economic viability and obtaining operational and predictive indicators for it is difficult because, for one thing, the economic viability of a farming system depends upon a variety of attributes. These include the level of economic returns, the instability and uncertainty of returns, and in monetary economies, the associated financial requirements for the farming system, the availability of finance and its implications for the financial liquidity of the farm. In all economies, the amount of investment required to adopt a sustainable conservation farming project will be a major consideration. As a rule, economic viability is also related to the sustainability of the natural productivity of soils and other natural resources on which economic production partially depends, so economic indicators depend in part on non-economic factors, and a holistic approach is needed. Taking such factors into account, as well as the difficulty of predicting the future economic sustainability of conservation projects, this paper critically reviews suggestions made in the literature for developing appropriate indicators of sustainability, such as those of Lynam and Herdt (1989), as well as break-even analyses and the scope for applying various forms of cost-benefit analysis. Illustrations are drawn from the IBSRAM/ACIAR project investigating land management on vertisols and on sloping lands, e.g. in Australia and The Philippines.