Assessment of multifunctionality and jointness of production
Fonctionnalité et productions jointes, comment mesurer le degré de jointure ?
Résumé
Multifunctionality is one way to reconcile agriculture with sustainable development: agriculture, beyond the production of food and fibre, also provides important social, environmental and economic functions to society. In general, much of the current literature on agricultural multifunctionality is qualitative and narrative, and focuses on demonstrating the existence of social and/or environmental functions. In this chapter, we start with the existence of these multiple functions and we seek to measure the relationships between them through the design of indicators of multifunctionality. We present a structured sequential framework to guide the development of multifunctionality indicators based on the concept of joint production. The three stages articulated in this framework are: 1) identification of jointness; 2) qualitative assessment of jointness; 3) quantitative assessment of jointness. Using data from SEAMLESS Prototype3, empirical evidence suggests that multifunctionality in agriculture is far from being negligible.